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PHP 8

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Re: PHP 8

#81

Post by ForHackernews »

alvis wrote: post #60
laszlokorte wrote: post #5

Php was my first language I learned 15 years ago. On that way I really started to hate it because of all it's quirks. Many of those have been fixed and nowadays I really enjoy it again and it's my goto language for any web project. It really hits a pragmatic sweetspot. It's really easy to deploy and frameworks like symfony give you all the power like rails but without the magic.

Same as many web languages, PHP's heyday has a reason as many toolkits at that time were far less powerful and complicated for even simple things. Perl+CGI + all the server setup for a simple dynamic page? It's just unimaginable to many today's developer. I started off with PHP3 and have a very great and hated time with it till v5. PHP for sure is difficult to maintain and very painful to debug, but it's not my reaso…

> Perl+CGI + all the server setup for a simple dynamic page? It's just unimaginable to many today's developer.

TBH, I'm still not aware of any truly simple/easy way to get a dynamic HTML page.

Recently, I had to make a dumb utility app to render some dynamic data, and I wound up writing a Golang server with the HTML specified as a Go Template. But making it accessible on the publc internet still required spinning up a server, installing nginx, configuring SSL with Let's Encrypt (at least it was free) and futzing around with nginx `proxypass` directives for several hours.

It works, and I guess it's conceptually simple, but it was still an all-day ordeal to get it up and running from scratch.

Re: PHP 8

#83

Post by baby »

combatentropy wrote: post #70

I got spoiled by PHP as my first language. It was so easy to get going. I was surprised to learn that other languages didn't work the same way, when integrating into a web server. Also it has always been rock solid. A bug in my code brought down only that request for that user, totally did not affect or even slow down responses to other users. People have attacked its syntax forever. I avoided the worst of it by lear…

> I was surprised to learn that other languages didn't work the same way, when integrating into a web server

Oh boy... I'm still not sure how you deploy a non-PHP webserver to be honest... every language seems to be doing something different, with php you just needed to drag & drop your files in the "public" folder.

Re: PHP 8

#86

Post by baby »

Kim_Bruning wrote: post #42

Finally, after all these years, Named Arguments! https://stitcher.io/blog/php-8-named-arguments

I don't understand why pretty much no language does that these days. I think the argument is that your IDE should do this, and it does in some cases, but still...

Re: PHP 8

#87

Post by encom »

meowster wrote: post #48

How should one start learning with PHP these days? My experience: hacked together a few PHP scripts over the years to notify me of a website change (5 minute cron job). Before that, I was a very good beginner with VB6 back in highschool. There are a couple of ambitious database-driven website projects I would like to create, but I don't know where to start. I like the KISS philosophy, and I think PHP and MySQL would…

>w3schools PHP tutorial

I think a better approach is to think of a (very basic) project you want to create, and then claw and bite your way through it, until you have something that works. Then think of a way to enhance it, and go though the process again. Slogging through a tutorial is boring, and you have nothing to show for it when you're done.

PS: Don't listen to sneaky JavaScript evangelists. Wicked! Tricksy! False!

Re: PHP 8

#88

Post by arp242 »

tyingq wrote: post #46
farresito wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I must be very picky, because to this day I still don't like it at all. It sucks less than it used to maybe, but if I compare it to other languages, I still would rather use anything else.

Curious if that's a general aversion to dynamic typing, or specifically PHP.

The problems with PHP aren't really with the concept of dynamic typing as such, but rather with the somewhat curious semantics and really awkward standard library. These are relics from the past that are, unfortunately, very hard to fix without a "Python 3000 moment", and all the problems that brings. Although PHP 8 does fix a bit of it (various comparisons and operators are a bit better now) there's still a lot of it remaining, especially in the standard library IMHO.

Re: PHP 8

#89

Post by benbristow »

ForHackernews wrote: post #81
alvis wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same as many web languages, PHP's heyday has a reason as many toolkits at that time were far less powerful and complicated for even simple things. Perl+CGI + all the server setup for a simple dynamic page? It's just unimaginable to many today's developer. I started off with PHP3 and have a very great and hated time with it till v5. PHP for sure is difficult to maintain and very painful to debug, but it's not my reaso…

> Perl+CGI + all the server setup for a simple dynamic page? It's just unimaginable to many today's developer. TBH, I'm still not aware of any truly simple/easy way to get a dynamic HTML page. Recently, I had to make a dumb utility app to render some dynamic data, and I wound up writing a Golang server with the HTML specified as a Go Template. But making it accessible on the publc internet still required spinning up…

Azure Static Web Apps and then a bit of AJAX to pull in the data from a function (all deployed automatically in one go)

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/app-service/stati...

Not a dynamic HTML page per-se but a page with dynamic data.

I deployed one of my old hackathon apps with it, works well - https://memorylane.benbristow.co.uk/

Re: PHP 8

#90

Post by laszlokorte »

combatentropy wrote: post #70

I got spoiled by PHP as my first language. It was so easy to get going. I was surprised to learn that other languages didn't work the same way, when integrating into a web server. Also it has always been rock solid. A bug in my code brought down only that request for that user, totally did not affect or even slow down responses to other users. People have attacked its syntax forever. I avoided the worst of it by lear…

REMOTE_USER as in HTTP Basic auth? the ugly login prompt you can not logout of again?
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