Every language I think about is better than PHP (Javascript, Python, Ruby). Personally I will choose Javascript / Node JS platform to start with.
why? Those three come with the same amount of quirkiness and issues. There is a reason why you have Typescript or golang, for example.
Typescript is just a much improved javascript, to the point of these two just being two dialects of the same language. I wouldn't make a distinction between the two. Performance-wise, as a servrr-side language, they both have the same strengths and weaknesses.
The problems with PHP aren't really with the concept of dynamic typing as such, but rather with the somewhat curious semantics and really awkward standard library. These are relics from the past that are, unfortunately, very hard to fix without a "Python 3000 moment", and all the problems that brings. Although PHP 8 does fix a bit of it (various comparisons and operators are a bit better now) there's still a lot of i…
They're a bit overblown now I feel, and I wouldn't throw out the language and ecosystem just because a comparator got fussy. You probably won't win any "Code is Art" contests, and if you want to do computer science work then why even waste the time hating PHP, it was never for that. PHP is a web application workhorse, and it's really exceedingly good at that task.
It's not just the comparison that's fussy; if that would be it then that would be fine. It's mostly the really messy, inconsistent, and difficult to use standard library that turns me off personally. And this isn't about inconsistent argument order or naming, I can deal with that as well, but stuff like not being able to create temporary files well, or not being able to check for specific errors in fopen(), and a long list of similar things. These are things that make writing simple, correct, and elegant programs very hard, or sometimes even impossible.
The problems with PHP aren't really with the concept of dynamic typing as such, but rather with the somewhat curious semantics and really awkward standard library. These are relics from the past that are, unfortunately, very hard to fix without a "Python 3000 moment", and all the problems that brings. Although PHP 8 does fix a bit of it (various comparisons and operators are a bit better now) there's still a lot of i…
That's what I was trying to make sure I understood. There are people that just don't like dynamically typed languages.
PHP offers some type checking (and has for a long time, albeit very limited) which is getting expanded all the time, including in this release.
I can't believe nobody has pointed out (yet) that PHP is the quintessential lambda :) That said, it's been many (many, many!) years since I moved away from it, but I'm intrigued by the state of the JIT and the current coding style (last time I checked, around 6.x, it was growing to be verbose and full of backslash-adorned-namespacing).
"PHP was serverless before there was serverless" However there is a difference: PHP has no deployment system included. But if you build that (not too hard) the difference isn't big ... (But with Lambda&others you outsource the management)
> PHP has no deployment system included.
SFTP? I mean, it's not included in PHP, but any linux system has it.
How should one start learning with PHP these days? My experience: hacked together a few PHP scripts over the years to notify me of a website change (5 minute cron job). Before that, I was a very good beginner with VB6 back in highschool. There are a couple of ambitious database-driven website projects I would like to create, but I don't know where to start. I like the KISS philosophy, and I think PHP and MySQL would…
My recommendation is to become familiar with the package manager composer https://getcomposer.org/ Almost all community code today is distributed with composer, anything from libraries to frameworks. Regardless if you write almost everything yourself or use a full featured framework, composer is always good to learn. And even when you are a follower of KISS there always things that you don't care enough about to writ…
Facebook’s backups were written in PHP. Well, the second version was, anyway. (The first version didn’t work so well.) By backups, I mean the central MySQL databases with profile and post information; not media or messages. The “Crown Jewels,” so to speak. It was written by an engineer in a week or so and then handed off to me. I was a storage guy with some programming chops. Fewer chops than I thought. Multiprocess,…
Can you elaborate a bit on what that code did? You said it a backup system talking to a MySQL? But there was a different front end and a different back end system that were both dependents on it?
Sorry, I wasn’t very clear. The backups were of MySQL databases and we stored them for a period of time (it was in the Terms of Service). When I say “back end” or “backend” I mean internal servers, that didn’t directly take HTTP requests. This means everything from databases to backup hosts to other data stores to dashboards. “Front end” means web servers that did take HTTP requests and served facebook.com. PHP development at early Facebook was always focused on the latter, for good reason.
Apparently some of the deprecations will make this the most backward compatibility breaking version jump of PHP since V4 to V5. (Read a german interview here: https://www.heise.de/news/PHP-8-im-Experten-Check-Der-erwart... ) There's a long report on Wordpress and PHP 8 and it's not pretty: https://developer.yoast.com/blog/the-2020-wordpress-and-php-...
Reading this list reminds that nobody cares about the tech/engineering decisions of a product if it solves their use case.
That is shockingly poor practice and state of a code base for a product that powers so much of the web
Finally, after all these years, Named Arguments! https://stitcher.io/blog/php-8-named-arguments
I don't understand why pretty much no language does that these days. I think the argument is that your IDE should do this, and it does in some cases, but still...
Surprisingly php these days is actually pretty fast even on forking webserver such as apache. This annoy me to no end because I prefer to use python and django and it can't match php performance on apache even though it handles http requests directly.
Are you using mod_python with Apache? If so, mod_wsgi is what you should be using for Apache + Django applications. mod_wsgi is fantastic and I see no issues with performance matching similar PHP setups via PHP-FPM.
I'm using gunicorn or uvicorn depending on the projects. Doesn't matter which wsgi server I used, the baseline performance level stay the same. For example, a simple django rest api endpoint with nested serializers took 45ms to render, which is similar to the time it take for freshly installed wordpress running on apache/php7.4 (docker) to render the homepage the same test server. All the rest api endpoint did was serializing values from database entries to json, yet it took the same time as a default installation of wordpress to render. Yes, django rest framework serializer is slow and maybe I should use something else, but if cpython is faster maybe there won't be a need to replace the serializer just for a performance issue.
Where's the best place to suggest a new feature or improvement for PHP? I've always wanted to see `foreach` get a built-in iterator/counter so you don't have to create and use a counter variable manually. Current way: $i=0; foreach ($array as $key => $value) { echo "Loop $i of " . count($array); $i++; } Possible new way: foreach ($array as $key => $value, $i) { echo "Loop $i of " . count($array); }
You can do it very simple by writing a custom generator function:
foreach(myfunc($array) as list($key, $value, $loop)) {}
Maybe you can array destructuring at this place, i am not sure at the moment.
And your manual counting you do in myfunc() and just yield the values