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PHP in 2019

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Re: PHP in 2019

#141

Post by saltminer »

StevePerkins wrote: post #104

On one hand, I do see that HN (and probably Reddit) live in a bubble. Where most of the darling languages and tools have very low use in the real-world. And where most of the languages and tooling that actually run the real-world go un-discussed, or simply dismissed, because they're boring and don't appeal to students and entry-level devs working on side projects. I realize that the perspective most rookies get from…

> PHP is only still relevant because of WordPress

There's also Drupal, which is very common in higher ed.

Re: PHP in 2019

#142

Post by Lazare »

alexandernst wrote: post #63
richardwhiuk wrote: post #55

And yet ~everything in https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/ is still true. All that's happened is that the language is even more complex, has even more baggage.

I'm not really sure why this comment is getting downvoted, but literally every single thing in that post still holds true.

If you read the article, it's full of notes about "this was fixed in 5.4" or whatever. A decent chunk of the remainder has been fixed in the 7.x series, and some of the remainder is slated to be solved in the (as of yet, unreleased) 8.0 version.

Just scrolling through at random:

> A function’s return value can’t be hinted.

But of course, this has been incorrect for years. The next was fixed in 5.3, the next two be fixed in 7.4, the next was fixed in 5.4, etc., etc. Which is fine; it's an old article, and one which was deeply influential on PHPs development, but it's completely false to suggest that "literally every single thing in that post still holds true". Many are outdated.

Re: PHP in 2019

#143

Post by k_bx »

simias wrote: post #51

As far as I'm concerned the bridges have burned a long time ago and I definitely can't see myself giving PHP a second chance. That being said, if I'm wrong and PHP has really managed to become a decent language (or at least something that's not completely insane) its defenders should focus on actually showing what modern PHP code looks like. Is performance that much of a big deal for most people? In a world where Rub…

> Server are cheaper and vastly more powerful now than in PHP's infancy

Slightly off-topic, but I think that nowdays it's actually less of an argument than when PHP started becoming popular. The thing is, back in the days, statically typed languages were just bad and unproductive. Today, they are way better, and the fact that I can run my service on $3/month server with 900M of RAM and not think about the price tag at all is actually quite a decent argument to stay away from dynamic languages (but not the main one, tbh).

Re: PHP in 2019

#144

Post by LeonM »

alexandernst wrote: post #67

Does it have an actual debugger already? Or are we still stuck with xdebug?

What's wrong with xdebug?

Sure, xdebug requires a graphical frontend to be practical (I use phpstorm), but so does GDB.

Debugging with xdebug has been a really good experience for me. Much better than python or even GDB for C code.

Re: PHP in 2019

#145

Post by megous »

premun wrote: post #129
megous wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You pay for every useless variable. It keeps the variable count low.

Luckily it's a dynamic language, so you can keep reusing one or two for everything!

Wow, you're right. :) I'll do that from now on.

Re: PHP in 2019

#146

Post by nickjj »

alfonsodev wrote: post #114
nickjj wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are comparable things with other frameworks too. For example I wrote a course on building a SAAS app with Flask. It's available at: https://buildasaasappwithflask.com/ It covers everything about user registration, profiles, subscription billing, 1 time billing, invoicing, and about 50 other things you would likely want to do in a SAAS app or any application really. The course comes with the source code along wi…

Nice! It looks very nice and complete. I've found this other one in Go lang https://buildsaasappingo.com (I'm not affiliated nor tested it) I think it is a good idea to turn something that you need for yourself into a side income, I've though about doing this same thing myself in a different language. What can you tell about your experience building this course, is it worth it ? rewarding ? Did you find difficult to…

That's how the course came into existence.

I built a number of SAAS apps (and apps that had similar functionality) for a few freelance clients. Then I eventually thought "hmm, lots of repeated patterns here, maybe I can make this into a course", so then I made the course.

As for the process. Funny you mention it. The changelog just had me on as a guest for their "backstage" podcast last week where we talked about content creation and the process of recording courses. That's at: http://changelog.com/backstage/4

It covers most of your questions but it doesn't cover nitty gritty details on sales figures and revenue. Thousands of people have signed up for the course but I still do quite a bit of freelancing. Freelancing and course creation is my full time job.

I find it really rewarding at a personal level. I just like creating things, but it is a lot of work. It's not just hitting record and being done in 2 days. Expect it to take 3-6 months of full time work to make a course. Then there's having to keep it updated (because tech changes so fast) and ongoing 24/7 support.

Couple people have asked me to make a course on making courses. Maybe one day but at the moment there's still a bunch of technical courses I still want to make, a million blog posts to write (I have 85 draft posts that are unpublished) and some side projects in the works.

Re: PHP in 2019

#147

Post by StevePerkins »

saltminer wrote: post #141
StevePerkins wrote: post #104

On one hand, I do see that HN (and probably Reddit) live in a bubble. Where most of the darling languages and tools have very low use in the real-world. And where most of the languages and tooling that actually run the real-world go un-discussed, or simply dismissed, because they're boring and don't appeal to students and entry-level devs working on side projects. I realize that the perspective most rookies get from…

> PHP is only still relevant because of WordPress There's also Drupal, which is very common in higher ed.

Indeed, and also Joomla. But the thing with all of these CMS systems is that they're already written. So the related "PHP work" is writing or tweaking plugins for them.

It's kind of like acknowledging the footprint of Microsoft Excel and VBA. Yes, it's quietly a huge deal, and thousands of people hold a job largely because they maintain it for an organization. But it's also the sort of thing one "stumbles into". They don't get hired specifically for that, and it doesn't really transfer to more general developer jobs.

Re: PHP in 2019

#148

Post by marcosdumay »

jbrooksuk wrote: post #61
simias wrote: post #51

As far as I'm concerned the bridges have burned a long time ago and I definitely can't see myself giving PHP a second chance. That being said, if I'm wrong and PHP has really managed to become a decent language (or at least something that's not completely insane) its defenders should focus on actually showing what modern PHP code looks like. Is performance that much of a big deal for most people? In a world where Rub…

> [...] its defenders should focus on actually showing what modern PHP code looks like. Laravel does this very well, not just by being a great framework but also in its ecosystem (Envoyer, Forge, Spark, Nova, Horizon, Socialite) and its documentation ( https://laravel.com/docs/master ).

Laravel has a Java-like problem of too many indirections, and has a really complex application model that breaks a lot of things. For that you gain an end of 00's quality templating system and ORM.

I understand that PHP developers love it. It's orders of magnitude better than doing everything by hand. But no, thanks.

Re: PHP in 2019

#149

Post by jaabe »

simias wrote: post #51

As far as I'm concerned the bridges have burned a long time ago and I definitely can't see myself giving PHP a second chance. That being said, if I'm wrong and PHP has really managed to become a decent language (or at least something that's not completely insane) its defenders should focus on actually showing what modern PHP code looks like. Is performance that much of a big deal for most people? In a world where Rub…

One of my old friends has been working with php since forever, we’ve teased him over the years.

Since then we’ve moved to a world where every program is web-based. I mean, even huge enterprise systems in healthcare run on some JavaScript MVVM framework and a web-backend in the cloud.

The truth is that php is more adapt at handling this than a lot of the stacks you see in enterprise. It’s really kind of silly, but I don’t think we’ll ever adopt php either exactly for its bad rep. But sometimes I wonder if we shouldn’t.

Re: PHP in 2019

#150

Post by proyb »

zaphar wrote: post #81
simias wrote: post #51

As far as I'm concerned the bridges have burned a long time ago and I definitely can't see myself giving PHP a second chance. That being said, if I'm wrong and PHP has really managed to become a decent language (or at least something that's not completely insane) its defenders should focus on actually showing what modern PHP code looks like. Is performance that much of a big deal for most people? In a world where Rub…

Yeah, I've been burned too badly by PHP. There are languages I haven't done in years that I would go back to if there was a compelling need to. PHP is not that language. Far to many sleepless late nights trying to clean up some security hole. PHP is like that abusive Ex that everyone says has changed. It may be true, in which case, good for PHP But I won't be putting myself in that position again.

I've been burned by some language that create a poor developer experience with long compilation time and garbage collection.

Maybe V language (vlang.io) could pique your curiosity.

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