Announcing a specification for PHP • Hacker News Board

Re: Announcing a specification for PHP

#261

Post by Zancarius » Sun, Aug 03, 2014, 12:35 AM UTC

wvenable wrote: post #260

Zancarius wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I half agree, but I'd like to point out that the likely reason the curator of this site thinks of these as "WTFs" has more to do with PHP's (lack of?) consistency and it's relatively bizarre behavior when compared with saner languages. The other thing to consider (looking at it again, particularly at the second example) is that there are some surprising side effects that can snag newcomers, depending on their backgro…

It's nit-picky to the point of ridiculousness. Take the first example, even the title "Objects with __toString are not strings." is already WTF worthy. Of course objects with a __toString method are not strings! It means they can be converted to strings when unambiguously used as strings. Which is exactly what happens! The whole entry is stupid. The author even complains that PHP will issue an error if __toString doe…

I'll grant you that, although I get the impression it's largely someone wanting to have fun with oddities of the language. Although I wouldn't necessarily go as far as to claim that it's "marveling [sic] at the weirdness of the perfectly logical result"--there are some PHP behaviors that are just plain strange.

On the other hand, had you written "perfectly logical result (within the confines of PHP's idea of what's logical)," then I might be inclined to agree.

But yes, I made the mistake of linking the site without re-examining it. I recall seeing it first from HN some time ago (probably 2010ish) and thought it might have improved. I do believe I may have indicated its quality isn't on par with wtfjs.org, however. Take it as you will.

Re: Announcing a specification for PHP

#262

Post by teh_klev » Tue, Aug 05, 2014, 3:57 AM UTC

tragic wrote: post #231

Kiro wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just spin up a preconfigured dokku droplet and git push. Exactly the kind of things I don't want to be bothered with. I'm just saying that traditional web hosts suit my needs perfectly and DigitalOcean is no replacement.

So that would be "I don't want to be bothered with two clicks and a single terminal command." Really? Leaving aside the whole "PHP sucks" vs "PHP is great/fine for my purposes" thing, this is really breathtaking. The fact that you can just FTP up your folder does not mean that's a sensible best-practice way to deploy anything, PHP, Ruby, Brainfuck or whatever you like. It isn't. FTP is insecure[0]. If you're balking…

>FTP is insecure

Really [0]?

>however, you're getting dangerously close to the anti-PHP stereotype of the average PHP developer

I think you're getting dangerously close to coming off as condescending and insulting.

Despite what you may think, plain old fully managed shared hosting is still massively popular, especially here in the UK.

Our client base are design and development houses who want a reliable, tinker-free fully managed, predictable and secure environment. These folks aren't as backwards as you think, they already have a development workflow that works just fine. They push their stuff to their htdocs folder (via FTPS) and it just works. We even support WebDeploy (also secure) on the Windows platform so they can build MS deploy packages and push them up.

Most of our clients do use source control, they're not that naive but not all of them have drank the Github Koolade. They're happy with their own private source control arrangements.

It's an environment and process that's tried and tested so they can get on with building apps that pay the rent and keep the lights on without futzing about with dynos and droplets and the like. Not only that they can pick up the phone and within two rings get access to an experience frontline engineer who will fix a problem or answer a question within a couple of hours.

I can speak about this from experience as an engineer who works for a UK shared hoster. Admittedly we're not a bulk shared-hoster like GoDaddy, our services are tailored towards the needs of business clients, not someone's granny deploying a Wordpress site with pictures of cats.

[0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Transfer_Protocol#FTPS

Re: Announcing a specification for PHP

#263

Post by thathonkey » Thu, Aug 07, 2014, 2:29 AM UTC

duaneb wrote: post #92

thathonkey wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many other options, none of which enjoy the ubiquity of PHP (as far as being installed on such a vast majority of hosts). The barrier to entry is higher if you want to run a site on something else. That is the sole reason PHP is as popular as it is and part of the reason why it stays popular and powers so many of the internet's top websites. Other reasons why it stays popular is that they really have improv…

> none of which enjoy the ubiquity of PHP (as far as being installed on such a vast majority of hosts). So, choose the language based on the ease of the first 15 minutes of your startup?

I could say it worked pretty well for Facebook but that would be too easy. Seriously though, I know it is very in vogue to hate PHP or at least favor X language over PHP and has been for a long time. I'm not trying to sell you on the idea that PHP is objectively the best language or even a "good" language. That is beside the point I'm trying to make which is that it literally (still) powers the majority of the internets' websites. Tons of new websites are still being made using PHP and THAT is a tough pill to swallow for many people of the opinion that it has no merit.

I don't personally enjoy programming in PHP but the way people act as if it isn't massively important strikes me as obtuse and/or petty.