neat
Taking PHP Seriously
581–590 of 673 posts
Re: Taking PHP Seriously
#582Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I suspect you can with some effort That is my point. You require effort in an order of magnitude greater than with PHP in order to achieve the same result, which in the case of a beginner, is the difference between continuing their journey in programming or abandoning the ship. You are failing to see the big picture and are taking for granted the plethora of initial setup you have to do to begin working with a lang…
>You require effort in an order of magnitude greater than with PHP in order to achieve the same result.. An order of magnitude? Really? I don't think so. Rust has a library (probably among others) called Horrorshow[1], that exports macros to do html templating. You claim that it is easy in Php to do html templating. But you miss the fact that it provide zero sanity/security checks while doing so. You need to sanitize…
Yes, an order of magnitude, in PHP we're talking about _minutes_ in Rust we're talking about _hours_ or even _days_ for a beginner programmer, ever tried to install Homebrew in a Mac to name an example? It adds at least a few hours to the equation with its dependency on Xcode unless you already know to just install the command line tools.
Remember that a beginner programmer doesn't always have a background in Computer Science, maybe it's a child, maybe a graphic designer, maybe an elder person or a housewife. Are you really expecting from a person foreign to CS to stop tinkering just because they can't write secure and performant code in your favorite language?
Again, stop taking for granted the initial process setup and all the gotchas that you already know, stop nitpicking in the example of templating and see the big picture: A beginner programmer being able to get instant feedback with little effort in their browser of choice. No initial project or repository set-up, no install for external libraries, no huge development environments (like Xcode or Visual Studio), no build process or compilation, no command line, just an app like WAMP (on Windows) or MAMP (which people accustomed to homebrew avoid) and a browser pointing to http://localhost.
PHP is not a perfect language, but it's neither the abomination people like you describe, too many people judge PHP by its former state of the art and are unaware of the progress it has had in the last years, many of the most popular issues are already gone or at least are too difficult to trigger, to name an example, PHP stopped having register_globals since version 5.4, and PHP 7 added strict type hinting, which throws an error instead of doing unexpected type coercions.
That doesn't mean that PHP is a better choice than properly-designed alternatives, just that it's less worse than before. I agree with the sentiment of using a well-designed language like Rust, but only when a project really requires that degree of security and performance (ex. writing a browser like Servo).
A bakery website written by the kid of a patissier doesn't require that degree of security and performance... Or are you really going to demand that child to use your favorite language just because you despise PHP?
Re: Taking PHP Seriously
#583Earlier quoted context omitted.
PHP always reminds me of the Dijkstra quote: "It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration."
My first language was Pascal. The concept of combining strings and integers in PHP without any conversion was scary and magical to me at first, but the damn thing worked, as long as you were careful. I still get mad at people who complain about type coercion because they expect their programming language of choice to read their minds and wipe their ass. And Dijkstra was kidding. As is Rasmus when he says he'll restar…
I think this is great comment, and I can really relate to a lot of it.
I especially liked this:
> Learn languages instead of a language and it'll click.
I started at 5 or 6 with Basic, then progressed to Object Pascal early on, then C, C++, PHP, Java and finally Javascript and C# - I believe this wide experience has served me well over my almost 30 years' of programming (Christmas I'm getting old!).
I think there is a time and a place for 'just get shit done, fast', as well as spending time building 'elegant' code. But, if anything, the compromise between these 2 is possibly the thing I struggle with most.
Re: Taking PHP Seriously
#584I 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 can agree that php might not be the nicest or the fastest language, and I like to say choose the right tool for the job, but writing it off just because it's php is stupid.
A couple of months back there was this php sucks article about being looked down upon because you do php for a living. Php is the language people bitch about to feel better about themselves. Even within the php community symfony developers don't take drupal developers seriously. It's sad really and even I'm guilty of doing that. A little more respect for your fellow developers is all we need. It's like judging a book by it's cover. How would you feel if was treated that way.
Php has a lot going for it. The community is very active and passionate, new things come out at a rate you can keep up with. You can easily get passionate about it if you engage in it. A lot of interesting projects are (being) build with it and it is obvious that php won't disappear anytime soon.
If you have to work with php and bitch about it, make the effort and solve the problem you have with it. Contribute back to the community and experience the gratitude. You'll enjoy your work more.
So there are php people that care and they try to make the best of it. I don't think they consider it to be a garbage language. They are the ones that made php what it is today which is something totally different compared to what it was years ago.
Re: Taking PHP Seriously
#585Earlier quoted context omitted.
But program managers and CTOs and other non-engineers at a company care about scalability, performance, technical debt and quality, right? Let's not pretend that these don't matter once you've gone past the "users actually care about our app" phase, because they do and they affect the bottom line of a company. And IMHO PHP falters in these regards.
Performance? You need to update your act. PHP7 is 3x faster than python and now faster than Java 8 . The only people that can call php slow are masochistic c++ web hacks. https://blog.famzah.net/2016/02/09/cpp-vs-python-vs-perl-vs-...
I don't care about performance.
Unless we are speaking about orders of magnitude and my use case has an absolute need for performance.
If I only cared about performance I would write everything in assembly optimised for every specific architecture.
But strangely I'm much, much, much more productive writing in c#, Java, groovy, f#, ruby and whatever language is appropriate for what I need to do at a certain time.
For sure I won't start a new project using a language in which writing such abominations as accessing the database in the presentation layer is not even discouraged, but it is actually encouraged and taken as an example on HN in this thread.
Enjoy your marvellous php.
But please stop the bullshit that pushed a lot of people to use that franken-language rather than using a better approach.
Re: Taking PHP Seriously
#586Earlier 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.
> It falls apart when you have a large often-changing content. Today, when one can have workflows via jekyll/git/Continuous deployment, at what frequency of "often-changing" should one move away from static websites to a php based solution?
I haven't tried jekyll so I can't really comment on it. Im guessing it only generates the changed files everytime you push to git, no? As for your question, it depends on other factors too. Who are your users, what is your web app, is it an ecommerce site? Is the jekyll/git/CI workflow easier than just pressing a few buttons on the screen everyday? Those are the questions you should ask. jekyll might be obvious for us devs but we are a minority compared to the rest of the population.
Re: Taking PHP Seriously
#587Earlier quoted context omitted.
> So what's the catch? About 2-3 orders of magnitude in performance. That’s the catch. And it’s the reason why even with PHP you use things as opcaches, cache database results in external daemons, you use process pools with fastcgi instead of actually creating new processes, etc. And hacking those things on top of PHP make your program even worse to reason about than just using a daemonized system with actor framewor…
Unless you're writing in pure hand-optimized assembly language, 3 orders of magnitude in performance is way more than you could claim. PHP web requests commonly execute in hundreds of ms (of course, here I generalize mercilessly, but that covers most of cases I know of and that's what most sites aim for). So you say your non-PHP requests which would do the same thing would finish in hundreds of microseconds? I have v…
[deleted]
Re: Taking PHP Seriously
#588Earlier quoted context omitted.
Performance? You need to update your act. PHP7 is 3x faster than python and now faster than Java 8 . The only people that can call php slow are masochistic c++ web hacks. https://blog.famzah.net/2016/02/09/cpp-vs-python-vs-perl-vs-...
Funny that people complain about js performance. In this benchmark it was 3 times as fast as php7 and about 7 times as fast as java 8. Have not checked the details of the benchmark yet.
Looks like you're reading that wrong? Java 8 is listed twice. Java 8, when using the non-standard library version of the program is second only to C++. This is pretty much as expected.
Re: Taking PHP Seriously
#589The article points out that arguably the best part of PHP is the "shared nothing lifecycle". That each request starts new, and the process dies at the end of the request. It's by far my favorite part, and I completely agree that it makes "reasoning about" (boy do I hate that phrase...) your program much easier. Why are there no other "competitors" in this space? Why do most other languages go with the alternative rou…
> So what's the catch? About 2-3 orders of magnitude in performance. That’s the catch. And it’s the reason why even with PHP you use things as opcaches, cache database results in external daemons, you use process pools with fastcgi instead of actually creating new processes, etc. And hacking those things on top of PHP make your program even worse to reason about than just using a daemonized system with actor framewor…
I don't know where do you get your 2-3 orders of magnitude from.
A rewrite I worked on, from PHP to C++, had an improvement of 20 times better performance.
That's only one (1) order of magnitude.
Re: Taking PHP Seriously
#590Earlier quoted context omitted.
Elixir and the Phoenix framework work like this, with a process spawned per request.
'Process' is an extremely overloaded term. It's more of a green thread for Erlang VM applications.
It is a green thread, but Erlang's green threads each have their own heap/garbage collector, so they're not sharing memory.