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PHP 7 Released

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Re: PHP 7 Released

#51

Post by ams6110 »

gkwelding wrote: post #31
mrmondo wrote: post #20

As a person with more of an ops background can someone explain to me why / when PHP might be a viable language? My experience with hosting PHP apps has historicity been one of fending off security issues and I think that often in the past PHP was often a language for designers that didn't have experienced programming skills, it feels like designers have now shifted to using Node for this?

"My experience with hosting PHP apps has historicity been one of fending off security issues" Unfortunately PHP seems to have this reputation. It's not so much the language that is the problem but the people using it. PHP typically had such a low bar to entry that literally anyone could pick it up and do anything and everything with it. And quite frankly there were (and still are) a lot of beginner tutorials out ther…

fending off security issues

This is my general experience with all platforms and operating systems. You have to keep up to date.

PHP was early on the web scene, and like ASP it encouraged a lot of bad practices (like concatenating user input into SQL strings) before people knew better.

These days, in the hands of a competent developer, it's no worse than any other mainstream stack as far as security goes.

Re: PHP 7 Released

#52

Post by aikah »

scotty79 wrote: post #43
egeozcan wrote: post #16

Why do they keep adding global functions like "intdiv"? For example in JS, it being another language with a similar compatibility burden, they are moving most of the global functions (like parseInt) to "namespaces" (like Number.parseInt) while keeping global references there. When I open the docs (for example, the array functions page[1]), I get frightened by the global functions which do not seem to share a naming c…

When you put stuff in namespaces you need to remember in which namespace it is (and which library to refrence). Number.parseInt is not that bad but I'll take to_json() global function instead of (new System.Web.Script.Serialization.JavaScriptSerializer()).Serialize() (or was it Newtonsoft.Json.JsonConvert.SerializeObject()?) any day. Sure, names of PHP functions look arbitrary and inconsistent but when you know the n…

> Number.parseInt is not that bad but I'll take to_json() global function instead of (new System.Web.Script.Serialization.JavaScriptSerializer()).Serialize() any day.

It doesn't have to be one or the other.

In fact, array functions could just be under the same static class, like Array::TheFunction() . It would be acceptable and limit chances of namespace collision .

Re: PHP 7 Released

#53

Post by sbarre »

aikah wrote: post #36
trm42 wrote: post #7

PHP 7 makes life a lot better for PHP devs in many ways but one awesome thing is it obsoletes bunch of out-of-date tutorials by finally removing the old Mysql extension \o/ http://php.net/manual/en/migration70.removed-exts-sapis.php I actually met a young aspiring web developer who still learned DB-access with mysql_* functions. I urged him to switch to a sane framework like Laravel. Oh boy he was happy in a month an…

> I actually met a young aspiring web developer who still learned DB-access with mysql_* functions. I urged him to switch to a sane framework like Laravel. Oh boy he was happy in a month and learned bunch of best practices quickly. There is some middle ground good practice which is using PDO, or even better Doctrine/DBAL . I don't think Laravel's ORM is that good, and the Active Record Pattern is somehow controversia…

I spent a good while trying to integrate Doctrine into my projects, and in the end I found it bloated and overly verbose and went back to PDO.

I am sure that it has valid use cases, but for a lot of straightforward PHP projects, it's complete overkill and adds more work than it saves (in my opinion of course).

I agree with knowing PDO though, I would say that's required knowledge for any self-respecting PHP developer.

Re: PHP 7 Released

#54

Post by to3m »

ams6110 wrote: post #47
venomsnake wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And every php developer would wish that suddenly all php in the world upgrades to v7. We are years away from 7 having a big penetration in the ecosystem. And years more till it hits enterprise.

Our production environment is just this month upgrading to 5.6.

DreamHost are still in the process of upgrading to 5.5.

Re: PHP 7 Released

#55

Post by scotty79 »

rjbwork wrote: post #50
scotty79 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you put stuff in namespaces you need to remember in which namespace it is (and which library to refrence). Number.parseInt is not that bad but I'll take to_json() global function instead of (new System.Web.Script.Serialization.JavaScriptSerializer()).Serialize() (or was it Newtonsoft.Json.JsonConvert.SerializeObject()?) any day. Sure, names of PHP functions look arbitrary and inconsistent but when you know the n…

I just type JsonConvert and hit Alt-Enter. #JustReSharperThings

https://www.jetbrains.com/resharper/buy/ But thanks. I was looking for thing that would import me proper namespace and reference proper dependancy.

Doesn't help you that much though when Microsoft releases new version of its web stack, naming different things with same class names as before just putting them in different namespace. I still need to guess which of the namespaces I actually need when I'm trying to get running something that I found on the internet.

Re: PHP 7 Released

#56

Post by mei0Iesh »

oblio wrote: post #25
RohithMeethal wrote: post #9

I wish every PHP developer would reread the docs and start using new features available instead of just continuing with what they know already just because it works. And of course if there was any way to remove all those old tutorials out there.

PHP is very likely to be the language used by Mort: http://blog.codinghorror.com/mort-elvis-einstein-and-you/ I doubt any of those developers are ever going to switch what they're already using unless they are forced by some external factor. The more serious factor is: if you're on Hackernews, you're at least Elvis or even Einstein. Mort is out of reach for most internet media for programmers.

This is an arrogant and immature type of thing to write. This is programming, not high school cool-kids club. PHP is a wonderful tool that was mostly responsible for the dynamic web. Before it became popular, the web was mostly static HTML with an occasional CGI form, probably written in something like Perl, mostly just for emailing the webmaster. Maybe some small amount of JavaScript for something like rollover effects, but that's about it.

It's kind of like the situation today with the resurgence of JavaScript. One day the kids of the next decade will be posting snarky attitude basically calling JavaScript users retards because they don't use the cool-kids' PepoCOde. Lame. PHP is still excellent technology, and very relevant still for building dynamic server-side websites.

It used to be that people using JavaScript were made fun of for being "scripters", not "programmers". Everyone knows JavaScript is the language of Mort. Only Franken Elvis uses C.

Re: PHP 7 Released

#57

Post by scotty79 »

aikah wrote: post #52
scotty79 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you put stuff in namespaces you need to remember in which namespace it is (and which library to refrence). Number.parseInt is not that bad but I'll take to_json() global function instead of (new System.Web.Script.Serialization.JavaScriptSerializer()).Serialize() (or was it Newtonsoft.Json.JsonConvert.SerializeObject()?) any day. Sure, names of PHP functions look arbitrary and inconsistent but when you know the n…

> Number.parseInt is not that bad but I'll take to_json() global function instead of (new System.Web.Script.Serialization.JavaScriptSerializer()).Serialize() any day. It doesn't have to be one or the other. In fact, array functions could just be under the same static class, like Array::TheFunction() . It would be acceptable and limit chances of namespace collision .

> It doesn't have to be one or the other.

Sure there's a spectrum. But even with one level I'm still guessing whether it was String.toInteger or Integer.toString, or String.parseInt or Integer.parseInt or Number.parseInt or whatever ... and since I need to check I don't mind finding out it's a global function named str2int or even int() that takes whatever.

Re: PHP 7 Released

#58

Post by marklgr »

rplnt wrote: post #49
marklgr wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PHP is the language many people love to hate; I guess some of them like the idea of being able to point the black sheep of web development, so that they can tell "maybe we have some flaws, but at least we're not one of these PHP shops". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splitting_%28psychology%29

> PHP is the language many people love to hate Do you think there's a reason for that? Maybe a direct one? That it's a bad language for example? Why would it need to be anything more complicated than that. So I don't think your guess is accurate. It's simply a bad language on its own. No need to compare it to anything. And I don't think anyone can deny that, no one will honestly say that "php is a good language". You…

To me, it's a so-so language, with some bad parts, some ok. On the plus side, it's easy to pick up, and it gets the job done for many projects. Perhaps it's a bit like the Ikea of programming languages, if you will--no the best of furniture for sure, but when you need a table and some chairs with little efforts, it's nice to have, and they're not horrendous unless you couldn't build them correctly.

Re: PHP 7 Released

#59

Post by Scarblac »

trm42 wrote: post #7

PHP 7 makes life a lot better for PHP devs in many ways but one awesome thing is it obsoletes bunch of out-of-date tutorials by finally removing the old Mysql extension \o/ http://php.net/manual/en/migration70.removed-exts-sapis.php I actually met a young aspiring web developer who still learned DB-access with mysql_* functions. I urged him to switch to a sane framework like Laravel. Oh boy he was happy in a month an…

I am an experienced programmer but I've only touched PHP a few times, years ago. What are the best books or tutorials to get an overview of modern PHP?

Re: PHP 7 Released

#60

Post by acdha »

gkwelding wrote: post #31
mrmondo wrote: post #20

As a person with more of an ops background can someone explain to me why / when PHP might be a viable language? My experience with hosting PHP apps has historicity been one of fending off security issues and I think that often in the past PHP was often a language for designers that didn't have experienced programming skills, it feels like designers have now shifted to using Node for this?

"My experience with hosting PHP apps has historicity been one of fending off security issues" Unfortunately PHP seems to have this reputation. It's not so much the language that is the problem but the people using it. PHP typically had such a low bar to entry that literally anyone could pick it up and do anything and everything with it. And quite frankly there were (and still are) a lot of beginner tutorials out ther…

That explanation is technically true but it's like blaming human error for factory workers being injured by a machine without safety guards. Since it happens so frequently you have to ask how the language could change to make it less common.

Most of it comes down to being developed ad-hoc with convenience for solving a simple problem right now as the main driving force.

Remember register globals? That was a minor convenience which took ages and millions of exploits to be removed – I remember lobbying for that in the late 90s.

Similarly, you mentioned SQL injection. Unlikely as this may seem now, there was a time when things like prepared statements were an exotic new feature with limited library support and a certain school of programmer thought they were probably too slow. The docs and most tutorials didn't mention things like validation or escaping prominently so most PHP developers were trained to slop everything into strings. When PDO came along, this persisted for too long as well and even after they started recommending placeholders you didn't get something like all of the mysql functions saying “Don't use this, it's unsafe”. I've heard that this has improved but it's been years since I needed to look.

Similarly, look at the lax attitudes toward error handling — errors are ignored by default, database errors or warnings have to be explicitly requested, etc. That's “easier”, saving whole seconds of learning at the expense of millions of successful exploits and hours spent debugging.

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