Taking PHP Seriously [pdf]

Or much worse what are the odds that if I'm an average developer and am picking a random feature from each language's standard library, making care to read the docs before using it in my application that I've still introduced a bug? (Consider that maybe I'm dealing with things that were considered strange and new when most of PHP is still from - like character encodings - particularly character encodings that differ from the system I'm running in).

Most languages can be CGI-style executed by an httpd with shared-nothing, but can also start up and be a long-lived stateful daemon. I don't have to decide between putting a square peg in a round hole or throwing my code away to learn something entirely new if I realize I need the latter part way through a project.

PHP comes with a excessively large (but strangely CGI/HTTP/HTML/SQL-obsessed) standard library littered with footguns, and for most of its life has not had a common pattern for reusable modules, and has not had a good bundler for shipping reusable modules or making working with C extensions easy - and as such few people bother reimplementing functionality from core outside of what's been provided there (which is all set in hard clay), and when they are forced to tend to do so in (plain-ole-interpreted) PHP and don't generally package it up for reuse outside their own projects - a practice much more common outside PHP-land.

Case in point (goddamn strlen, even): https://api.drupal.org/api/drupal/includes%21unicode.inc/fun...

Some of that is changing in recent history (as in well after other languages figured these problems out) with PSR (design for reuse) and Composer (bundler) but it's slow moving and the latter still won't compile C extensions yet: https://github.com/composer/composer/pull/498

Plenty of this could be solved in PHP, some of it already is if you have the luxury to work with a tiny subset of PHP projects, but the practice in PHP seems to still mostly be to have it piss in your face and believe that it's raining. People are in a rut of tradition or simply don't expect their tools or libraries to be good - and I've spent the last 6 years working with PHP (several products, several teams) and wondering where I can get some of the Koolaid that my colleagues are drinking.

All that dependency crap is only a result of your AbstractTestingFrameworkMethodFactoryClassMockMethodGenerator() and similarly useless abstractions, anyway.

A simple module system can be implemented in a single function and referenced from test code as easily as:

test_requires('module1','module2');

Purely procedural tests are as easy as:

assert_equals(function_one('example_input'),'expected_output'); assert_not_equals(function_two(true),false);

Full featured test framework:

function assert_equals($a,$b) { return $a==$b; } function assert_not_equals($a,$b) { return $a!=$b; }

(Edit: I don't believe I missed the point - 'dependency injection', a recent term in PHP, essentially means tightly coupling to an entire DI system instead of directly to a single dep as demonstrated above. Either way, loose coupling is a concept to strive for as far as reasonably possible - not an absolute requirement. If your code requires something else, then it requires something else. The solution is not to create a new AbstractPretenderOfTotalWorldVisibilityEvenThoughControlFlowIsNowAllOverTheShop() After all, if you carry that tight coupling argument further you could claim that by virtue of writing PHP at all you are tight coupling to a certain, if broad, class of processor architectures. There has to be a limit somewhere! Mostly, that's determined by legibility/maintaintability and programmer time, not by abstract measures of correctness.)

PHP means access to easy to install, ready to go software, which meets 95% of the needs of small businesses. I would love to see that in python, or anything else, but it simply isn't there. The most widely used python CMS? Plone. It's massive, hard to maintain, and far from easy to install or host.

I've been on and off working on systems like WordPress for pyramid/python for a while, but it's a massive project. One day I might finish it...

You can do a lot with meta-programming in PHP. For example, you can write your own array type if you are so inclined and use it anywhere you would use an array. Here's an experimental library that showcases the meta-programming abilities: https://github.com/jsebrech/php-o