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PHP needs a vision

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Re: PHP needs a vision

#71

Post by flyosity »

icelancer wrote: post #61
fleitz wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Generally that size is not more than about 5 files.

Yeah good one. Wordpress is a great example of a huge failure written in PHP over 5 files, right?

The codebase of Wordpress is an utterly terrible, offensive, kludgy, hacked-together mess of spaghetti code. The last time I looked at the internals it still lacked a coherent MVC structure. There are big, good things built with PHP, written the right way with solid software engineering principles, but Wordpress is not one of them.

Re: PHP needs a vision

#72

Post by LaRakel »

jtreminio wrote: post #64
fleitz wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're confusing a language with a framework. A more apt comparison is rails with symfony2 or zend framework2.

You're right. Still I can compare doing web development using ruby on rails with doing it in php without a framework.

I've done both, rails was much more pleasurable. See? I just compared the overall experience of a language with that of a framework.

Re: PHP needs a vision

#73

Post by jaequery »

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…

have you ever even tried Symfony? i think a lot of the debate is about how people are starting to get fed up with the Java/c#-like direction PHP is heading. symfony is not like rails, no where close to it. not sure exactly where they started taking the wrong turn but it's really going the opposite direction from other languages like node/python/ruby where simplicity is at it's core.

Re: PHP needs a vision

#74

Post by bitcartel »

cowboyhero wrote: post #45
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…

> We have server side JS (Node), Ruby, Python and Java -- Hey now. Let's not forget everyone's first love: Perl. :D It's still quietly running quite a few big sites out there, and is currently enjoying something of a renaissance with frameworks like Mojolicious & Dancer, not to mention the releases of 5.10-5.16.

I'd say there's life in the old dog yet given that BBC's iPlayer site runs on Catalyst.

On the other hand, Dr Dobbs thinks:

"...Perl continues its long decline. According to Google trends, the number of searches for Perl is 19% of what it was in 2004. Its declining role in open-source communities further cements the perception that it's in an irretrievable tailspin."

http://www.drdobbs.com/jvm/the-rise-and-fall-of-languages-in...

Re: PHP needs a vision

#75

Post by taylorbuley »

pippy wrote: post #60
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.

One nice side affect of this is that PHP can suit both novice and experienced programmers. Newbies don't have to learn OO before they write Hello World.

Re: PHP needs a vision

#76

Post by zaphar »

pippy wrote: post #60
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.

No. No it doesn't. It does it easier. That's not the same thing.

Re: PHP needs a vision

#77

Post by jaequery »

olleicua wrote: post #50

I think this may be too optimistic. It seems to me that PHP's lack of vision has already made it a horrifically bad language. The problem is not that it tries to do OO while also not really trying to do OO (don't get me wrong though, that is a problem). The problem is that it tries to do OO like Java. Get with the times and learn Ruby already.

it's true, php core devs have some kind of a Java OOP/DP fetish. maybe because they think Java is enterprise so they should replicate what works for them.

Re: PHP needs a vision

#78

Post by laurent123456 »

taylorbuley wrote: post #75
pippy wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

One nice side affect of this is that PHP can suit both novice and experienced programmers. Newbies don't have to learn OO before they write Hello World.

That's also a problem because anyone with a day experience in PHP can claim to be PHP developer, and often companies can't really tell the difference between an experienced and non-experienced programmer. If they can do PHP, they can build our website and we end up with horrible unmaintainable code. I think that's why PHP has such a bad reputation.

Re: PHP needs a vision

#79

Post by polemic »

ircmaxell wrote: post #70
polemic wrote: post #49

Worthwhile reading the email that preceded it: http://news.php.net/php.internals/64763 The response hardly seems warranted. The vision is pretty stated there.

The response would seem warranted if you had been a participating member of the PHP internals list for any significant length of time. Stas is pretty well known for jumping into threads and completely derailing, and shooting things down with BS like "PHP is not Java, stop trying to make it into Java". The response is a culmination of a long time of watching him respond in such a fashion. Stuff like this: http://marc.…

Fair enough, but the only Proven Successful (tm) solution to trolling is to ignore it. If it's not productive, disregard it.

Re: PHP needs a vision

#80

Post by [deleted] »

jtreminio wrote: post #16
justizin wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Questioning the value of a technology which inhabits the technology industry much like a cancer is not empty. PHP needed a vision 15 years ago. It was originally called "Personal Home Page" and intended to only slightly extend the functionality of Server-Side Includes. People tend to forget that.

> PHP needs to die That comment is extremely insightful. How did I not see this? > It was originally called "Personal Home Page" I was originally 19 inches long and crapped my diaper several times a day. PHP has grown and changed tremendously since those days. It's not the same codebase, at all: "Finding PHP/FI 2.0 still inefficient and lacking features they needed to power an eCommerce application they were developi…

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