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PHP's Oddities

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21–30 of 186 posts

Re: PHP's Oddities

#21
post #9

After over two decades of working in PHP, I'm now working in Java. PHP is basically Java-lite. I am absolutely loving the compile-time safety of Java, but I dearly miss PHP's maps and arrays. In Java, the amount of verbosity for defining a map/list and operating on it is overwhelming. Modern PHP is great. Many powerful language features, excellent performance, great community and package ecosystem, and decent enough…

> Modern PHP is great. Many powerful language features, excellent performance, great community and package ecosystem I heard this a long time ago about perl. CPAN is great. Well ... perl entered the fossilized era. I think people do not really observe things correctly. I am noticing the same with ruby right now - everyone sees that ruby is in decline, very strongly so, in the last 3 years. Yet you have blog posts suc…

Mate, not to be rude but your entire comment isn't based on factual analysis; it's a rant about unrelated languages.

Re: PHP's Oddities

#22
post #9

After over two decades of working in PHP, I'm now working in Java. PHP is basically Java-lite. I am absolutely loving the compile-time safety of Java, but I dearly miss PHP's maps and arrays. In Java, the amount of verbosity for defining a map/list and operating on it is overwhelming. Modern PHP is great. Many powerful language features, excellent performance, great community and package ecosystem, and decent enough…

> Modern PHP is great. Many powerful language features, excellent performance, great community and package ecosystem I heard this a long time ago about perl. CPAN is great. Well ... perl entered the fossilized era. I think people do not really observe things correctly. I am noticing the same with ruby right now - everyone sees that ruby is in decline, very strongly so, in the last 3 years. Yet you have blog posts suc…

> People seem to shy away from criticism.

What actual criticism of PHP is anyone shying away from?

PHP got bashed for such a long time, while simply nothing steps up to do what it does better. Something that, for example, is available on every webhost you can just throw files at, where all (meaningful) config and state can be in those files.

Re: PHP's Oddities

#23

To note, it is surprisingly refreshing to completely forgo instanciable classes on a modern codebase. Phpstan deals well with type definitions, arrays are powerful enough to contain whatever needed, and functions can be stored and passed around easily enough.

Array shapes are still second-class citizens defined in phpdoc, with an inferior editor UX, and lack of any run-time enforcement. A proper record type for PHP with value semantics would be an ideal solution for me. Would go nicely with the pattern matching proposal that's still incubating.

Re: PHP's Oddities

#25
post #9

After over two decades of working in PHP, I'm now working in Java. PHP is basically Java-lite. I am absolutely loving the compile-time safety of Java, but I dearly miss PHP's maps and arrays. In Java, the amount of verbosity for defining a map/list and operating on it is overwhelming. Modern PHP is great. Many powerful language features, excellent performance, great community and package ecosystem, and decent enough…

If I have an “array” and can do array[0] to get first item, but when I filter this array and array[0] throws an error, that’s super weird. What is the meaning of [] or what is an array even? The language forces me to understand how it is implemented under the hood. That’s exactly what the author says: leaky abstraction.

Re: PHP's Oddities

#26

I’d love to see a post like this for JS that actually talks about things people run into. Usually when people make a post like this in js, its about archaic things nobody actually uses.

https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat

Archaic maybe, but still brings a smile

Re: PHP's Oddities

#27

I think the “bad rep” is coming from developers that stopped developing themselves.

I've written PHP off and on since the .php3 extension was a thing, and I can say that PHP very much deserved the bad rap it had for some time. It's evolved beyond most of that, but a lot of that is due to the composer ecosystem making up for it while the behavior of many builtins remains beyond repair. Which is fine, every language has baggage and warts. PHP's warts are sometimes heinously ugly, and they're on full display in many legacy codebases, but modern PHP is something I actually find to be fairly pleasant to develop with, far more than Go or vanilla JavaScript.

Re: PHP's Oddities

#28
post #9

After over two decades of working in PHP, I'm now working in Java. PHP is basically Java-lite. I am absolutely loving the compile-time safety of Java, but I dearly miss PHP's maps and arrays. In Java, the amount of verbosity for defining a map/list and operating on it is overwhelming. Modern PHP is great. Many powerful language features, excellent performance, great community and package ecosystem, and decent enough…

> Modern PHP is great. Many powerful language features, excellent performance, great community and package ecosystem I heard this a long time ago about perl. CPAN is great. Well ... perl entered the fossilized era. I think people do not really observe things correctly. I am noticing the same with ruby right now - everyone sees that ruby is in decline, very strongly so, in the last 3 years. Yet you have blog posts suc…

> objectively

> Ruby is dying

How exactly do you define these “objective” criteria for such sensationalism?

Re: PHP's Oddities

#29

I think the “bad rep” is coming from developers that stopped developing themselves.

A lot of it came from the rather harmful "php a fractal of bad design" article that used to get posted everywhere despite being highly inaccurate and out of date. Thankfully its fairly rare to see someone daft enough to still try using it in a discussion. PHP's come a very long way since then.

Re: PHP's Oddities

#30
post #9

After over two decades of working in PHP, I'm now working in Java. PHP is basically Java-lite. I am absolutely loving the compile-time safety of Java, but I dearly miss PHP's maps and arrays. In Java, the amount of verbosity for defining a map/list and operating on it is overwhelming. Modern PHP is great. Many powerful language features, excellent performance, great community and package ecosystem, and decent enough…

> Modern PHP is great. Many powerful language features, excellent performance, great community and package ecosystem I heard this a long time ago about perl. CPAN is great. Well ... perl entered the fossilized era. I think people do not really observe things correctly. I am noticing the same with ruby right now - everyone sees that ruby is in decline, very strongly so, in the last 3 years. Yet you have blog posts suc…

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