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PHP needs a vision

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Re: PHP needs a vision

#51

Post by kjackson2012 »

I come from a C++ background, and early last year tried my hand at web development.

After hearing about all the stuff about how PHP was an "old", kludgey language, I tried to learn python, and go the webpy. It was doable, but I kept running into issues all the time.

I gave up and switched to PHP, and I have to say that it was a much easier experience. For the most part, everything just worked. Regardless of how kludgey its history is, how inconsistent the syntax is, etc, it really does work well. I'm now doing PHP development at my current job and it's been fine.

One thing I learned from a previous job was the saying "Your customers don't care about your technology. They care about you solving their problems." If you are solving their problems, they will pay you, regardless of whether or not your back-end is CGI, perl, PHP, or whatever.

Re: PHP needs a vision

#52

Post by venomsnake »

You want a vision? Here is one - make the mess we have at the moment work.

I write in php for the better part of 4 years now and hate it every day. And I have written in c++ before that. Ask 20000 developers what are their main pain grievances sort them by "popularity" and just remove them one by one.

For me it is the hard debugging, the include mess and the "extremely" creative ways parsing and runtime errors are communicated to the developers.

Re: PHP needs a vision

#53

Post by olleicua »

sauravc wrote: post #43
cies wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I find nothing much 'general purpose' about PHP. The language has configuration files! That alone prohibits me from doing anything generic with it. So all that's left for me is 'focus on web development'. And to be honest: I think today it is not even so good at that. We have server side JS (Node), Ruby, Python and Java -- all freely available with huge communities. Does PHP stack up against these today? I…

"I find nothing" is a fairly strong statement. There are plenty of general purpose scripts one can write in PHP. Also config files don't preclude 'general purpose'. For example, run anything in Java and you'll find out there are plenty of defaults running on the JVM that you can override. Yet no one would argue Java isn't a general purpose language. The fact that PHP keeps these defaults in a file is inconsequential.

How is that a fairly strong statement? Here's a much stronger one: PHP is terrible at being a general purpose language. General purpose language doesn't mean you can do things that aren't web dev in it. General purpose means that it is designed to be useful in any application. You know like Ruby, Python, or Perl. General purpose doesn't mean that those things are possible (because I agree that they are possible in PHP); it means that it is a good tool for any job. PHP isn't just an inferior tool for non web dev projects though, it's also barely better if at all for web dev. LEARN RUBY!

Re: PHP needs a vision

#54

Post by venomsnake »

kjackson2012 wrote: post #51

I come from a C++ background, and early last year tried my hand at web development. After hearing about all the stuff about how PHP was an "old", kludgey language, I tried to learn python, and go the webpy. It was doable, but I kept running into issues all the time. I gave up and switched to PHP, and I have to say that it was a much easier experience. For the most part, everything just worked. Regardless of how kludg…

The problem with php is that is scales terribly with the size of the codebase. Try to move away from the comfort zone of the language and the size of the project and it changes a lot.

Re: PHP needs a vision

#55

Post by chrismsnz »

cies wrote: post #15
cies wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I find nothing much 'general purpose' about PHP. The language has configuration files! That alone prohibits me from doing anything generic with it. So all that's left for me is 'focus on web development'. And to be honest: I think today it is not even so good at that. We have server side JS (Node), Ruby, Python and Java -- all freely available with huge communities. Does PHP stack up against these today? I…

On a more positive note: I think the Symfony team actually has the vision: provided it has to be with PHP, let's make a full stack web development framework (like Rails) that does not suck, and create heaps of interesting components/libraries that can be used perfectly on their own in the process! These guys and girls are showing to what extend PHP can be pushed, they also build a fair share of general purpose libs t…

Completely agree. The people behind Symfony (and other embraced projects such as Composer) are dragging PHP kicking and screaming into the modern age.

The support and tooling they've managed to come up with is great, rivalling some of the more mature languages. Definitely a good "side" to hitch your wagon to.

Re: PHP needs a vision

#56

Post by michael_miller »

venomsnake wrote: post #54
kjackson2012 wrote: post #51

I come from a C++ background, and early last year tried my hand at web development. After hearing about all the stuff about how PHP was an "old", kludgey language, I tried to learn python, and go the webpy. It was doable, but I kept running into issues all the time. I gave up and switched to PHP, and I have to say that it was a much easier experience. For the most part, everything just worked. Regardless of how kludg…

The problem with php is that is scales terribly with the size of the codebase. Try to move away from the comfort zone of the language and the size of the project and it changes a lot.

If this is the case, then maybe PHP's role is a rapid prototyping language which is replaced when the codebase gets to a certain size.

Re: PHP needs a vision

#57

Post by fleitz »

kjackson2012 wrote: post #51

I come from a C++ background, and early last year tried my hand at web development. After hearing about all the stuff about how PHP was an "old", kludgey language, I tried to learn python, and go the webpy. It was doable, but I kept running into issues all the time. I gave up and switched to PHP, and I have to say that it was a much easier experience. For the most part, everything just worked. Regardless of how kludg…

PHP works fine as long as you're never exposed to a better way.

In a year or two start using rails. You'll come back to PHP and wonder why anyone would ever make a hammer with two claws.

Re: PHP needs a vision

#58

Post by fleitz »

michael_miller wrote: post #56
venomsnake wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with php is that is scales terribly with the size of the codebase. Try to move away from the comfort zone of the language and the size of the project and it changes a lot.

If this is the case, then maybe PHP's role is a rapid prototyping language which is replaced when the codebase gets to a certain size.

Generally that size is not more than about 5 files.

Re: PHP needs a vision

#59

Post by bunwich »

I have $20. $10 to two PHP BDFL's kickstarters that are willing to take on the responsibilty of improving the language and removing the inconsistencies.

1) No one from Zend or Rasmus can apply. 2) facebook - would love if you guys forked it, but you don't need my money.

Re: PHP needs a vision

#60

Post by pippy »

kjackson2012 wrote: post #51

I come from a C++ background, and early last year tried my hand at web development. After hearing about all the stuff about how PHP was an "old", kludgey language, I tried to learn python, and go the webpy. It was doable, but I kept running into issues all the time. I gave up and switched to PHP, and I have to say that it was a much easier experience. For the most part, everything just worked. Regardless of how kludg…

    "PHP Should Be Implementation Neutral, and Support All Paradigms Equally".
This is what I like about PHP. When you want a 4 page site, you can use procedural and functional programming. When you're working on an enterprise level CMS you can whip out the OO paradigm and you're set. PHP is a messy soup but it does web better than most other languages.
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