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I Like PHP

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Re: I Like PHP

#261

Post by jarrett »

ChiperSoft wrote: post #258
jarrett wrote: post #173

The biggest problem with PHP isn't anything built into the language itself, but rather the culture of mediocrity/naivety surrounding it. As at least one other commenter has said, there are disciplined and skilled PHP programmers. If only they were the majority! Sadly, for the PHP ecosystem, a few good apples don't unspoil the bunch. Here are a few ways PHP's bad culture manifests itself. 1. Cargo culting The web is f…

> the culture of mediocrity/naivety surrounding it Unfortunately there is also a counter-culture of elitism and condescension. I'm constantly encountering PHP devs who look down their nose at their fellow developers and assume that anyone who doesn't write sites exactly the same way they do is ignorant and full of failure. That's the feeling I took from the article. The author _knows_ all the best practices, but some…

I don't think there's one right way to code a website. So I wouldn't look down my nose at someone who uses a perfectly good architecture that's merely different from the one I would have chosen.

That being said, there is such a thing as a wrong architecture. (And for non-trivial projects, the absence of architecture is clearly wrong as well.) The choice between several good designs is partly subjective, but some designs are objectively bad. So I think criticism (not condescension) is warranted at times. Wordpress being a good example.

Re: I Like PHP

#262

Post by jarrett »

Pengwin wrote: post #216
jarrett wrote: post #173

The biggest problem with PHP isn't anything built into the language itself, but rather the culture of mediocrity/naivety surrounding it. As at least one other commenter has said, there are disciplined and skilled PHP programmers. If only they were the majority! Sadly, for the PHP ecosystem, a few good apples don't unspoil the bunch. Here are a few ways PHP's bad culture manifests itself. 1. Cargo culting The web is f…

As a programmer who deals with wordpress on a daily basis I feel like I have a different view to it's inner workings. The simple functions for the_loop(), the_title(), and the_content() are things i rarely touch, as they are more template functions for displaying templates. There is a reply to The post that describes using "do_action" which depending on what you want would be a better option for achieving the formatt…

I agree that the Loop can be convenient at times. But I still contend it's bad architecture--just as many seemingly convenient programming practices are.

The loop functions operate on (global) variables that are not explicitly passed into them. Therefore, without consulting their source, one cannot know what data they're touching. It's not obvious how and when these global variables get set and modified (which is one of the classic reasons global variables are considered Evil). Presumably, the variable are are set by the_loop(), but the opacity here is bad style.

On top of that, the fact that you must have these globals set to use the Loop's formatting functions makes it much less practical to use them in novel ways--i.e. in contexts other than the Loop. Sure, if you want that same data somewhere other than the Loop, there are other functions you can use. This is the typical reply I've heard in defense of the Loop. But that's a fairly poor defense: It's admitting that the API is so wonky, the WP devs had to create a bevy of functions that all do roughly the same thing to patch over each other's weaknesses. Why should there be a different way to get some post data in the main content area versus anywhere else?

BTW, I'm not just nit-picking Wordpress about the Loop. I'm talking about it because it's a well-known and very illustrative example of what I perceive to be a broader pattern of poor architecture throughout Wordpress.

Re: I Like PHP

#263

Post by ericd »

evilduck wrote: post #255
ericd wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was I incorrect that he was talking about small sites, or do people just believe that every site regardless of size should use a deploy script and the other trappings of large application/high volume production development? Because the latter is silly.

He was but I don't think that's a valid excuse. Doing a tested change and then a pushing to production is a 4 command overhead using git as lazily as possible with maybe an additional 5 minutes spent during initial project setup. You're doing the same coding work, you're just helping to ensure it's not going to create any completely useless work spent undoing mistakes. It's an ounce of prevention, pound of cure argum…

It's really not that clear cut. To do what you propose, you either have to set up an identical staging environment, or you have to set up a local environment that mimics (and stays in sync with!) the production environment. For a tiny site that sees This all depends on what kind of site it is, of course, but in the context of what he's saying, it makes sense.

Re: I Like PHP

#264

Post by eropple »

AgentConundrum wrote: post #195
pavel_lishin wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the record, "PHP: The Good Parts" is downright fucking awful. Apologies to the author if he reads this, but I'll buy him a beer and restate my opinion.

I've not read any of the "The Good Parts" series, so I can't comment from personal experience, but I've heard that Crockford's book is the only good one in that series. He wrote it, and he wrote it well, and then O'Reilly decided to base a series about it, but didn't get authors who could write those books to the same standard.

This is pretty much dead on.

Re: I Like PHP

#266

Post by sgerrand »

bermanoid wrote: post #231
chc wrote: post #23

"I don’t even bother writing tests for most of the PHP I write (obviously, I would be a bit more thorough if this code were destined to be used in a more mission critical web site). Not writing tests is not the only software taboo that I break when I write PHP: I happily mix up presentation and logic all the time. That’s just how PHP is supposed to work" And this is why everybody else hates PHP. It tempts you to writ…

And this is why everybody else hates PHP. It tempts you to write bad code, and so most people working in the language end up doing so. I have to periodically stop myself when I'm writing PHP and make sure I'm not falling into bad habits. You've got to keep in mind what PHP (currently) stands for: "PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor". Use it for that, and it's great, but try to make it do more and you run into trouble. IMO,…

So why not use Perl then?

Re: I Like PHP

#267

Post by pale_rider »

alanh wrote: post #192
pale_rider wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WordPress sites get hacked because the owner fails to update the platform or install 3rd party scripts/plugins without any sort of logical research. This can be said about any platform, regardless of the language.

> WordPress sites get hacked because the owner fails to update the platform Why are the updates even necessary? If you are still on Rails 2.3.8, you aren’t getting hacked just because you didn’t move to Rails 3 yet. But the situation with Wordpress & its ecosystem seems waaay less secure by default. > This can be said about any platform, regardless of the language. Not to the same degree, no sir.

Last time I checked Rails was not a content management system.

A fair comparison would be Drupal, Joomla, vBullentin - anything of that nature - which all regularly release updates.

Re: I Like PHP

#268

Post by freshhawk »

kamaal wrote: post #225
daeken wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, absolutely! Except that they're more prevalent in PHP applications than anything else. It's simply way, way too easy to do the wrong thing. If you want to introduce XSS into, say, a Rails app, it's significantly more difficult; generally, you have to explicitly throw something back as 'raw'. Sure, some PHP frameworks handle it the same way, but it's rare to see this in the real world. While testing apps, PHP imme…

That happens in nearly every language which is famous and widely used. I have seen awful Python code in the past. So bad that it would have led me to hate Python, so bad that it would have forced me to believe Python as a language sucks. But by now I am mature enough to understand that if you hire bad programmers you get bad code irrespective of the language its written in. You can use any tool you want, if you use i…

Everyone always makes this argument, and yes you can write bad code in any language. That's a truism that contributes nothing to the discussion.

Now which languages make it easier to write more good code? Everyone talks about the lack of good PHP code and the response is "well there's plenty of bad python code out there!". What we will never see are any examples of PHP code held up as being great a few years from now.

Yes, every few years a set of tools get trolled badly. The same tools that were considered sub par by professionals at the time.

Re: I Like PHP

#269

Post by alanh »

pale_rider wrote: post #267
alanh wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> WordPress sites get hacked because the owner fails to update the platform Why are the updates even necessary? If you are still on Rails 2.3.8, you aren’t getting hacked just because you didn’t move to Rails 3 yet. But the situation with Wordpress & its ecosystem seems waaay less secure by default. > This can be said about any platform, regardless of the language. Not to the same degree, no sir.

Last time I checked Rails was not a content management system. A fair comparison would be Drupal, Joomla, vBullentin - anything of that nature - which all regularly release updates.

Those are all PHP based and would seem to prove the point.
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