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Taking PHP Seriously

slack.engineering

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Re: Taking PHP Seriously

#241

Post by userbinator »

toast0 wrote: post #120
swalsh wrote: post #16

I work on PHP at my day job (in a public company), before this, I came from Ruby, and .NET before that. I'm convinced the reason so many successful projects use PHP, is not because of any inherent nature of the language. I think it's the people who use it. They just don't care. A successful project needs to be started by someone that cares just enough, but not too much. If you're programming in PHP, you're not runnin…

> If you're programming in PHP, you're not running around talking about "convention over configuration" giving talks, or trying to make your code beautiful. It's a garbage language, and you know it. This is exactly right. The right philosophy for PHP is to embrace the garbage. When you're done with a request, and have spit out all the HTML to the client, the server is going to throw everything away. So don't build a…

Indeed it's very much a "worse is better" philosophy throughout.

Re: Taking PHP Seriously

#242

Post by aikah »

calsy wrote: post #191
swalsh wrote: post #16

I work on PHP at my day job (in a public company), before this, I came from Ruby, and .NET before that. I'm convinced the reason so many successful projects use PHP, is not because of any inherent nature of the language. I think it's the people who use it. They just don't care. A successful project needs to be started by someone that cares just enough, but not too much. If you're programming in PHP, you're not runnin…

So people who don't care make successful projects and PHP is a garbage language that is responsible for more successful projects than any other server side scripting language. LOGIC.

> PHP is a garbage language yet it is responsible for more successful projects than any other service side scripting language?

If you consider Wordpress a success then yes PHP is successful. The thing is, a CMS isn't an interesting project to work on.

Re: Taking PHP Seriously

#243

Post by codedokode »

wyager wrote: post #221
Aldo_MX wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which of the top languages is actually well designed? All of them have their area of opportunity.

Rust and Haskell are both extremely well designed. Most of the "top languages" by percentage usage are 20+ years old, so I can't fault them that much for being badly designed, but we should definitely stop using them.

Rust looks very complicated to me because there are "lifetimes" and you need to think where to put those single quotes properly. Not a language for a beginner.

Haskell doesn't support OOP if I remember correctly. And it is complicated too.

Re: Taking PHP Seriously

#244

Post by anexprogrammer »

brian-armstrong wrote: post #152
chris_wot wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps. But that rather begs the question. PHP has horrible bits, but in fact from what I've observed in the last year or so is that whilst it has in the past been fairly horrible, much of what made it awful can be entirely avoided. If you aren't following the PHP Framework Interop Group ( http://www.php-fig.org ) then you really should. I'd hazard that most of the warts in PHP can now be avoided pretty much altoget…

An easier way to avoid those warts would be to pick a different language

PHP devs aren't expensive. Even good ones.

It's easier to reroll in another language and retrain or recruit? No. So you probably mean for a new project. So now you've more maintenance and learning curve unless you just happen to have enough skilled in $NEWTHING. Not really easier.

PHP is an inconsistent mess, everyone knows that, but it's cheap, widely understood, and it's perfectly possible to write decent maintainable code. There's ways to mitigate the chaos.

Re: Taking PHP Seriously

#245

Post by aikah »

berntb wrote: post #63
ken47 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or because it had first mover advantage in its cohort.

It didn't really, AFAIK (not a PHP guy, but old) it got traction because it was easier to get started with than the alternatives. That said, all environments will be one of three: 1 Have warts. 2 Not be used. 3 Be in denial and claim to be perfect. The GP had a point, perfection is the enemy of good. Something delivered is better than nothing.

PHP got traction because it was easier for hosting companies to set up shared PHP hosting and it was easier for non developers to add basic code to HTML pages. PHP was also at the right moment at the right time,just like MySQL and some people made it easy to install it on Windows, a platform too often ignored by language maintainers (try to write Ruby on windows, a (slow) pain in the ass).

Re: Taking PHP Seriously

#246

Post by Klathmon »

germano wrote: post #17
Klathmon wrote: post #11

The article points out that arguably the best part of PHP is the "shared nothing lifecycle". That each request starts new, and the process dies at the end of the request. It's by far my favorite part, and I completely agree that it makes "reasoning about" (boy do I hate that phrase...) your program much easier. Why are there no other "competitors" in this space? Why do most other languages go with the alternative rou…

Elixir and the Phoenix framework work like this, with a process spawned per request.

Ive been hearing nothing but good things about Elixir, I may have to check it out.

Any recommended places to start with?

Re: Taking PHP Seriously

#247

Post by mastazi »

Of the four disadvantages of PHP mentioned in the article, in my opinion, the worst by far is the first, i.e. confusing comparison rules. The article however fails to explain that clearly: the worst thing is not that comparison rules are just confusing (heck, many things are confusing at first, but eventually you work them out); the worst thing is that those rules are intransitive (!!!), as explained very well here: http://phpsadness.com/sad/52

The second disadvantage, passing by reference vs. by value, honestly can or cannot be confusing, depending on which other languages you are accustomed to. So I would say it is a debatable point.

The third point, the language being failure-adverse, is a choice made by design, this is also a debatable point, but it's in line with the fact that PHP was created as a utilitarian language as Lerdorf explained numerous times, e.g. here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anr7DQnMMs0

The last point, inconsistencies in the standard library, is obviously true but I would say it is very common in languages that have been around long enough to have subsequent approaches layered in the standard library. Some languages resolve this by making breaking changes and keeping consistency (think Python 2 vs Python 3), some others just show their age by having libraries that were developed at different point in time (Perl, R and Java come to mind), this is also explained by Lerdorf in the video linked above.

Re: Taking PHP Seriously

#248

Post by calsy »

aikah wrote: post #242
calsy wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So people who don't care make successful projects and PHP is a garbage language that is responsible for more successful projects than any other server side scripting language. LOGIC.

> PHP is a garbage language yet it is responsible for more successful projects than any other service side scripting language? If you consider Wordpress a success then yes PHP is successful. The thing is, a CMS isn't an interesting project to work on.

Wordpress is a single example and a project being 'interesting' does not equate to success.

Re: Taking PHP Seriously

#249

Post by colllectorof »

mikey_p wrote: post #72
Klathmon wrote: post #11

The article points out that arguably the best part of PHP is the "shared nothing lifecycle". That each request starts new, and the process dies at the end of the request. It's by far my favorite part, and I completely agree that it makes "reasoning about" (boy do I hate that phrase...) your program much easier. Why are there no other "competitors" in this space? Why do most other languages go with the alternative rou…

The downside is literally exactly the same as the upside: you have to bootstrap from literally nothing for every single request. Think about how ActiveRecord in Rails reads from the DB schema to generate it's magic methods, etc. This is usually done on startup or at least cached in memory once it's loaded. This is something that you have to manage more carefully with a PHP app since you can't have anything initialize…

>Think about how ActiveRecord in Rails reads from the DB schema to generate it's magic methods, etc.

All the magic you ever need can be dynamically created in __get, __set and __call. It works, it works well, and it makes not only reasoning, but also deployment an order of magnitude simpler.

>Code paths, auto-loaders, database connections, config files, etc.

Use a single code path, a single autoloader and a single database connection. Cache the opcodes of stuff you load. Write config files and templates in pure PHP, so they're cached as well. Done.

I've never, ever had problems with bringing PHP page generation time below .1 seconds. Usually it took something like .03 seconds on crappy hardware. And that was without extensive caching of DB results or anything else that's particularly clever.

Re: Taking PHP Seriously

#250

Post by swalsh »

calsy wrote: post #191
swalsh wrote: post #16

I work on PHP at my day job (in a public company), before this, I came from Ruby, and .NET before that. I'm convinced the reason so many successful projects use PHP, is not because of any inherent nature of the language. I think it's the people who use it. They just don't care. A successful project needs to be started by someone that cares just enough, but not too much. If you're programming in PHP, you're not runnin…

So people who don't care make successful projects and PHP is a garbage language that is responsible for more successful projects than any other server side scripting language. LOGIC.

My point is that the people don't care about the tech. They're worrying about the problem they're trying to solve. New companies that priotitize tech over finding and pleasing their customers don't live long enough to see the benefits. Just my observation. I've been through the "but if you don't build it right today you'll have to build it again tomorrow... that makes no sense" phase. I made some great code, but very few people are running it. My worst code is the code the most amount of people are running... it's because I got it done, and I got it rught before my budget ran out.
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