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Go with PHP

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Re: Go with PHP

#301

Post by throwaway2990 »

keyle wrote: post #17

As a fullstack developer who has worked many, many years in the javascript hellhole, I mean ecosystem, as well as the python ecosystem and .NET; coming back to PHP the last 2 years, working essentially in Laravel and the like - I couldn't approve more of this message. Seriously, PHP is the grand father that will drive you to class and you'll never be late, the car will never smell and everything will always just be f…

> Oh and it's free. All of it. PHP, Laravel. And its hosting has always been the cheapest. You don't need a particular OS or certain cloud providers.

Unless you’re getting shared hosting, then it’s true for most things now. You don’t need a specific OS or cloud provider for .NET, Java, Go, Rust… etc

> When I consider the solutions of flask and microservices I've left behind, the many node processes running with pm2, the complexity of .NET solutions... PHP just works, and it's easy to make reliable... And if it's slow, it's because I'm doing dumb stuff, not because of dark corner edge case I happened to be tripping into.

.NET isn’t anymore complex than a PHP app. Unless you write many layers of abstractions. And nothing stops you from doing the same thing in PHP.

Re: Go with PHP

#302

Post by motogpjimbo »

simonhamp wrote: post #291
SergeAx wrote: post #187

I see couple singletons calls in those examples. Is it considered a good practice in PHP now, or was it made to simplify the demoed code?

Maybe you mean 'static' calls? Depends on the context but in most cases these are a convenience, syntactic sugar. Take SendOrderToVendor::dispatch($order)->onQueue('orders'), for example. This could also be written as: $job = new SendOrderToVendor($order); $job->dispatchOn('orders'); (Exact function calls may not be correct, I'm on my phone) Functionally identical - same code path. The main gain is ergonomics, but it…

The issue isn't the exact syntax that's used to access the service object. It's the fact that any random chunk of code anywhere in the codebase can reach out to any other random piece of code. Syntactic sugar or not, that's considered to be an antipattern in pretty much any community outside of Laravel's.

Re: Go with PHP

#303

Post by dgb23 »

jusssi wrote: post #292
dgb23 wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If someone's still hating on PHP in 2023 it makes me wonder if they've been focused on more exotic technology because they were looking to pad their resume with more expensive skills, build science projects for their own amusement vs. what the business needed, etc. etc. Red flag. I get that you are arguing from personal experiences, people you met and worked with. But this statement lacks context and nuance. There…

> magic framework stuff that Laravel/Symphony provide The magic in these frameworks is evil, and likely a big part in ruining PHP's reputation. Laravel in particular hides way too much stuff behind magic, and when it goes wrong you find yourself sifting through OOP-obfuscated layers of framework and libraries just to find out how exactly your controller is called.

I agree with you. But, and this is a big but, it's a tradeoff. You also get benefits.

This is why I said "buy-in". If you are comfortable with doing things in their way, you get a ton of leverage: easily consistent code, a fast and productive "get off the ground" experience. The downside is what you described.

Personally I'm just not a fan anymore of these things. You quickly produce code that _looks_ clean and consistent. But it's also bloated and brittle, especially if you need to break out of the happy path. A framework like that is great if you don't do software design, but more of a hindrance if you do. There's no framework that can help you do a holistic solution. For that you need good tooling, a robust foundation (AKA not PHP and probably not JS) and a simple design.

Again: Trade off.

That's why many here in these discussions will tell you that X or Y is the best thing since sliced bread - because it fits their needs almost perfectly. But you also get many (like us) who have at least some reservations, because had to bend over backwards to fit a square peg into a round hole and ultimately wasted so much time that using X or Y wasn't worth it at all.

Re: Go with PHP

#304

Post by VWWHFSfQ »

That PHP code right there at the very top of the page that is supposed to be representative of how great it is has multiple TOCTOU authorization and validation bugs. In fact, nearly every piece of code on that entire page is riddled with transactional bugs

Re: Go with PHP

#305

Post by lastangryman »

There's 2 things to separate here:

1. PHP the language and developer experience (frameworks, tools, community, docs, etc)

2. PHP performance at scale

In my experience, PHP is much improved for 1. and fine to work with. Laravel and composer are great.

For 2. I would never use PHP on anything above a few hundred requests a second. It's slow on its own, but more importantly it's blocking IO model will grind things to a halt at any level of concurrency when talking out to database, caches, or other services. You are also vulnerable to issues like saturating your database with connections due the programming model in php-fpm. I know async php exists but my impression is the mainstream frameworks dont support it (I could be wrong?) so why not just switch language at that point. I speak from experience of scaling a Laravel php app up 5k RPS+ and needing a LOT of EC2 instances to do it. Using Go was a revelation and delivered a 10x improvement in terms of resources required to serve the same number of requests.

So yes, if your rps (And defining your scale in terms of orders per month is a bit silly)

Re: Go with PHP

#306

Post by liendolucas »

keyle wrote: post #17

As a fullstack developer who has worked many, many years in the javascript hellhole, I mean ecosystem, as well as the python ecosystem and .NET; coming back to PHP the last 2 years, working essentially in Laravel and the like - I couldn't approve more of this message. Seriously, PHP is the grand father that will drive you to class and you'll never be late, the car will never smell and everything will always just be f…

> It's fast, it's typed (now), it's reliable.

Fast, the most overrated feature that we developers endlessly look for. How fast? How much are you winning, milliseconds, nanoseconds, picoseconds? It's extremely likely that if something is slow is because you're doing something wrong regardless the language and/or framework.

It's reliable PHP? Well, so are Python, Ruby, Go and other friends, right?

> Laravel is pretty darn rock solid.

Again, so are: Rails, Flask, Django and many other matured frameworks out there that have been baked for years now. Unless you pick some toy framework project written in a weekend I'd say there are plenty of rock solid options out there.

> Just ignore the fugly standard library inconsistencies of (old) PHP...

I'll just prefer to pick a language that narrows/discards that dark side as much as possible. Very long time ago I couldn't finish reading a page whose author painstakingly detailed every single inconsistent feature of PHP (literally it could have taken a whole day to read). After that horrifying testament I said myself to ever get my feet wet with PHP. Now in a team with PHP you will need to agree which "inconsistencies" should be left out either by adding some tool to automatically watch for that or educating onboarding members of your team.

> Oh and it's free. All of it. PHP, Laravel.

Aren't the other friends out there also free? All of them?

> When I consider the solutions of flask and microservices...

Flask AND microservices are two completely different things. You can have a full fledged monolithic Flask application or go with the microservices rabbit hole with ANY technology and/or programming language that you want.

So PHP, well... Nah. At least not for me. There are plenty of interesting languages and technologies out there to be learnt and PHP for me is definitely not one of them.

One question aside out of ignorance. How do people debug in PHP? Many many many years ago I worked for an extremely short time for a company that were heavily using Laravel. I didn't know how to debug a PHP program at a time. People told me to simply do "prints" to the rendered template. If I remember correctly I also tried to find some tutorial or howto on debugging with PHP only to be unsuccessful. I'd be interested to know because with Python is just a joke to do that. Install ipython and ipdb. Then set `import ipdb;ipdb.set_trace()` and you are done, you get the full fledged mighty console where you can see everything you need to track down an issue. Up today I haven't got the opportunity to testify someone using a similar capability with PHP but hey I might be wrong and something of the like is out there.

Re: Go with PHP

#307

Post by o1y32 »

"500,000 orders per month"

That's like, what, 12 orders per minute? Is this meant to be impressive or something? I bet any language run on a modern laptop can handle that.

Re: Go with PHP

#309

Post by switch007 »

safety1st wrote: post #44
keyle wrote: post #17

As a fullstack developer who has worked many, many years in the javascript hellhole, I mean ecosystem, as well as the python ecosystem and .NET; coming back to PHP the last 2 years, working essentially in Laravel and the like - I couldn't approve more of this message. Seriously, PHP is the grand father that will drive you to class and you'll never be late, the car will never smell and everything will always just be f…

This 100%. It's actually a bit of a red flag to me these days if a developer turns up their nose at PHP. The language has matured a lot and building stuff with it is simple, cheap, straightforward and fast. If someone's still hating on PHP in 2023 it makes me wonder if they've been focused on more exotic technology because they were looking to pad their resume with more expensive skills, build science projects for th…

These “as a super important hiring manager” brags are quite boring to read

Re: Go with PHP

#310

Post by o1y32 »

diordiderot wrote: post #112
awestroke wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s cool to see PHP getting its second heyday once again. It’s currently a perfect storm of two communities starting to notice PHP. Really? I see no evidence that this is happening

The Frontend / server less / JS ecosystem craziness and high rate of change has left a lot of devs disenchanted. High profile posts over bundlers, tailwind, and microservices set the scene. A few popular people on Twitter have been talking about Laravel which has influenced other devs. Wind is in Laravel's sails, not php's

awestroke asked for evidence, but your long comment provided none
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