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Taking PHP Seriously

slack.engineering

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Re: Taking PHP Seriously

#291

Post by candiodari »

bbcbasic wrote: post #121
hueving wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds like to me you are mistaking the popularity of PHP with the proficiency of the developers. PHP has been around a long time and is used by lots of people. Even if PHP projects only have a 1% success rate and haskell projects have a 20% success rate, guess which one will have more "successful projects".

I think the point is that for most "tech startups" they are marketing-first and tech-second. If PHP gets you to first base (MVP) in 10% of the time than NiceLangX then you get 10 X more chances to throw shit at the wall and see what sticks.

But that assumes this is the goal. The real goal is to get a nice looking CV with all the "advanced" entries, not to actually have a useful product or -god save us from this evil- an actual business.

Re: Taking PHP Seriously

#293

Post by lj3 »

napsterbr wrote: post #161
lj3 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In your opinion, what does that look like for PHP? Most of the projects I've seen tend to go overboard on the java-like OOP declarations.

Take a look at phabricator's code. Great example of a good, well-designed application built on top of php.

I can't say I agree. That code base resembles Java in all the wrong ways.

Re: Taking PHP Seriously

#294

Post by bbcbasic »

candiodari wrote: post #291
bbcbasic wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the point is that for most "tech startups" they are marketing-first and tech-second. If PHP gets you to first base (MVP) in 10% of the time than NiceLangX then you get 10 X more chances to throw shit at the wall and see what sticks.

But that assumes this is the goal. The real goal is to get a nice looking CV with all the "advanced" entries, not to actually have a useful product or -god save us from this evil- an actual business.

Touche! Although probably not if you are the founder. Maybe for employee #1.

Re: Taking PHP Seriously

#295

Post by flukus »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #269
astrodust wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not the decoding and encoding stuff, every language has that, but the difference in accessing the data. $data['key']['value'][0] is a lot messier than data.key.value[0]. Ruby has ways of mitigating this, but you pay a performance penalty.

There's also $data->key->value[0], which is the default. But yes, dots are shorter.

There's a special place in hell for language designers that make you use shift that often.

Re: Taking PHP Seriously

#296

Post by brendoncrawford »

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…

This seems to assume that a developer necessarily hits an MVP in PHP faster than in other languages. This might be true when comparing with the tooling/dependency nightmares of JS/NPM, but a half decent Python dev can get a Flask app up and running in about 15 minutes.

Re: Taking PHP Seriously

#297

Post by astrodust »

krapp wrote: post #201
astrodust wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not the decoding and encoding stuff, every language has that, but the difference in accessing the data. $data['key']['value'][0] is a lot messier than data.key.value[0]. Ruby has ways of mitigating this, but you pay a performance penalty.

that's fair - your only options in PHP are array notation or arrows for objects, dots are much easier.

Thanks to Perl that's used for string concatenation.

Re: Taking PHP Seriously

#298

Post by Aldo_MX »

wyager wrote: post #289
Aldo_MX wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we should definitely stop using them That will never happen, you can't write code like this in Rust: Customers Even when the previous code is an abomination, it is absolutely easy to write, this is why languages like PHP are a success, the barrier to entry is definitely low. The issue comes when the whole industry buys the idea that PHP equals bad code, fail to appreciate the progress the language has had in the la…

I don't know if you can do that in Rust (I suspect you can with some effort), but you can certainly do it in Haskell (with slightly different syntax, of course) using a library like Blaze-HTML5. Your argument is a bit spurious; you're right insofar as you can't write PHP in a language that's not PHP.

> I suspect you can with some effort

That is my point. You require effort in an order of magnitude greater than with PHP in order to achieve the same result, which in the case of a beginner, is the difference between continuing their journey in programming or abandoning the ship.

You are failing to see the big picture and are taking for granted the plethora of initial setup you have to do to begin working with a language like Rust (ex. generating bindings for a database driver written in C if it doesn't exist in cargo), you were just nitpicking in the syntax of the previous example (which BTW, I took care to clarify it was an example of bad code to avoid people not familiar with PHP from getting the wrong idea).

It was my fault to say "you can't" in my previous message (see Atwood's Law), I really meant "it requires too much effort".

Re: Taking PHP Seriously

#299

Post by TheDong »

gravypod wrote: post #131
leeoniya wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The language is not beautiful, it is full of signature and func naming inconsistencies [1] it inherited from C. The devs are ultra-conservative and stubborn to cause BC even at major version bumps (like the forever-incorrect ternary associativity [2][3]). But PHP7 is both fast and productive with many modern first-class features. You can in fact write excellent code without much effort that will handily outperform Py…

> The language is not beautiful, it is full of signature and func naming inconsistencies [1] it inherited from C. It was consistent with the thing it inherited most of it's syntax from so that makes it inconsistent? > The devs are ultra-conservative and stubborn to cause BC even at major version bumps (like the forever-incorrect ternary associativity [2][3]) You shouldn't be judging the way operators work in one lang…

> It was consistent with the thing it inherited most of it's syntax from so that makes it inconsistent?

It is also internally inconsistent in so many ways.

Half the array functions take arrays as the first arg, the other half the last.

explode and implode have different argument order requirements (one is strict, the other works either way).

Functions have a grab-bag of errors from returning null to false to 0 to strings to requiring error\_get\_last to even requiring an object specific error function (DateTime::getLastErrors).

Functions were named to make them have more randomly distributed hashes (http://news.php.net/php.internals/70691). Functions randomly do or don't have underscores, sane order, etc.

Some apis are in terms of objects (DateTime), some are not (getdate).

The whole thing is far less consistent than C. Some inconsistencies are from C. Most are PHP shit layered on top.

> You shouldn't be judging the way operators work in one language with the way they work in others. Is lisp inherently bad since it's operators are prefix and not infix? No I'd say not, it's just different.

It's a C-like language. Every c-like language does it the other way. I will totally judge a language that makes a decision that makes programmer's lives terrible with no justification. In this case, it's different in a way that often leaves to bugs and surprises.

Re: Taking PHP Seriously

#300

Post by wyager »

Aldo_MX wrote: post #298
wyager wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if you can do that in Rust (I suspect you can with some effort), but you can certainly do it in Haskell (with slightly different syntax, of course) using a library like Blaze-HTML5. Your argument is a bit spurious; you're right insofar as you can't write PHP in a language that's not PHP.

> I suspect you can with some effort That is my point. You require effort in an order of magnitude greater than with PHP in order to achieve the same result, which in the case of a beginner, is the difference between continuing their journey in programming or abandoning the ship. You are failing to see the big picture and are taking for granted the plethora of initial setup you have to do to begin working with a lang…

When I say "with some effort" I mean "with a bit of initial effort to create a combinator library and zero effort after that". I'm not familiar enough with Rust to be confident of that though. It's certainly the case with Haskell.
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