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Taking PHP Seriously [pdf]

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Re: Taking PHP Seriously [pdf]

#41

Post by wanderr »

jtreminio wrote: post #31
wanderr wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. There are a few things which are stateful and are therefore made easier/better by OO, mainly DB connections. For everything else, we mostly use classes as namespace (pre-5.3) with lots of static methods. In general for backend web it's pretty silly to spend a bunch of time building up stateful objects when your real goal is usually to load up the subset of information the user needs right now, return that and…

The problem with static methods is that they make testing nearly impossible.

Hmm, how so? In general it seems to make testing things easier since nothing is carrying around state; a static method with the same parameters is going to run exactly the same way every time no matter where or when it's called.

Re: Taking PHP Seriously [pdf]

#42

Post by jasonlotito »

memla wrote: post #17
harshreality wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$productid = "0x4zz5"; print $productid + 4; If printing "8" is your idea of a working interpretation of that code, then PHP is the language for you. If not, then PHP doesn't work. End of story.

Things like this and some interesting developments from Facebook concerning them are mentioned in the presentation, so it would be nice if people would actually discuss that. Just a suggestion.

It's PHP. Unfortunately, enough developer got bit by the fact that PHP doesn't prevent you from shooting yourself in the foot, and shot themselves in the foot.

So, you'd probably be pretty ornery too when other people had more discipline to use the language without shooting their foot and were also employing it successfully. You'd probably want to make assumptions, and word hard to belittle them. Insult them.

And they'll talk about beauty. And zen. And wonder, and joy in a language. And they'll gloss over the major problems that it suffers from. They'll imagine all is well. And they'll try and tell you that nothing good can come from the tool they once used to shoot themselves in the foot.

Just walk away. Because you still have two feet.

Re: Taking PHP Seriously [pdf]

#43

Post by debaserab2 »

jrockway wrote: post #24
goshx wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just checking: do you have any experience with it? When was the last time you tried working with PHP in a team?

I've done more projects in PHP than I would care to admit. I ported the University of Chicago's "Uncommon Application" from Cold Fusion to PHP using an OO data access model, MVC, and explicit templates. (This was a long time ago before people realized that MVC was a bad idea.) I've also hacked up a bunch of open source projects (wordpress, joomla). No tests, so you never know what you've fucked up, and you spend more…

What is "tasteful" source code? What characteristics make a code base tasteful? Do you have any samples?

Re: Taking PHP Seriously [pdf]

#44

Post by dkhenry »

At this point we almost need to stop saying facebook programs in PHP. I know this was defending PHP, but look at what is happening. Facebook ( big engineering firm, lots of developers and resources ) could not get php to work for them short of rewriting the core (HPHP ) and then adding on features to the language that most other languages have determined are useful enough to be baked into the language.

Here is my TL;DR of this article. PHP is bad we all know this and accept it. Facebook has made it better by keeping most of the syntax and chucking everything else out the window. Run your stuff on HipHop ( unless you need extensions in which case your OOL )

Re: Taking PHP Seriously [pdf]

#45

Post by jtreminio »

wanderr wrote: post #41
jtreminio wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with static methods is that they make testing nearly impossible.

Hmm, how so? In general it seems to make testing things easier since nothing is carrying around state; a static method with the same parameters is going to run exactly the same way every time no matter where or when it's called.

You are unable to properly mock static methods. So, for example, if you have a AuthorizeNet class that has a static method ::submit(), if you test the code then every single time you run it you're pinging Authorize.net's servers, which opens you up to a world of hurt.

Properly mocking methods allows you to get rid of this unknown and say, "The submit() method will return an array of this specified data" without Authorize.net ever getting a ping.

With static properties, the problem is that they do have memory. If you change it in one place in your codebase, that static property will then be changed across your whole codebase for that execution, even if you have multiple, separate object instances.

Re: Taking PHP Seriously [pdf]

#46

Post by Sanddancer »

fsniper wrote: post #18
harshreality wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$productid = "0x4zz5"; print $productid + 4; If printing "8" is your idea of a working interpretation of that code, then PHP is the language for you. If not, then PHP doesn't work. End of story.

It's PHP concatenation operator is ".". print $productid . 4;

You missed the point, and the problem. PHP tries way too hard to try to mangle input to kinda sorta work with the operators at hand. Were it a reasonable language, it would throw out a warning, or better yet, an error, to handle a fairly broken situation like this, rather than try to pick and choose the parts of the string it thinks is appropriate.

Re: Taking PHP Seriously [pdf]

#47

Post by memla »

dkhenry wrote: post #44

At this point we almost need to stop saying facebook programs in PHP. I know this was defending PHP, but look at what is happening. Facebook ( big engineering firm, lots of developers and resources ) could not get php to work for them short of rewriting the core (HPHP ) and then adding on features to the language that most other languages have determined are useful enough to be baked into the language. Here is my TL;…

Judging by that TL;DR people would think that there's an article with pages upon pages of what Facebook decided to eliminate from PHP, and not to make it easier but to make it possible to mantain their codebase. No such thing can be found in the provided PDF.

Re: Taking PHP Seriously [pdf]

#48

Post by workhere-io »

dkhenry wrote: post #44

At this point we almost need to stop saying facebook programs in PHP. I know this was defending PHP, but look at what is happening. Facebook ( big engineering firm, lots of developers and resources ) could not get php to work for them short of rewriting the core (HPHP ) and then adding on features to the language that most other languages have determined are useful enough to be baked into the language. Here is my TL;…

could not get php to work for them short of rewriting the core (HPHP )

I've heard this argument before, but it's important to realize that Facebook was able to use standard PHP up until the point when they had roughly 500 million users. Unless your site has a half billion users you can't compare your use case to Facebook's.

Re: Taking PHP Seriously [pdf]

#49

Post by prostoalex »

memla wrote: post #47
dkhenry wrote: post #44

At this point we almost need to stop saying facebook programs in PHP. I know this was defending PHP, but look at what is happening. Facebook ( big engineering firm, lots of developers and resources ) could not get php to work for them short of rewriting the core (HPHP ) and then adding on features to the language that most other languages have determined are useful enough to be baked into the language. Here is my TL;…

Judging by that TL;DR people would think that there's an article with pages upon pages of what Facebook decided to eliminate from PHP, and not to make it easier but to make it possible to mantain their codebase. No such thing can be found in the provided PDF.

They've added static typing, return types for functions, and a few other things. I believe the premise of the talk is that it's still possible to use everything else available in PHP (traits, generators, namespaces, etc.)

Re: Taking PHP Seriously [pdf]

#50

Post by shire »

Idk about you guys but I love PHP. After using new technology for Web Development PHP makes me feel nostalgic. I really enjoy PHP's ease of learning for Web Development. It's easy to understand Databases and Server-side programming using PHP than it is using Ruby on Rails, IMO It feels like magic using Ruby on Rails.
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