$PHP = ; • Hacker News Board

Re: $PHP = ;

#41

Post by fdomingues » Wed, Jan 24, 2018, 4:10 PM UTC

smaili wrote: post #25

FWIW, the reason there is an empty space after the equals and before the semicolon is because there's supposed to be a poop emoji -- i.e., PHP is "poop". It's a pity, my initial reaction seeing the headline was somebody had found an interesting hack with that particular syntax.

$=${$}[$]; $($);

Actually some time ago I found some piece of alien PHP code (a backdoor) in my server, and I couldn't understand it! I did't know the $($); syntax. After searching for that and not finding anything I discovery that exist one special Unicode character that is invisible.

Full code here: https://imgur.com/a/Cggdx

Re: $PHP = ;

#42

Post by pan69 » Wed, Jan 24, 2018, 8:58 PM UTC

Over the years I have come to notice that programming languages are, most of the time, not important at all. However, tooling and ecosystem around a language is.

Turns out, yes, PHP is not a very elegant language and there is still quite a bit of phpclasses style gunk out there to be found. But, PHP has a fantastic mature ecosystem. Projects such as Symfony, Doctrine, Composer, The PHP League and PHP The Right Way, to name but a few, are all great examples of this.

To me, for building business type CRUD apps, PHP is still the most productive.

Re: $PHP = ;

#43

Post by sametmax » Thu, Jan 25, 2018, 2:38 PM UTC

bpizzi wrote: post #17

While being sarcastic and not really giving any meaningful technical information (which is fine!), this quick read made me remember that I definitely became more productive when I stopped seeing myself as a '[php/node/ruby/c/whatever] programmer' and started describing me as a 'problem solver using the best tools for a given context'.

However, some tools are not interesting for any job anymore and the only reason we use them is because of inertia. I've done a lot a php in the past, and i can't think of a single task thar I, as a professional developper, would benefit from using php to perform instead of something else in my toolbox.

The only reason i still do php at all is that some clients ask for it. Inertia.

I can, using my imagination, picture a situation were using php is better for someone, for something.

I can also aknowledge that php has been used to create very nice products at the time, including wordpress, joomla and prestashop.

But there is such thing as evolution in programming. And yes, php has been outperformed by several modern dynamic languages out there. There is no shame in it. That's life.