The good parts were a small memory footprint, fast soap/xml parser, and stateless finite execution. Unlike the 200MiB+ "hello world!" async nodejs standard popular today... one can run small php cms/wiki sites on budget servers.
I still love PHP and JavaScript
91–100 of 402 posts
Re: I still love PHP and JavaScript
#92PHP has so many hidden benefits: - it's stateless by design (much easier to scale) - it was "serverless" before Serverless - surprisingly performant - no "unknown unknowns". it's so tried-and-true, there's no surprises - deployment is so simple, just drop a file on a web server. No middleware needed. - No long compile times because there is no compiling needed. EDIT: why the downvotes? If you don't agree, just reply…
Not sure about "no surprises" - just saw this on Twitter yesterday: https://twitter.com/LupinityLabs/status/1554217944179249153
Re: I still love PHP and JavaScript
#93I have grown to love JavaScript, especially in its modern form. PHP I hate more and more each day I use it.
Re: I still love PHP and JavaScript
#94Defining good software is hard. Every definition seems to miss something. Including the definition in this article. It misses that Good Software is cheap to maintain and can easily have features added. This goal is hard to meet and there are lots of ways to get there. You can get there with PHP and JavaScript but both languages allow developers to create a mess. Don't get me wrong all languages allow developers to cr…
Thanks for the thoughtful comment. I indeed haven't fully articulated what is driving me to write this piece (besides a desire to give PHP a bit of love as it is so harshly criticized for reasons I don't entirely understand). I find "problematic PHP" much easier to untangle than say, "problematic node.js" or "problematic python". Because PHP is often older codebases that have survived the test of time, this is actual…
One weekend I got sick of that and threw together a tiny website that automates the entire process. My tool of choice was PHP because it takes no effort to get started. TBH it was a great choice for such a simple tool. It's been running for five years and has easily paid off the time it took to build.
I guess I agree with you more than I realized.
Re: I still love PHP and JavaScript
#95PHP has so many hidden benefits: - it's stateless by design (much easier to scale) - it was "serverless" before Serverless - surprisingly performant - no "unknown unknowns". it's so tried-and-true, there's no surprises - deployment is so simple, just drop a file on a web server. No middleware needed. - No long compile times because there is no compiling needed. EDIT: why the downvotes? If you don't agree, just reply…
> EDIT: why the downvotes? The anti-PHP cult is strong here on HN. List 5 benefits of React and watch your upvotes skyrocket.
Re: I still love PHP and JavaScript
#96> I love legacy codebases. > A legacy codebase means that the product is performing well. It means that I can often make immediate and impactful improvements. Wow. This person must have worked on very different legacy codebases than me. Legacy Javascript code, to me, is something that I do not want to touch with a 10 foot pole, because every little piece of it can be intertwined with and used by many other hidden pla…
Re: I still love PHP and JavaScript
#97PHP has so many hidden benefits: - it's stateless by design (much easier to scale) - it was "serverless" before Serverless - surprisingly performant - no "unknown unknowns". it's so tried-and-true, there's no surprises - deployment is so simple, just drop a file on a web server. No middleware needed. - No long compile times because there is no compiling needed. EDIT: why the downvotes? If you don't agree, just reply…
> EDIT: why the downvotes? The anti-PHP cult is strong here on HN. List 5 benefits of React and watch your upvotes skyrocket.
Re: I still love PHP and JavaScript
#98PHP was my main language from 2000 to 2011. I liked PHP 4 very much. "Pass by value" was the default, so it accidentally introduced me to the Functional paradigm, even though it didn't have the memory management to allow for real functional programming. (It did not internally share memory between old and new versions of an object.) I dislike the direction that PHP has taken since the introduction of PHP 5. For the la…
Re: I still love PHP and JavaScript
#99You can write good code without compile time type checking, but it requires so much more developer focus to avoid writing bugs than a language with type checking. Everything else, php’s “jankyness”, javascript’s mystifying truthyness tables, those are easily overcome problems. Handing a string to a function expecting a number, and not finding out about it until that code actually runs? That’s the real problem, imo
thanks for reading and commenting. I am incredibly bullish on static typing and static analysis in general. There are quite a few tools that bring these to PHP and JS (I am not entirely happy with PHPStan / Psalm, I am very pleased by Typescript). Before that, I have been using Jetbrains analysis tools. In web development, I find that there is a certain freedom that comes with dynamic typing that I wouldn't tolerate…
I will never argue against types, but unless I am working with somebody else, I don't need them.
Re: I still love PHP and JavaScript
#100I kinda like js but hate php with passion. Having said that php has one really very big thing going for it - people who use it are simply addicted to getting things done.