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PHP 8.1.0

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Re: PHP 8.1.0

#61

I've been using PHP since 5.x. Often had to work on older 4.x web apps. I find it interesting when I read people saying "PHP has come a long way. It's a proper language now, etc." If you work long enough with a language and figure out most its quirks, it's a breeze. It's nice that they are adding all these new features, but they are hardly what makes it or break it for me. Here is the one features that is taken for g…

Same folks say Perl is unreadable because the syntax for certain aspects of the language is unfamiliar to them.

There might be more to it than that...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19576425

Re: PHP 8.1.0

#62

Still holding the web. Happy to see it is continually evolving.

What's your estimate for PHP's long-term viability? I'm asking, because it was the hobbyists and kids who got started in PHP mucking around in their everyday white-label cPanel/Plesk-based web-hosting accounts in the very early 2000s that really gave PHP the mindshare of enthusiastic users and thus its staying power. But it's 2021 now: all the kids are getting started with NodeJS for server-side web-applications, not…

Personally I am delighted that the low end has been replaced by fully managed platforms. The average small business does not have the ability to run a website. Actually building the site and getting it online is the cheapest and easiest part but its the only part these places budget for. Then the inevitable problems come when the site is 2 years old, falling apart, getting hacked, etc. Allowing these low end customers to just have something that is set and forget truly is an improvement.

Re: PHP 8.1.0

#63
I use C#, Javascript and PHP a lot.

PHP always wins when it comes to deployment and productivity. In my opinion that's the power of PHP.

It's also versatile. I used it for small projects, multi-million € projects, COM-port communication, API communication, prototyping and what not.

The syntax is not great, but to me PHP is this multi-tool that just gets the job done and will run reliable for years.

Re: PHP 8.1.0

#64
post #18

Everyone laughing at PHP hasn't tried it for years, I'd bet. It started clumsy, true, but it became a solid and quite elegant way of doing things. And by things I don't mean just web development. The current limitations I see in PHP is that there is not an official multi-core coroutines solution.

[deleted]

Re: PHP 8.1.0

#65

I've been using PHP since 5.x. Often had to work on older 4.x web apps. I find it interesting when I read people saying "PHP has come a long way. It's a proper language now, etc." If you work long enough with a language and figure out most its quirks, it's a breeze. It's nice that they are adding all these new features, but they are hardly what makes it or break it for me. Here is the one features that is taken for g…

What monsterous golang app are you running that takes 30 seconds to compile?

More interested in what meaningful fixes can be done in some fraction of the 1.2s RTT of this rapid-fire style PHP development.

Re: PHP 8.1.0

#66
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Phabricator, much like WordPress, kind of lives in its own world and hasn't adopted most aspects of modern PHP. Even as someone who works with PHP and enjoys it, I wouldn't want to use Phabricator.

Wordpress has taken great strides to comply with the latest PHP standards so I'd say that's not quite fair to include it here.

i just helped my father with a wordpress site, and it sure doesn't use modern php. It runs on modern php, but it does not seem to actually USE it.

Re: PHP 8.1.0

#67

I've been using PHP since 5.x. Often had to work on older 4.x web apps. I find it interesting when I read people saying "PHP has come a long way. It's a proper language now, etc." If you work long enough with a language and figure out most its quirks, it's a breeze. It's nice that they are adding all these new features, but they are hardly what makes it or break it for me. Here is the one features that is taken for g…

You can use a live reload tool, e.g. BrowserSync, to automatically refresh webpage after source file change. Put your browser on half of screen if you have big enough monitor, or even better - use dual screen setup. And if your IDE supports automatic saving, you are down to single step: "Edit file".

Re: PHP 8.1.0

#68
post #32
post #18

Everyone laughing at PHP hasn't tried it for years, I'd bet. It started clumsy, true, but it became a solid and quite elegant way of doing things. And by things I don't mean just web development. The current limitations I see in PHP is that there is not an official multi-core coroutines solution.

Elegant is not the word I'd use to describe PHP. Solid, perhaps. Undoubtedly useful. But if there is elegant PHP, I haven't seen it.

This depends a little on the taste of each person, but personally the most elegant way of doing PHP apps I ever found is with Siler: https://siler.leocavalcante.dev/v/main/ and Create Siler App: https://github.com/leocavalcante/create-siler-app

Re: PHP 8.1.0

#69
post #19

Who is still using PHP anno 2021?

If you ignore things like Wordpress, my guess is that today it's often used by organizations whose flagship product was originally written more than a decade ago, back when PHP was the go-to language for web development (see: Facebook, Wikipedia, Tumblr etc.) and now that there's an ecosystem around this flagship product, new projects/services may as well be started in PHP, because that's what everyone is comfortable/familiar with. Otherwise, it looks like PHP isn't a very popular choice nowadays for new projects, especially if it's a new company.

Take our company for example, our flagship web product was developed more than a decade ago, and, well, today we still use PHP, because rewriting everything in a different language is a gargantuan task. It's not only about the language itself, but also about all the tooling/best practices etc. around it, which you have to replace, and it's costly. We do gradually modernize our code to remove all the PHP5-era warts, and it's much easier to accomplish than switch to a different language entirely. Modern PHP7+ with Symfony is very pleasant to work with, and in my opinion, from the productivity standpoint, there's really no reason to switch to anything else. Also, PHP7+ seems to be faster than Python/Ruby in raw interpreter speed. However, we realized that we can't scale further if we stay with our PHP/Symfony monolith for everything because of Symfony's considerable startup overhead, so we now try to write new services in Go (request processing is usually 10 times faster for our loads), and seems like the combo PHP+Go is very popular among PHP developers in general.

So, I'd say, PHP isn't "dead" and is still widely used in 2021, however, in my opinion, its usage is indeed dwindling, because there seems to be a trend even in our own PHP community to gradually supplement/replace/augment parts of our projects with services written in Go, and PHP is more and more frequently equaled to "legacy"/"monolith".

Re: PHP 8.1.0

#70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's your estimate for PHP's long-term viability? I'm asking, because it was the hobbyists and kids who got started in PHP mucking around in their everyday white-label cPanel/Plesk-based web-hosting accounts in the very early 2000s that really gave PHP the mindshare of enthusiastic users and thus its staying power. But it's 2021 now: all the kids are getting started with NodeJS for server-side web-applications, not…

There's also Moodle which got extremely more important because of the pandemic. Nothing that ever becomes as popular as PHP and continues evolving for 2+ decades disappears quickly. I think 10+15 years... I don't know... I think it will last longer. COBOL and FORTRAN are still alive, there was more heavy money into both but there are more minds in PHP.

Ah, yes - Moodle.

My 6th Form experimented with Moodle when I was a student there - that was a loooooong time ago (2004? 2006?). I remember the staff weren't happy that Moodle allowed students to set their own avatars because too many kids figured out you could use animated GIFs as avatars, probably copied from eBaums or deviantArt; while others uploaded shock-images or just controversial content because I guess that's just funny to a bunch of 16yos.

The school ditched the experiment after a few months because Moodle simply wasn't delivering any real value: the teachers didn't want to have to type-up their handwritten lesson-plans and manually scan-in their existing non-digitized content, and those that did already have digitized content (those smug 6th Form computer science teachers, naturally) didn't want to have to "refactor" (I guess that's the right word?) their content to fit into Moodle's way-of-doing-things.

I think as the experiment came to an end we were only using it for ungraded quiz-taking - we weren't even using it for submitting homework (teachers still preferred e-mail for that: the 6th Form already had its own on-prem MS Exchange set-up that everyone used - and we could e-mail staff from our personal e-mail accounts too, which was nice - I know a lot of schools kept closed, on-prem-only, not-internet-facing e-mail systems to avoid spam - this was back when spam filters were awful and spam itself regularly included actual porn and other very-inappropriate-for-schools content, so I can understand why those other schools did).

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I haven't laid-eyes Moodle ever since then - every few years someone will mention it but I've never had a chance to speak to anyone who actually uses it to find out if it's actually any better than it was 15 years ago - and how it's changed at all. Can you fill me in?

And still far better than Blackboard?

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