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Taking PHP Seriously

slack.engineering

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Re: Taking PHP Seriously

#431

Post by codedokode »

josteink wrote: post #400
codedokode wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I cannot agree that OOP in Javascript is anywhere near good. Every library (like Backbone) includes a layer to emulate traditional Java-like classes with private/public fields and inheritance. Because until ES5 there were no syntax for classes, and in ES5 it is just a syntax for adding methods to a prototype and not a real class. And JS is too forgiving, even more forgiving than PHP. In JS you can misspell object fie…

> In JS you can misspell object fields's name and learn about it only when undefined value will cause an error somewhere in another module. You should try "use strict" sometime. If you write sloppy JS, you'll find out in no time. Javascript will still have most of its warts, mind you. But some of the most obvious errors should at least be catchable.

It doesn't help to find a misspelled property (and doesn't prevent you from dividing by zero too). You need a static typing system like TypeScript to detect such kind of bugs.

Re: Taking PHP Seriously

#432

Post by pif »

increment_i wrote: post #355
michaelmrose wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't it stand to reason that the people that actually know how things work under the hood are the people that care about such things. You could say the same thing about cars people don't care about what sort of engine is under the hood or how it works they just want to go places! It doesn't then follow that all cars are the same and you are just as well getting any one of the millions of cars or even any one of th…

You have a logical point for sure. I think it might be an apples to oranges comparison in this case though. I just don't know that building cars is the same as building websites and apps. I know Php and JavaScript can respond to an HTTP request. I don't know how to optimize an internal combustion engine. There's probably parallels in terms of expertise with software developers, but I can't be sure.

> I just don't know that building cars is the same as building websites and apps.

Indeed it isn't. "Maintenance" has opposite meanings in those worlds: maintaining a car means keeping its original functionalities still available; maintaining an application means letting it evolve.

Re: Taking PHP Seriously

#433

Post by pif »

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…

> Only engineers care about programming languages. Seriously. That's it. No one else cares about them.

So what? Who else could care for something apart from those professionals using it?

Maintenance is the biggest part of software development. A wrong technological choice can turn my nice job into my worst nightmare. Why shouldn't I care?

Re: Taking PHP Seriously

#434

Post by test1235 »

justinhj wrote: post #372
Aldo_MX wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which of the top languages is actually well designed? All of them have their area of opportunity.

Look at c++ as a counter example. Once immensely popular and yet I don't think many people would say it was well designed

It is still ridiculously popular. It has it's place close to the metal, but a bit easier to use than regular old C.

Re: Taking PHP Seriously

#435

Post by arpa »

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…

Eh, you can do rapid prototyping-type garbage code in any language you are proficient in, as you can do the endless-architeture-meeting, special snowflake beautiful code, enterprise-level everything documented and automatically tested continuos integration and deployment to the most popular containerized/virtualized environment for a reasonable price of $millions in PHP or even bash or powershell.

V1 is usually shit in any language and if it does what it's supposed to do, it remains shit forever. I've seen shit in C#, Java, and ROR. I've seen stored procedures stringed together inside MSSQL Server vomiting HTML snippets and PS shells giving birth to Excel files to be consumed via network share by some poor soul pressing a button in Excel. I've seen systems written in "enterprise" style, by "enterprise" developers without a single automated test and 20+ levels of abstraction with cross-dependencies running like spider web among 10-some "sub-projects".

I'm not even talking about time-tested shell scripts you can find included by default in your favorite distro or the widely beloved ./configure.

I guess the point is, the language has nothing to do with the attitude of the developer / project manager / product owner. It's easy and convenient to just dump your problems on the tool you're using, but the reality is more deeply rooted in the whole approach to software development (just get shit done), project management (the requirements have just changed, dude!) and the general "i need it done last week" attitude of the product owners.

But sure, let's collectively shit on PHP, just because it's easier. Just like writing shit code is.

Re: Taking PHP Seriously

#436

Post by oliverkyss »

codedokode wrote: post #425
vatotemking wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Try console.log([] * {}) and be surprised. At least in PHP you cannot multiply array by object. Type casting in PHP gets fixed gradually: https://wiki.php.net/rfc/invalid_strings_in_arithmetic .

Why would that be surprising? NaN as a result definitely means that you cannot multiply array by object in JS either. JavaScript uses IEEE 754 special values, not exceptions on arithmetic errors (eg 1/0 returns Infinity instead of throwing). If you bother to learn the language, it doesn't surprise you.

Re: Taking PHP Seriously

#437

Post by ohthehugemanate »

Most of the hate for PHP comes from the PHP4 days, when it really was a wild west, fast and dirty kind of language. And of course, wordpress has done a lot of reputational damage as the world's most popular plate of spaghetti code.

But look at the way modern php developers work, in PHP7 with frameworks like Laravel, Symfony, and even Drupal 8. Modern PHP is a pleasure to work with.

Re: Taking PHP Seriously

#438

Post by mtberatwork »

captn3m0 wrote: post #367
cutler wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you used Rails in production? Just curious.

I've used both Rails and Laravel in production, and while I equally love both, the amount of hassles you face with rails in prod is an order of magnitude more. rails + unicorn/passenger v/s apache + mod_php.

> rails + unicorn/passenger v/s apache + mod_php.

That's not a fair comparison though. For any non-trivial app, most people deploy PHP using a CGI, PHP-FPM being the standard. Even the cheap, shared hosts provide FastCGI these days.

That being said, getting RoR or Django up and running is really no more difficult than getting Laravel setup and running via PHP-FPM.

Re: Taking PHP Seriously

#439

Post by vatotemking »

guitarbill wrote: post #417
vatotemking wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Youre right. I think JS has taken over the title, for better or for worse. Even WordPress is migrating to JS with its front end.

Re: Taking PHP Seriously

#440

Post by tyingq »

ryanlm wrote: post #331
tyingq wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>Why are there no other "competitors" in this space? There are. Any language that supports either fastcgi, or runs as an apache plugin (or similar) functions in the "each request starts new" space. There's certainly others, but Python and Perl are both good examples. Starting new with each request does, of course, mean lots of re-work that shouldn't have to be done with each request. It does initially keep complexit…

Can you set up Python to have the same pattern as PHP? I've always had to proxy the web server to the Python process running HTTP.

Python via fastcgi, wscgi, etc, is the same pattern. Or mod_python inside Apache.
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