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Taking PHP Seriously

slack.engineering

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Re: Taking PHP Seriously

#411

Post by vatotemking »

codedokode wrote: post #236
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…

I don't like the term "garbage language". People use to praise languages like Ruby or Python which don't even have private fields or type hinting the PHP has. Ruby libraries use approaches like monkey-patching classes in other modules. And if we look at Javascript, it is even worse than Ruby. How do you call Javascript if PHP is "garbage"?

> And if we look at Javascript, it is even worse than Ruby. How do you call Javascript if PHP is "garbage"?

I think JS is better than PHP, at least when it comes to: 1.) consistency of std lib and 2.) type casting. There are many surprises with PHP's type casting. See /r/lolphp sorted from top all-time: https://www.reddit.com/r/lolphp/top/?sort=top&t=all

Re: Taking PHP Seriously

#412

Post by guitarbill »

Gruselbauer wrote: post #405
collyw wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I completely agree with this. There were a host of similar services when Facebook appeared in my radar, I was signed up to a couple of them. Its only because more friends signed up for facebook that it seemed to have a snowballing effect. It didn't seem in any way superior (well except compared to myspace).

In Germany, we used to have a VK-like social network aimed exclusively at university students that was big before Facebook even appeared. To this day I have no idea how that died so fast and hard, and how Facebook managed to overtake it when it hadn't even translated the interface. Ze English izn't zecond nature to all ze Germans.

Ah yes, the * VZs. From my perspective, there's a few reasons. One, my friends were very privacy conscious and would often either not sign up or use a weird name (like some people do). This made it hard to find people. Two, the user experience sucked hard. Third, they had different domains for different subgroups (I remember one for school children and one for students).

Finally, if you went travelling to any other country (except Austria or Switzerland maybe), the rest of the world had Facebook. So to keep in touch, you also needed Facebook, which had a better user experience. Why bother with both?

Re: Taking PHP Seriously

#414

Post by guitarbill »

increment_i wrote: post #336
brian-armstrong wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll offer an alternate hypothesis. Some companies are succeeding in spite of php. There are many, many users of php, and we'd expect that there would be considerable variance, with some users doing awful (no traction, buggy sites, etc) and some hitting home runs (facebook). Because it's such a popular language, it will have users across this entire spectrum. It's easy to cherry-pick the winners and miss all of the t…

It would be an outlier company indeed who held an 'all hands on deck' meeting and said, "We're succeeding in spite of PHP everyone!" Only engineers care about programming languages. Seriously. That's it. No one else cares about them. I work in a large public university alongside a revolving door of student interns who are always 19. In 10+ years of work, I've still yet to meet the person who talked about their favour…

Developers care about cognitive load, and people care about security.

Sure, they'll be some guy who's memorised all of PHPs quirks, but for most of us the inconsistencies make it hell to program, because you're always looking up stuff. As a result, writing secure PHP is possible, but far harder than it should be.

IMO the laughable security track record of e.g. Wordpress have damaged PHP's reputation more than anything else.

Re: Taking PHP Seriously

#415

Post by dakull »

nrser wrote: post #406
justinhj wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is easy if you are just willing to spend more money on servers. Often it's worth it.

it's the "good problem". and the good problem can always be solved, though lack of reliability can seriously hurt your growth. but that doesn't mean that it's as easy as people make it out to be. i wrote and ran a big php app (Zynga's Mafia Wars). this is just about the app server (apache + php side), single-master MySQL will give you far greater problems at that scale. everyone is tearing away adding features, and t…

>php's performance was an order-to-two or magnitude better than rails

Again PHP (the language) vs. Rails (the framework).

What framework was that `big php app` using?

Re: Taking PHP Seriously

#416

Post by regularfry »

cakeinblue wrote: post #333
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…

After I use both php and ruby for the same employer over more than a year. I would rather say Ruby is more like a garbage language -- 1) twist syntax to allow people write the same function into different ways is not a cool feature, it is disaster feature which causes more for a team to sync. 2) Duck typing is not interface, don't kidding yourself. they are totally two different thing. 3) ruby attract a lot of master…

> good luck with writing a unit test against an API not created by you

Is that a good idea?

Re: Taking PHP Seriously

#417

Post by guitarbill »

vatotemking wrote: post #398
bbcbasic wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dynamic content.

Underrated comment. To expand on this, static website generators are best for generating documentation and small blogs. It falls apart when you have a large often-changing content. This is where PHP is still king of the web.

> large often-changing content. This is where PHP is still king of the web.

PHP is still widely used, but there's a myriad of other contenders: Java, ASP.NET, Python (Django,Flask,etc), Ruby (Rails), Perl, Javascript (Node,etc) and others.

I'm not sure about PHP being the "king". PHP might be the most widely deployed thanks to either FB or the huge number of legacy bulletin boards and wordpress sites, but in terms of new deployments does it still dominate? Probably not. (For novices, a static site generator is definitely the way to go, until you run into it's limitations.)

Re: Taking PHP Seriously

#418

Post by jwmoz »

Having come from years of PHP development and then into Python the past year or two, there's no way I'm going back to PHP. This is the same as every other ex PHP dev I know.

Re: Taking PHP Seriously

#419

Post by chriswarbo »

dakull wrote: post #415
nrser wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's the "good problem". and the good problem can always be solved, though lack of reliability can seriously hurt your growth. but that doesn't mean that it's as easy as people make it out to be. i wrote and ran a big php app (Zynga's Mafia Wars). this is just about the app server (apache + php side), single-master MySQL will give you far greater problems at that scale. everyone is tearing away adding features, and t…

>php's performance was an order-to-two or magnitude better than rails Again PHP (the language) vs. Rails (the framework). What framework was that `big php app` using?

> What framework was that `big php app` using?

PHP is a framework. True it's not a particularly nice one, and some people build even more layers on top, but it comes with all manner of HTTP/url/DB/etc. stuff out of the box. It's also a templating language (that's what the "<?php" tags are for); although, again, not particularly great, and some people layer more abstractions on top.

Re: Taking PHP Seriously

#420

Post by chriswarbo »

deathanatos wrote: post #316
qwertyuiop924 wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not. In python, classes are entities like any other object. In JS, classes literally don't exist . Yes, even in ES6. I know there's a class keyword, but it doesn't actually create a class. What the class keyword creates is a constructor function which then initializes new objects with a set of properties, and also sets a prototype, when called with the new keyword. JS objects don't have a superclass, they have a…

> A prototype isn't a class: it's another object. When a method is called, or a variable is looked up on a JS object, JS scans up the prototype chain, all the way to Object.protype. A type in Python is also just another object. When a method is called, or a variable is looked up on an object, Python scans the MRO (effectively the same thing as the prototype chain, except it supports multiple inheritance too) all the…

> A type in Python is also just another object.

Yes, but it's (roughly speaking) an instance of a "Class" class. In the "Person" example, the prototype of a "Person" object is another "Person" object (until the chain reaches an "Object", at least).

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