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PHP 3.0 Final is out (1998)

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Re: PHP 3.0 Final is out (1998)

#61
post #40

PHP 7.x and Laravel really gave the language its big boy pants. Really fun to develop in and looks nothing like the PHP 3.x and 5.x grime.

Sadly along with Laravel and Symfony came PSR culture where idiomatic PHP, with its fanfold docblock comments and double-spaced lines of code means you're lucky if you can see a dozen lines of code on a typical screen. I don't call that productive at all.

Re: PHP 3.0 Final is out (1998)

#62
post #18
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PHP deliberately has a low barrier to entry, and as a result there is a lot of poor quality code out there, written by beginners. People like to use this fact to suggest that the entire language is bad, which it most certainly is not. I've seen lots great, well structured and performant PHP code - the quality depends on the programmer, as it does for any other language.

As somebody who loves PHP, some PHP mockery is deserved. The standard function naming and argument ordering is inconsistent and stupid. It throws errors written in Hebrew. There were fundamental decisions made that harmed web security for years. Unicode wasn’t in PHP for a long time. Getting decent performance and/or scaling was/is a major challenge. The comparison tables are questionable at best. Etc. The language i…

Re Facebook, you can say that again. In August 2007 the source code of Facebook's index.php was exposed revealing a long list of global variables and not a single function definition in the whole 439 lines. Facebook engineer Steven Grimm commented 3 years later that similar, if not the same, code was still part of the codebase. So much for enterprise architecture.

Re: PHP 3.0 Final is out (1998)

#63
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As somebody who loves PHP, some PHP mockery is deserved. The standard function naming and argument ordering is inconsistent and stupid. It throws errors written in Hebrew. There were fundamental decisions made that harmed web security for years. Unicode wasn’t in PHP for a long time. Getting decent performance and/or scaling was/is a major challenge. The comparison tables are questionable at best. Etc. The language i…

You should watch this video: https://youtu.be/wCZ5TJCBWMg It's a talk by the creator of PHP about how PHP grew to what it is today. The entire thing is really interesting. There is actually a reason for things like 'inconsistent' argument ordering. They're ordered based on the C API, rather than being consistent in user land ;).

I think the C roots are also why PHP arrays double as hash maps.

Re: PHP 3.0 Final is out (1998)

#64
post #41
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As somebody who loves PHP, some PHP mockery is deserved. The standard function naming and argument ordering is inconsistent and stupid. It throws errors written in Hebrew. There were fundamental decisions made that harmed web security for years. Unicode wasn’t in PHP for a long time. Getting decent performance and/or scaling was/is a major challenge. The comparison tables are questionable at best. Etc. The language i…

> Getting decent performance and/or scaling was/is a major challenge. The rest of what you say I agree with, but the language was never a performance bottleneck over other scripting languages. It certainly scaled better than ruby or perl or python apps with the same logic. The fact that each request was fundamentally stateless and ephemeral helped this if you needed to distribute your app and made development faster…

Paradoxically, PHP's stateless architecture is also what makes it dog-slow with large frameworks such as Laravel. Now you have to load the whole framework with every request.

Re: PHP 3.0 Final is out (1998)

#65
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the same story for me. Moving from PHP to Python was really difficult conceptually for me. For years fiddling with Apache configs and uploading files via FTP was web development. I sometimes find myself thinking about teenagers getting started nowadays and the accessibility of development, but I suppose there are a lot more resources now than the early 2000s for some enterprising kids to get started.

Yes, but at the same time, web development was a much simpler process back then to get into and actually start to learn. No virtual machines to have to learn, or npm, or git, or... just code in php/html in notepad and maybe some raw basic javascript until js frameworks started becoming a thing and upload it via ftp. I mean, you didn't even have css to worry about...you just threw everything into a table! (lol!) There…

I mean, the exact same things work now, a beginner don’t have to use docker, don’t have to care about responsive layouts, etc.

Similarly to how one can start writing python scripts without having to know OOP, maintainability, or even functions. It will suck, but it is a valuable learning step.

Re: PHP 3.0 Final is out (1998)

#67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess you are lacking some context. Back in the day, you could: * Be bold enough to use Linux or FreeBSD and use CGI or Perl as the only free version * Use ASP but pay license fees for Windows NT, ISS and SQL Server * Use ColdFusion which was kind of trendy but was pretty expensive. When PHP arrived it was so refreshing. I used to make my stuff in Apache+PHP, MySQL and Linux and it was magical what you could do wit…

I remember my employer was paying Indian consultants a fortune to build a web app in ASP that didn't work. I told them I could do it in PHP in a week, but they didn't trust some "free program."

Ha, I can relate to that. Met a potential in the mid-2000s who lived down the road running a travel agency which was falling over due to bugs in its web app. He knew nothing about technology other than that his app needed to parse "an XML" to work properly. "Can you get the XMLs working?". As soon as he showed me a couple of files I realised it was a Classic ASP site written in VBScript running on some overpriced Windows host so I offered to rewrite it in PHP. No chance - in his mind "the XMLs" were glued to the original code.

Re: PHP 3.0 Final is out (1998)

#68

Someone from my dads office gave my some printed pages about ASP from MS. Until that time I was doing all my web dev in Perl (it was basically either that or c) with print " hello... et. After reading about ASP, I concocted my own miserable php-like thing in perl where you could put perl code in between to add logic. I tried to find the code (I have it somewhere in dropbox, I'm sure), but I remember I failed at doing…

> Good memories; deploying a site cheaply by scp/rsync the files.

Well. I have a minio instance running for static small sites, every time I wanted to create a new bucket I had to re-read my own notes and fiddle around for half an hour with s3cmd and mc before getting something live. Today I threw the things out and started using scp again. It's much easier, it's not in the way.

Re: PHP 3.0 Final is out (1998)

#69
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the same story for me. Moving from PHP to Python was really difficult conceptually for me. For years fiddling with Apache configs and uploading files via FTP was web development. I sometimes find myself thinking about teenagers getting started nowadays and the accessibility of development, but I suppose there are a lot more resources now than the early 2000s for some enterprising kids to get started.

Yes, but at the same time, web development was a much simpler process back then to get into and actually start to learn. No virtual machines to have to learn, or npm, or git, or... just code in php/html in notepad and maybe some raw basic javascript until js frameworks started becoming a thing and upload it via ftp. I mean, you didn't even have css to worry about...you just threw everything into a table! (lol!) There…

It is important to point out that this simplicity was by design. There was a ton of complex UI frameworks in the 90s, but Tim Berners Lee decided to get away with that complexity. Of course, developers being who they are, decided that simple is not what they wanted, and created probably one of the most complicated development stacks the world has ever seen on the top of the web browser.

Re: PHP 3.0 Final is out (1998)

#70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It basically did for simple web programming what visual basic did for Windows desktop toys: allowed you to throw some UI together (drag & drop components in the VB case, any old HTML with links or forms for PHP) then start stringing bit of code in haphazardly to link it together. No need to learn a more complex compiler or other build tools, worry about configuring CGI or other web server tech (unless running PHP you…

If someone proposed a conspiracy theory for why the rapid application development tools of the middle 1990s became extinct in reaction to plotting by corporate interests in perpetuating the value of consulting services and the high salaries of CS graduates, I would buy the hardback edition immediately. VB, Visual Age, Delhi, Genera on Tru64, RDB and RMS and DEC TM giving you schema less (noSQL to taste) wan -clustere…

I think one thing that killed the RAD market was it became viable to stick together a web application, especially since for a while no one cared if you included a barebones web server in your delivery
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