A look at modern PHP

https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/818973/507f4b5e09ab9870/

by lukastyrychtr • 6 years ago

442 578 6 years ago

tommica2• 6 years ago

I've worked with PHP since 5.4, and to me the language has not been the obstacle, it has been my own skill-level that has held me back, and still is - I lack very much the core architectural skills in getting forward as a developer, among many other things.

I've seen some codebases using an even older version, and I think I can understand where people are coming from with their angst towards the language - but I think we should look at ourselves before we jump to the bandvagon of just hating something blindly - I remember being part of the "Apple sucks" group for no other reason than hype, and now I've used one for years as a work machine.

currriuosly• 6 years ago

Good, that you can confirm your skill level, so maybe PHP suites you very well.

For me, having no standard HashMap and having to set strict mode params in functions - is an instant no go. There is no lack of better options.

tommica2• 6 years ago

Good, that you can confirm your skill level, so maybe PHP suites you very well.

Could you elaborate on this one, I am not exactly sure what you mean by it.

Cthulhu_2• 6 years ago

This has been my experience too. Ten+ years ago I had already concluded that the biggest problem PHP has is the community. Googling for "php mysql" you still end up on w3schools and the like where SQL injection is still not emphasized. Everyone was making their own frameworks and software from scratch. My last foray into PHP, and my realization that it's not actually all bad, was working in Zend Framework (iirc this was also when Ruby on Rails was fairly new and gaining popularity fast).

I haven't touched it (beyond very basic edits on my website, wordpress etc) for over a decade, but recently I inherited an older codebase at my new job. The existing codebase is an absolute mess, worse than the shit posted in those tutorials I mentioned.

But as part of the job (beyond rebuilding the application), I also had to add a big new feature to the application, a REST API. Keep in mind that due to constraints on the systems we install on, it had to be made in PHP 5.2 or 5.3 - one difference being that the older version doesn't even support an array creation shorthand (`$var = []`).

I could keep interactions with the existing codebase to a minimum. The rest was... actually surprisingly all right, thanks to me knowing what a REST API is and how to structure an application properly.

I did have to basically write my own framework (sigh) because pretty much nothing is still available that works on pre-array-shorthand-versions of PHP, but it was fairly minimal; an off-the-shelf router and URL matcher (can't be arsed with writing that myself), middleware for authentication, and a simple class structure to encapsulate different output formats (json, csv, streaming plain text).

Granted, this old version of PHP is seriously rough around the edges, and at the time it already represented great advancements in the language. I mean before 5.4 the language didn't even have a function to set the HTTP response code (you had to write the header manually).

Grumbledour• 6 years ago

Thanks, that made me smile. I got out of php a few years ago and 5.x is still the new kid on the block for me, with all this crazy enhancements! :-D

Though I also totally forgot things like array creation syntax and wonder how I could have ever lived without stuff like that shorthand.

jinzo2• 6 years ago

I got back into web development in the last year or so. Previously I did mostly Python/Django and then 5 years of something unrelated to dev. Now I'm working in a fairly typical PHP/Wordpress mixed joint, and now I understand why PHP has the bad rep - because it allows/tolerates/even encourages bad practices (and beyond the usual "shoot yourself in the leg" we can see in other popular/common languages). And I guess that is one of the reasons why a lot of libraries/plugins/php code out there is simply bad. For example: Seeing heavy mixing of PHP code and HTML output in 2020 is a horrible sight for me (and it's waaay to common in what I saw).

Of course you can write good code in modern PHP, but you can write really bad stuff too - more (at least imho) than in other popular languages. And then the whole ecosystem "drags you down" and gives PHP a bad rep -> but I don't think it's totally undeserved.

On a similar note, this actually compelled me to try Rust/something similar instead of just going straight back to Python (which I still love tbh).

fatboy2• 6 years ago

The thing I hate about php is the inconsistency and unpredictability for new-to-php developers.

camelCase? snake_case? nocase? Who knows what the global function will be.

And who knows what order the arguments should go in. Sometimes the array is first, sometimes not (in array iterating functions like map).

The thing that got my goat the most however was that referencing an undefined variable merely caused a warning, but referencing an undefined key in an array borked it.

And what's with arrays and maps being the same thing?!

alphadevx10• 6 years ago

Many of the features highlighted in that article as "new" are from PHP 5.x, so it reads more like a list written by someone who has been out of touch with PHP development for a number of years.

laumars3• 6 years ago

Did you actually read the article or just the headings? Any features that pre-date 7.x are discussed as being 5.x features and, where applicable, the author expands on how it's been further refined / improved upon in 7.x releases

alphadevx10• 6 years ago

Yes I read it, why accuse me of not doing so? The main block of sample code is highlighting OOP features in PHP, but PHP has had most of those features since 5.3, e.g. namespaces, so my point still stands. Those features are not part of "PHP showing its maturity in release 7.4", but have been around since at least 2009, so why lead with that example?

Svip• 6 years ago

Even with PHP7, PHP still feels like it is playing catch up. There is nothing new or revolutionary in PHP7, just adopting features present in other major languages. Adopting as other newer languages like Go and Rust seems to be moving beyond those features. A catch up into a world that's on its way out, if one will feel so blunt.

PHP's raison d'être remains its ease of getting an instance running on a webserver. But with fewer people self-hosting these days, that has become less an advantage. And even for those who do self-host, the advantage is becoming narrower as other languages have made it easier to distribute their web applications.

Pascal, COBOL, Oracle DB and PHP today seems like technologies that only stick around because they are legacies being maintained, not because people start new grand projects with them. Would Wordpress have chosen PHP if they started today?

cbg0• 6 years ago

Would Wordpress have chosen PHP if they started today?

You could replace "Wordpress" and "PHP" with whatever you want, depending at which point in history this comment is made.

enitihas• 6 years ago

Kubernetes and go for example.

Tomte• 6 years ago

There is nothing new or revolutionary in PHP7, just adopting features present in other major languages.

There is nothing wrong with that. Java also follows that philosophy.

Would Wordpress have chosen PHP if they started today?

According to Matt Mullenweg: no, but does it matter?

People do start new PHP projects, and people use old, but still maintained PHP projects.

If you're looking for shiny new things, look elsewhere. But you don't have to take away the working, well-known "old" away from others.

simion31415• 6 years ago

Most of the time you do not chose a language or ecosystem because it has some cool syntax or some new feature. As an example if you need to do X you look at what solves X the best, if I can do X by installing say ffmpeg and write a bash script I will do that and not cry that bash does not have some cool feature.

I think languages like PHP, Java, C++ appeal for people that solve hard problem where the fact that you have a giant ecosystem of existing libraries and a large number of existing developers compensates the fact that the language is not "cool" or is missing some feature that you probably don't need anyway or workaround it with a library.

valand5• 6 years ago

X sometimes stands for problems above technical problem, such as:

- Existing team is comfortable with using PHP - Existing project is tightly coupled PHP monolith - Existing project cannot be migrated to other language fast enough if needed

All are valid and justifiable reasons. Learning new language is not the easiest and we should think of the people.

I must emphasis though, all party must not freeze in time. They should learn to adapt. PHP is getting smaller. The decline is slow enough to let people migrate or jump ship but fast enough that it is recognizable.

Demands are growing for languages and environments which provide more than PHP, simplest examples would be granular websocket connection control, explicit process control, whitelist-by-default security, rise of cloud and edge computing, and of course, trends, "cool new stuffs" which is not always good for everybody, but always exciting especially for the naives.

There might be a day Java is getting replaced due its huge memory usage or its tendency to be verbose and hard to read. Golang is a contender for the memory usage side of the spectrum, NodeJS is the contender for the ease of use side of the spectrum.

There might be a day C++ is getting replaced due to its "harder to write secure code". C++20 is quite cool, but there's a new cool kid Rust where you most probably won't write bad code, can be actually faster than C++ / C in some cases, and can run on browsers.

May all programmers of old languages survive and thrive and in the new world.

fetbaffe6• 6 years ago

Yes, and all three of them has very good backwards combability, one of the most underestimated features in a language for developers but one of the most important ones for building a stable business.

I recently upgraded a huge legacy codebase from PHP 5.2 (released 2006) to PHP 7.4 (released 2019) with relatively few changes, mostly changing the use of deprecated functions & misuse of variable references.

frenchman99• 6 years ago

I remember reading about Ghost.org team members saying that if they had chosen PHP instead of Node.js when they got started, they'd be much further along in their roadmap [0].

PHP has a reliable ecosystem of 3rd libraries with LTS releases. I am not aware of something like Symfony [1] for Rust or Go.

[0] https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/007-john-onolan-of-ghos...

[1] https://symfony.com/

luckylion5• 6 years ago

Another big bonus for PHP to me is: there are plenty of people who are comfortable with it. Most things aren't genius-scientist-required kind of things where you lock some genius in a room for eighteen months and they revolutionize the industry. Most things are pretty average and you just need somebody with a good understanding of the problem and experience to do them. You'll want plenty of those people to get things done, and using a very common tool helps with having a large pool of people you can call upon.

rob74• 6 years ago

Well yeah, if you would pick one technology that even PHP would compare favourably too, it would be Node... my thoughts on Node were always: just because Google built V8, which makes it possible to run JS fast enough to use it in the backend, doesn't mean that you have to do it.

Regarding frameworks: of course PHP has an advantage there, because it's a more mature ecosystem. But frameworks written in PHP like Symfony or Laravel tend to forget that they are based on a scripting language (which years of optimization have made very fast for a scripting language, but still), so using their features extensively will slow down your application...

jinzo2• 6 years ago

PHP's raison d'être remains its ease of getting an instance running on a webserver. But with fewer people self-hosting these days, that has become less an advantage. And even for those who do self-host, the advantage is becoming narrower as other languages have made it easier to distribute their web applications.

And if you are doing something moderately complex/serious/modern you probably need/want composer anyway - because uploading all of the million files via FTP is cumberstone (let's not even get into the versioning/modern deployment practices). Then you are at shell already and not that far away from other language deployments.

nucleardog3• 6 years ago

I think that's kind of part of the point though -- PHP provides a gentle slope from "single HTML file" to "big project".

You can start with a plain HTML page and go "Hey, I want to do X" and just throw some code in the middle of the page. When you decide you need a database, MySQL is right there and easy to use. When you decide you need some libraries, you can just download and `include()` them. All of this can just be FTP'd up to some server somewhere.

As this grows bigger, there are tools like composer and frameworks/libraries like Laravel and Symfony. You can still FTP those, but once that gets painful you can start to learn the bit of *nix skills it takes to start managing this different ways.

At no point have you had to worry about nginx/apache/supervisor/anything else. But whenever you're ready, that's all there too.

This is basically the path at least one guy I know took to going from working in a totally non-technical industry to building a massive (almost 2 million lines at this point) application that allowed people in the industry to stop working with a bunch of exploitative big name companies and instead self-manage and earn more money. And now that product makes a bunch of money for him.

And then there's the scales that places like Twitter/Facebook/etc took it.

I think the big thing that always gets missed here is PHP's... egalitarian nature. Yes, at some point it just ends up a in some ways less-good version of other things. But it provides an incredible opportunity for people who aren't engineers to realize their ideas without immediately becoming overwhelmed with needing to learn a huge amount of foundational knowledge before they can lay down their first line of useful code, and seeing that through to crazy places.

ehnto• 6 years ago

PHP still remains incredibly accessible, the documentation and legacy of problem solving means you can find help for any problem you'll encounter and the lack of complicated tooling makes it easy to focus on the problems that matter.

There is also a maturity in the tooling and community for PHP that doesn't exist in newer, better languages. There's no shortage of developers, and moreso nowadays there's also a huge body of best practices that embody good software engineering.

If what you want is a monolithic standalone web application paired with SQL, I'd argue PHP is a pragmatic choice from a business point of view. I would also argue that a monolithic web application is all the vast majority of companies need.

The biggest source of bad software and failing to meet business requirements in my experience has been following the industry's whim and rebuilding every time the wind blows in a new tech stack. If you're a PHP shop delivering web applications, you will be able to do that successfully for years to come. Picking the "right" language is a wild goose chase, just be good at the language you choose and you'll be able to deliver good software reliably.

onli4• 6 years ago

But with fewer people self-hosting these days, that has become less an advantage.

I don't think fewer people self-host. There are some going to big clouds, there are some using integrated offerings like squarespace, but there are still many hosting their website with a regular hoster. And probably in total many more than in the past.

And even for those who do self-host, the advantage is becoming narrower as other languages have made it easier to distribute their web applications.

Did they? How?

With PHP, all the users has to do is to fetch the project files and upload them with FTP to the directory the hoster told them to. No other environment matches that - and no other environment is supported by those hosters. If you want to run something else - like Ruby, which I prefer to use, or something that creates a binary for you - you are looking at a completely different type of hosting. Digitalocean, Heroku - and that's not as easy, if the application is not provided as a one-click-install.

Okawari• 6 years ago

I'll concede that PHP focused hosting solutions such as your traditional shared webpage hosting environment is better at hosting PHP than any other language, and sure there are less services out there that lets you deploy code "as easy as PHP".

I had to check and I'm paying about 4$ a month for a traditional PHP server host vs 5$ for a VPS which I can run whatever I want on. And if you want a barebones deployment for lets say rails, what is stopping you from just copying files over with scp and running bundle and rails s from the shell. Then only thing that makes this harder is having to kill the server and restart on deployment. I dont find that to be that much harder.

creshal4• 6 years ago

I don't think fewer people self-host. There are some going to big clouds, there are some using integrated offerings like squarespace, but there are still many hosting their website with a regular hoster. And probably in total many more than in the past.

From my experience, the share of people who can only deploy PHP is steadily shrinking. PHP remains the default, and popular, but easily deploying other languages is becoming more feasible, and we're shipping docker containers with Python/Go/Node/whatever code a lot more often these days.

guggle3• 6 years ago

With PHP, all the users has to do is to fetch the project files and upload them with FTP to the directory the hoster told them to

Let's not idealize things. For moderately complex apps, even back in the days, this falls pretty fast: missing PHP modules in default distro installation, PECL/Pear extensions, hosters messing with the php.ini in bad ways, etc. And now the dependency management and deployement systems pushing you to access a shell on your server...

petre• 6 years ago

Rust and Go for writing a cusomizable CMS like Wordpress, really? Also PHP playing catch up and not breaking up my stuff with every point release is just fine. It means stability, maturity. Even Node.js has LTS releases.

Dart is more suited for this type of thing if one wants a new and shiny statically typed language with great performance.

fetbaffe6• 6 years ago

Wait, Go hasn’t had any revolutionary change since it arrived 10 years ago. It is still basically the same language/package. I’m not saying that is bad, but why does a language need to be constantly revolutionary if it solves what it sets out to solve well?

Catch up to other languages? You can easily argue the opposite, that other languages has finally catched up to PHP, ease of deployment, ease of horizontal scaling, fast reload/build time, built in string templating, simplified variable syntax (auto, var), etc

I can go on, but if you already framed the question to the disadvantage of one party you will not really get a fair answer.

creshal4• 6 years ago

why does a language need to be constantly revolutionary if it solves what it sets out to solve well?

That's a very big If in PHP's case.

mekster4• 6 years ago

Other languages haven't caught up on PHP about ease of deployment.

If you need a fast hot reload, it isn't trivial in other languages. PHP does it with no effort. Save and refresh runs the updated code instantly, not to mention asking people to run PHP app is far easier as every general hosting provider has PHP installed.

On the other hand, language structure is quite behind others but can't blame when it had been around since 20+ years ago.

The new type hinting is so basic, not sure how realistically useful it is compared to typing in TypeScript.

oblio5• 6 years ago

Go itself is also not a revolutionary language, actually the fact that it isn't revolutionary is one of it's "raisons d'etre". Go is mixing up various popular concepts into a reasonably compact package.

naranha• 6 years ago

A question I ask myself often is what niche does a language fill, and it seems a little like the traditional niche of PHP has been eroded away in the last decade. Many of the things that gave PHP an edge (ease of deployment, templating within your HTML files, direct SQL queries) are no longer considered the correct approach.

At the same time PHP is trying to reinvent itself by adopting a strong type system and experimenting with async and long running processes. But these are niches that are already filled better by other languages (Java/C#, Node, Go), so it feels like they are fighting an uphill battle. But maybe it is that tenacity of the language to stay relevant that makes it attractive to a younger generation of developers and decision makers.

oblio5• 6 years ago

only stick around

Greenfield projects are much less important than brownfield projects. After all, a project is new only for the first few months of its existence. After that, it all becomes legacy code :-)

And techs with mainstream adoption in the post DotCom bust era, especially if they're free and Open Source, will be around for decades. A newbie PHP programmer in 2020 will most likely be able to retire in 2065 as a veteran PHP programmer, if he/she so wishes.

CiPHPerCoder• 6 years ago

Even with PHP7, PHP still feels like it is playing catch up. There is nothing new or revolutionary in PHP7, just adopting features present in other major languages.

Of the first programming languages that cater to novices to some degree (which is important to project health, because excessive gatekeeping is toxic), PHP was the first to make Curve25519 and Argon2id widely available (through the sodium extension). (7.2)

Even with the "just use FFI" mindset of other languages, the experience is janky at best.

For example: Before sodium-plus [1] came along (which was something I created, so I'm removing it from the table for my criticism of the JS crypto ecosystem), JavaScript required knowing which of the following packages to install: [2] [3] [4]

There was no guidance available anywhere. Some of these APIs were suitable for browsers, others for mobile devices, and still others for server-side JavaScript. And their APIs were subtly incompatible with each other.

Java's in a similar situation [5] today.

Java (Java Native Access): libsodium-jna
Java (Android): Lazysodium for Android
Java (Android): Libstodium
Java (Android): Robosodium
Java (Android): libsodium-JNI
Java: Apache Tuweni (crypto module)
Java: Lazysodium for Java
Java: jsodium
Java: Kalium

Yikes.

With PHP7, you just had to update to the latest version (and make sure your OS package vendor isn't huffing or eating glue, which was rare but still existent) and you had it.

There are probably still languages and runtimes today that make using modern cryptography (Ed25519, X25519, etc.) a miserable experience.

Miserable experiences moving to modern cryptography keep peoples' projects trapped in an early 2000's RSA-PKCS#1v1.5 + AES-CBC hellscape reminiscent of SSLv3 but somehow worse.

Thus, I would argue that what PHP did with libsodium counts as revolutionary.

Your move, $languagesThatHackerNewsFindSexierThanPHP

[1] https://github.com/paragonie/sodium-plus

[2] https://www.npmjs.com/package/libsodium-wrappers

[3] https://github.com/sodium-friends/sodium-native

[4] https://www.npmjs.com/package/sodium

[5] https://libsodium.gitbook.io/doc/bindings_for_other_language...

ragnese20• 6 years ago

Not only is PHP playing catch-up. It's only playing catch-up to Java. That's... not the highest bar, IMO.

FranOntanaya• 6 years ago

Well, Rust is playing catch up with the "change code and run" speed of PHP.

goatlover4• 6 years ago

Do the two overalp in their niches at all? You'd write a web server in Rust. But is there much effort put into Rust web frameworks?

It's just a weird comparison. PHP is competitive with JS, Python, Ruby and even Java. But Rust? That's C/C++/D territory. And Go is somewhere in between.

pvtmert• 6 years ago

Same as Java, ~adding~ backporting boilerplate from other JVM stuff.

echelon12• 6 years ago

For web backend, being able to ship a single binary, such as what Rust and Go can provide, is really nice. I don't see PHP as a more compelling solution than either of those languages.

Scripting and command line automation is executed better by Python and Ruby, which excel for writing Unix scripts and tools.

I do not see what the use case for PHP is in 2020.

PHP has one of the most abhorrent language syntax designs this side of Perl, and the standard library is wildly inconsistent.

I really wish PHP would just die. Continuing to drag it along like the dead carcass it is wastes so much human effort. The longer it exists, the longer we have to support it.

Cthulhu_2• 6 years ago

At the same time, being able to install new or change existing software just by uploading some files to a cheap webhost is not to be dismissed as easily.

pm90• 6 years ago

Most webhosts provide some kind of support for containers don’t they? Perhaps I’m completely missing the point here? I’ll readily admit that Im young enough to have used docker to deploy apps nearly everywhere I worked. Is php useful for ultra low cost websites? Is it low maintenance? Is that the appeal? Genuine question.

mschuster91• 6 years ago

Scripting and command line automation is executed better by Python and Ruby, which excel for writing Unix scripts and tools.

Python has a ridiculous time it needs to start up, it is not suited for any batch task that requires a lot of process creation.

PHP has one of the most abhorrent language syntax designs this side of Perl and the standard library is wildly inconsistent.

At least it has a standard library that is both usable (in contrast to the JS ecosystem, remember left-pad?) and actually not that inconsistent if you have experience in developing C - most of what is described as "inconsistent" comes right from there.

And: the stdlib of PHP can easily be expanded upon by a rich variety of Composer libraries that can easily be deployed. Let's compare that to... Java, for example. Three popular dependency managers (and build tools): Ant, Maven, Gradle. Plus classpath worries if you're using Tomcat or other application servers which means you also have their libraries in the mix.

Changing code in production? In PHP it's as easy as changing the file using rsync and automatically all new incoming requests will use the new code, vs Java where you have to restart the server (which for large project means minutes of downtime).

piokoch• 6 years ago

Think of a simple landing page with a form to save data from a form and send out an email with confirmation.

In PHP you just need to add to your HTML page a few lines of PHP code and copy it using scp to any share server hosting that costs 4 dollars a year.

No "automation", no "cloud", no REST APIs, no WSGI/Gunicorn, etc. just plain Apache with mod_php enabled, which is available everywhere. I don't think anything can beat PHP productivity for such simple usecases.

psychoslave• 6 years ago

Aren't there a zillion online services that provides that product out of the box, most likely for free, only requiring a browser and some monkey clicks around? -> No PHP, HTML or web server.

stephenr11• 6 years ago

being able to ship a single binary, such as what Rust and Go can provide, is really nice

Unless you're distributing your binary to 3rd parties, why?

If you really don't want to deploy changes to e.g. a single/small number of controller or template files as independent file changes, build your PHP app into a .phar archive, and deploy that.

I don't specifically think PHP, when run (IMO) the best way it can be, is "easier to deploy" but I also don't think it's harder either.

I'm going to ignore your other comments because they're personal opinions and while you express them as facts, I realise you probably mean them as statements of opinion.

But the last part, I just don't understand:

I really wish PHP would just die. Continuing to drag it along like the dead carcass it is wastes so much human effort. The longer it exists, the longer we have to support it.

Who is the "we" in this statement? You clearly don't like it personally, so why does it affect you, at all? I'm not a huge fan of Java, but I don't go around claiming that it should "die" or that humanity is somehow worse off because it exists.

There's no such thing as a client-side PHP application, so it doesn't even compare to e.g. genuine concern over tech choices that are 'forced' upon users of a website (e.g. Flash, SilverLight, ActiveX, javacript bloat, etc). If the backend part of the system does what it needs to do, the language/framework/runtime it's written in/with is meaningless.

p4bl0• 6 years ago

I very rarely write PHP and will probably never have to use these features, but I think that the combination of the FFI and preloading can be quite a powerful thing.

thdrdt2• 6 years ago

I've been using PHP for over 15 years and always liked it. There is no other webserver language that's so easy to use and so deployable while still being fast.

But for larger projects the available frameworks are just okayish. I think Symfony is closest to what a good framework should be. But every time I use it I wish it would be like .NET

Today .NET core is also available on Linux and very easy to deploy so I don't think I will ever start a big project in PHP again.

But for quick smaller and CMS[1] projects PHP is still my goto language.

[1] If you are looking for a great PHP CMS: https://processwire.com/

toshk• 6 years ago

I always enjoyed Laravel

nsomaru2• 6 years ago

What if you’re looking for a great way into .net web dev on Linux? I’ve been struggling to find a good guide that combines dev env, deployment and a good web framework. Any advice?

I have quite a bit of xp with Python (Django/flask) and less with php.

oblio5• 6 years ago

Aren't there guide for ASP.NET Core? https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/?view=aspnetcor...

I think you need VS Code with some extensions, .NET Core installed and you should be off to the races in half an hour.

thdrdt2• 6 years ago

Maybe this is a good place to start: https://dotnet.microsoft.com/learn

Most can be done via de command line but an editor like VisualStudioCode could be handy. Personally I use Jetbrain's Rider as IDE on Ubuntu.

Deploying can be done via the `dotnet publish` command. But tools like Teamcity can also be very useful. When you built a webapp it includes the Kestrel webserver. So it is just a matter of running the app and navigating to the port it listens to.

.NET core is a complete set of tools to create console apps, (web)APIs and webApps. This includes the .NET framework.

rhlsthrm• 6 years ago

As someone with 0 experience in .NET, I'd love to hear what's so cool about it.

simplyinfinity• 6 years ago

Tooling, tooling, tooling!

.net has proper debugging working compared to node.js, has great standard library, can develop 3d games, servers, mobile apps, web apps, machine learning ,desktop apps and even (some) embedded devices.

Great instrumentation and support with quality updates from MS and the community. The IDE is superb and free (community edition at least), drag & drop desktop & mobile app development (if you wish).

I've worked with PHP for about 4 years (5.x - 7.0 days), .net for the next 6 years and node.js for the last 1 year, and every day i work with node.js i wish i could switch everything to .net because it's sooo much better & smoother experience, and everything just works together so well.

marcosdumay4• 6 years ago

Honestly, as a PHP hater that got much more experience in .Net than PHP, it both were the only options, I would go with Laravel without any doubt.

C# is an inflexible language that just can not have a modern web framework on it. MS extended it with hard-coded functionality to closely emulate a framework and did an ok job on it, but it emulates a closed down, inflexible framework that is stuck in time. It's not a disaster, but it doesn't compare to the stuff that has kept evolving for the last decade.

perttir2• 6 years ago

I use php daily. Mostly Symfony/Laravel stuff. There are still some stuff it needs what other languages have. (Can't really right now remember all the stuff i stumble upon sometimes which gives me the feeling "damn if i could do this like i do it in rust/java/cpp/(w/e)")

Maybe the worst thing is the composer (it's slow.)

Eremotherium2• 6 years ago

Try Prestissimo, which enables composer to download packages in parallel

  composer global require hirak/prestissimo

Epskampie• 6 years ago

The dependency solver is what is slow, not so much the downloading.

pachico• 6 years ago

I have been coding in PHP for 15 years (not exclusively) and indeed many things had to improve. Nevertheless, many other languages also had to. Just as an example, PHP had a much more mature vendor requirements system than Go and years before! What I see many people tend to fail to observe is that a language is also good as the amount of value it can being to the business and in that PHP was and still is phenomenal. Anyhow, I'm really happy to see how it has evolved.

sneak• 6 years ago

I wrote my very first webapp in PHP when I was a teenager, and my first dozen paid apps shortly thereafter as a consultant. PHP was a lot worse then, but still has a lot of the same fundamental issues that it won’t ever be able to escape without becoming a different language.

I think it’s a good first tinkering language for people around that age: sort of like BASIC, but for the web.

I am glad PHP is still around; it is a very useful signal on the resume or CV of someone who uses it a lot.

It’s sort of like c# in that regard (exception granted for vertical-specific devs who work professionally to ship commercial apps with Unity), or Visual Basic before it.

Same goes for heavy Java outside of Google/Amazon backend, or outside of Android.

Most of these people are desktop Windows users by choice, too. It’s a very specific type of techie. Perhaps one day I should make an ishkur-style taxonomy. :D

I think this is also why almost all forum software is written in PHP.

ur-whale2• 6 years ago

Does php still use $ for variable names in 2020?

fetbaffe6• 6 years ago

Of course. Why change that for zero gain? Powershell does too.

Can you point to some research that scientifically proves that the use of dollar sign in variable names makes it harder to solve computer science problems?

ur-whale2• 6 years ago

1. Waste of time and mental cycles: forces the programmer to do the parser's job because the language designer was too lazy to build in the logic to recognize variables.

2. Carpal tunnel syndrome, especially on keyboards where "$" can only be reached via shift.

open-source-ux• 6 years ago

Whether you like or hate PHP, it has achieved something that no other language has done - made it easy to host a dynamic website or app on the server. Other languages may claim to be 'web-friendly' (e.g. Python, Ruby) but when it comes to ease of deployment, they are anything but 'web-friendly' or easy.

This is what programmer and blogger Jeff Atwood - who isn't a fan of PHP - has written about PHP:

"If you want to produce free-as-in-whatever code that runs on virtually every server in the world with zero friction or configuration hassles, PHP is damn near your only option"

He wrote that in 2012. It's 2020 and I can't think of any other language that has caught up with PHP's ease of deployment. If you want to get your customers to self-install your software as painlessly as possible, what other language can match or exceed the ease of deployment of PHP?

realharo4• 6 years ago

If you want to get your customers to self-install your software as painlessly as possible, what other language can match or exceed the ease of deployment of PHP?

Anything with containers. Docker was a real game-changer here.

barbegal• 6 years ago

But in the overall scheme of things it's order of magnitudes more difficult to deploy. PHP is upload a file whereas docker requires many more steps (for example: https://kb.sloppy.io/en/collections/156106-getting-started )

oaiey• 6 years ago

For hosting companies, PHP has a unique benefit: A single installation which scales with the load. Most Python, .NET, Java, NodeJS, Docker, whatever require to run a seperate executable for each site permanently (producing a basic workload / memory consumption / security mgmt needs / ... ).

In that sense, PHP is like a early variant of Lambda ;) When there would be a universal, simple-install, simple-use, low-requirement version of Lambda (incl. Gateway etc) we would see a easier hosting market for all the languages beyond the public clouds.

cageface5• 6 years ago

PHP, Python and Ruby all feel to me like last-generation languages. IMO we should be building new frameworks on modern languages that support concurrency & static typing. The most promising new stack I've seen is Kotlin's KTOR framework. Thanks to the expressiveness of Kotlin it's not really any more verbose than something like PHP or Ruby but it's far more powerful and robust.

pojntfx2• 6 years ago

Nah. The JVM must go; we have Docker and the universal platform are Linux ELF binaries so the entire "bytecode" concept makes sense for the compiler (i.e. LLVM), but no longer at runtime. It's just bloat.

cageface5• 6 years ago

Kotlin native might eventually make the JVM superfluous but for now there are a lot of benefits to being on the JVM including great performance, a huge ecosystem of Java libraries, and very battle hardened monitoring and debugging tools.

lmm• 6 years ago

The JVM does what Docker does for far less overhead and is easier to understand and upgrade.

erik_seaberg2• 6 years ago

Bytecode is simple enough to alter at load time. This gives you aspect-oriented programming and instrumentation of everything that statically linked binaries have never offered. And I don't think anything compares to the JVM's GC throughout yet; why roll your own if it's slow?

nelsonic• 6 years ago

Agree that PHP, Python and Ruby Web Frameworks lack modern features. Have you tried Elixir + Phoenix?

cageface5• 6 years ago

Elixir and Phoenix look very appealing but I'm very firmly in the strong static typing camp.

holler• 6 years ago

what modern features does python 3 lack compared to phoenix/elixir?

simion31415• 6 years ago

What do you mean by concurrency here? JS like async or Java/C# like threads? And why would concurrency help in problems where PHP is involved, in the problems I solve with PHP I don't think I ever needed async. For unning more things in parallel like processing 1000 RSS feeds you can spawn 10 scripts that run in parallel and if one crashes the others still continue to work(I had experienced crashes with some RSS XML files crashing the built-in XML parser).

solraph7• 6 years ago

Not the parent, but it would be nice to have separate thread for things like logging and firing events into a queue.

cageface5• 6 years ago

Anything that will block the server. Fetching data from an external API, doing some kind of expensive computation, sending an email etc. You can either handling this Node style with blocking i/o, throw the work onto a background queue like Sidekiq, or use a language with first-class concurrency support like Golang or Kotlin. To me Kotlin feels like a far nicer and more scalable language than Golang.

solraph7• 6 years ago

Alas, I feel the same way. After much thought this weekend, I concluded that it was time to move on from PHP. I decided against the any other scripted language (Ruby, Python), as it felt like more of the same.

Requirements were strict typing, functional programming support, built-in concurrency, decent library support, and real support for both native and Javascript. It pretty much came down to Kotlin or Rust.

I really want to like Rust more, but the library support, and the jobs in my area just aren't there (yet?).

Picking up Kotlin feels like coming home.

72deluxe4• 6 years ago

Why not C++ in this area? The more I use PHP the more I appreciate C++'s type system.

jfkebwjsbx• 6 years ago

What do you mean by "real support for both native and Javascript"?

cageface5• 6 years ago

Kotlin is really a fantastic language even without IntelliJ but with IntelliJ it makes these older languages feel archaic. Once you've had this level of explicit typing & null checking, code navigation, and refactoring that really works its very hard to go back.

Kotlin also feels like a pretty safe bet since both Google & Jetbrains are backing it.

perttir2• 6 years ago

Php supports (somewhat) strictly defined types.

You can defined what types/interfaces methods needs to return, what types/interfaces variables must have, what types/interfaces the method arguments needs to have.

It also supports class inheritance, abstract classes, interface classes, class traits, etc.

solraph7• 6 years ago

It does, and using PHP in strict mode, in combination with tools like phpstan is what led me to looking for a language that is even better in that regard.

If PHP hadn't made advances in it's type system with the 7.x series, I probably would not have stuck with it this long.

However, while PHP the language supports strict typing, it does it at run time (inherently a limitation of scripted languages, I know), rather than compile time.

stephenr11• 6 years ago

One of the main benefits of PHP for web serving, is the "shared nothing" architecture.

By operating as a non-threaded application, entire categories of bugs and security holes are avoided.

Are there situations where threads could genuinely help? Sure, there is always an exception to any rule, but for the vast majority of projects where PHP is used, I don't believe threading would achieve much in terms of performance gains.

ragnese20• 6 years ago

Yeah, but if you're worried about bugs and security holes, I'm not sure PHP can possibly help more than it hurts. E.g., type juggling: https://www.netsparker.com/blog/web-security/php-type-juggli...

chown• 6 years ago

I'm there with you about Kotlin. I started with PHP last "last generation" and was pretty bored with it. Kotlin was a breath of fresh air. Also, if you like some similar to Laravel/Symfony for Kotlin, give Alpas a try: https://alpas.dev/

jerng• 6 years ago

Meanwhile JavaScript/ECMAScript's syntax creep is turning it into PHP.

dastx3• 6 years ago

And their modules ecosystem is turning it into a security nightmare.

riteshpatel• 6 years ago

Noticed this recently when doing an ES6 course. So many additions look similar to modern PHP!

Dylan16807• 6 years ago

If it's modern PHP specifically, are you saying that both languages are adding a bunch of the same things? That doesn't really sound like one language turning into the other.

pojntfx2• 6 years ago

If you're starting with WebDev in 2020, choose Go or Rust. Concurrency & safety + simple deployable static ELF binaries > weak typing and legacy bloat.

The_Colonel• 6 years ago

rust has huge mental overhead for most webdev work

go is incredibly weak language in some regards (error handling?)

From these 3 I would still pick PHP for webdev.

simion31415• 6 years ago

Why would I use Rust for Web dev or anything else that is not some low level system programming? I mean if you want to write some toy project and want to learn sure, but for a serious project I would chose something that uses a higher level programming language, that has a big and stable standard library and that also has a big community made , well tested libraries to work with.

dastx3• 6 years ago

weak typing and legacy bloat

Lots of legacy stuff has been removed.

Static typing has been added as a feature back in PHP 7.0.

valand5• 6 years ago

I love rust, it's great once you adapt to it, but I don't think it'll be anytime soon people would convert to Rust (although I wish they will).

The paradigm and the workflow are alien to most, the discipline needed to write with it needs learning.

Narann• 6 years ago

Depicts language feature, PHP ecosystem is dying. For me, an example is latest MediaWiki syntax highlight extension dropped GeSHi (PHP) which is not updated anymore, to pygments (Python) using a sub process.

I realized I have to drop MediaWiki because my host didn't expose PHP proc_open() feature.

I don't even know where to start. A natively written syntax highlighter can be considered as an important brick in an ecosystem (GeSHi was used everywhere few years ago), but it looks like no-one is working on it anymore so MediaWiki did an strong technological move to use Python via a sub process.

This kind of move (dropping a existing natively written tool for a tool from another language) shows how bad the ecosystem situation is.

zozbot2342• 6 years ago

Would it be feasible to write a PHP equivalent to emscripten, so that one could export software compiled from any frontend language (including, e.g. the WASM representation) as a php object that can be run directly by mod_php?

creshal4• 6 years ago

It should be possible, but I'm not sure if PHP has the kind of community drive behind it to make it a realistic option.

Or a necessary one – emscripten's main use case is "everyone has a browser", but there's very few PHP hosting offerings where you can't shell out and just run straight native code (in your own little isolated sandbox).

dastx3• 6 years ago

This is a side effect of open source. GeSHi, and many others, suddenly stop getting maintained, and more often than not, project ownership doesn't get passed down.

This problem isn't unique to PHP. I have seen this is many projects across all kinds of different languages and tooling.

Unfortunately, if there's no good alternative written in PHP, MediaWiki could have either reimplement it from scratch. In my opinion, GeSHi isn't the best implementation of a syntax highlighter, so I get their reason to not adopt it. Writing a syntax highlighter from scratch isn't a trivial task either.

None of this says that the PHP ecosystem is dying though. MediaWiki isn't going to suddenly move away from PHP. Nor will many, many of the other big name projects that are still built on top PHP, and as long as there are big name projects, PHP ecosystem will continue to evolve.

I will say choosing a Python sub-process at the sacrifice of portability (considering how many people simply run this on a PHP webhoster) is quite surprising.

fnord123• 6 years ago

That's not a side effect of open source: it's a side effect of any dependency. If you were using foxpro, any google service, apis from companies bought by Apple, etc then the dependencies stop being maintained or vanish altogether.

zabil• 6 years ago

Never worked in PHP, but I watched this talk, "Let's program like it's 1999", about PHP's influence on JSX and React. I quite enjoyed the talk.

xd4• 6 years ago

I've been using PHP professionally since ~1999. I remember ripping the Perl fanboys in the early 2000's until the foundations of PHP started to crumble with what are issues that stick in peoples minds today; so I do wonder if we brought it on ourselves sometimes. But PHP moved on carefully to preserve backwards compatibility. I still have a SaaS first developed back in 2005 on the latest version of PHP that's happily ticking over with the minimal of maintenance required - the code base is horrendous but that's because a developer I had with me at the time made a massive case for "software design patterns" that he crowbarred into every nook and cranny regardless of if it was required or not.

I've done things with PHP that would give people nightmares. It's a far more capable language [1/2] than most realise and with version 8 bringing us JIT things just keep getting better. Would I use PHP if I was starting out today? Unlikely, but I know PHP inside out and can wield it to my wicked ends with ease so won't be dropping it anytime soon.

[1] https://stitcher.io/blog/php-in-2019

[2] https://stitcher.io/blog/php-in-2020

hnarn5• 6 years ago

Would I use PHP if I was starting out today? Unlikely, but I know PHP inside out and can wield it to my wicked ends with ease so won't be dropping it anytime soon.

So just out of curiosity, if you hypothetically did start learning web development today from scratch, what would you spend time learning instead of PHP?

xd4• 6 years ago

When I started I struggled with browser inconsistencies. Over the years Javascript has come a long way and whilst I'm not 100% sold on node.js, I like the idea of using the same language across front and backend so likely would have gone down that road.

lucidone• 6 years ago

Piggybacking to say that if you're just starting out, I'd recommend choosing _anything_, as in, your choice of programming language ecosystem is ancillary to learning the broader technologies and patterns common to web applications. Know somebody who knows PHP you can bug? Use PHP. Find the idea of writing Python exciting? Use Python. Really like the tutorial / book you found for Ruby? Use Ruby. It doesn't matter.

hising2• 6 years ago

Why do these discussions always end up in some black/white dicotomy? Are there situations where PHP is a valid part of a tech stack? Sure. Are there places where, if you could choose, PHP is not a good choice in the stack, Yup.

My personal view of it is that it is part of our eco-system and will not go away, how eager some of us may be to have it disappear, so seeing it getting better as a platform should make the world a little better for a lot of people that need to use it in systems that are built with parts in PHP.I cant see how that is a bad thing.

The thing I dont understand is, if you for some reason do not like to use a specific language or tech, why bother trying to convince others not to use it?

Few of the people I worked with have only one tool in their belt, and they can work in any language. We all have some favorable setup that we think is best for us/others to use in order to build better software with quicker iterations. But all of us (hopefully) also know that few, if any, stacks are 100% solid and consistent after a couple of years. There is always some parts that we wish would not exist, some script that magically does stuff that we do not dare to touch, some service that is written in some fancy language by that awesome dev that worked here 10 years ago or some really central part of our software that is written in Python, talking to a module written in C that needs to be compiled with a specific compiler that went dead 4 years ago. Even if we dream about the perfect system that just works (LIKE I WANT IT) and has a fantastic setup, it is only at specific snapshots of time systems work like that. Time, people, organizations, product requirements, marketing efforts, buzz, hacks, fixes, playfulness, boredom etc all makes system degrade over time and while it is important to manage these debts, it is more or less impossible to have a system in a state where it will always have the tech stack you want right now. That way, we will always have to address bugs in PHP, old Python-versions, rage over custom compiled nginx or whatever. Whether or not PHP is a good language or not is a meta-discussion IMO. If languages that are used by a lot of people gets better over time, that is awesome in my book. Having a perfect tech stack with only funny/new/fancy/awesome tech is at best an interesting mind experiment.

hnarn5• 6 years ago

As soon as you hit a certain level of complexity in your solution/software/whatever, you will be using multiple languages. You'll have scripts written in Bash, front-ends using PHP, back-ends using C or whatever. You are definitely correct that there is no black and white here, all software just needs to be "good enough" to actually solve a problem and be worth paying for.

If PHP being slow stops you from being "good enough" then it's very likely that you can just isolate the part where PHP isn't doing a good job, re-write that in another language and keep the parts where PHP is working fine.

cesarb2• 6 years ago

The thing I dont understand is, if you for some reason do not like to use a specific language or tech, why bother trying to convince others not to use it?

Because, if others use it, I have a higher chance of also having to use it.

I do not use Java and JS at work because of my like or dislike of these languages; I use them at work because, many years ago, whoever started the project I'm working at chose these languages. Had they chosen Python or Ruby or C# or anything else, I would have to use these languages. And it does not apply only to work: if I want to contribute to the Linux kernel, I have to do it in C; if I want to contribute to LibreOffice, I have to do it in C++; if I want to contribute to MediaWiki, I have to do it in PHP; and so on.

Convincing others to not use a poor language reduces the chance of myself having to deal with it later.

hising2• 6 years ago

I guess the "poor" in "poor language" is in the eye of the beholder and I get your point. Have you found yourself lucky in convincing the world in not using any language yet?

dep_b• 6 years ago

Tried PHP again (using it since the 3.x days off and on) a few years ago and didn't dislike it. It would be great if types were even better enforced. But then again I could have been working with Microsoft MVC instead and have an even better experience, especially in terms of autocomplete in an IDE (because C# has stronger types and they are more logical to find by trial and error, like typing a . after a string value), something which I highly value.

But I still think PHP is really cool when you just want to hack something together and indeed like many people said before run it anywhere without headache. You can output formatted text really easily. Other languages are way more formal about output. I hacked together a song recommendation and voting system for my marriage website in a few hours and people loved it.

72deluxe4• 6 years ago

I still can't see how it can be "mature" if it offers an iterable returnable type like in the article example yet doesn't indicate the type of the object it is returning!

It has type hints for function parameters and return types but not for arrays. This makes it useless to me.

I know everybody will say "just add comments so an IDE can interpret it" but this should be a feature of the language. Just adding comments to hint to an IDE is not a real solution.

It's still just a vector<void* > in C++ parlance. Nobody would take you seriously if you said "just add comments to indicate what your void* might be" in a large codebase.

mrkeen2• 6 years ago

I still can't see how C++ can be "mature" if you have to indicate the type of object it is returning!

I know everybody will say "just add a type declaration so the compiler can interpret it" but this should be a feature of the language. Just adding type declarations to hint to a compiler is not a real solution.

72deluxe4• 6 years ago

But it's not a hint to the compiler. It's stating a fact to the compiler. It'll stop compilation.

If I have a basket of fruit, all the items in that basket container are fruit. I can't put anything other than fruit in it. It's a basket of fruit. I know how to interact with the fruit due to its type.

If I am able to put dung into my basket, my fruit is spoiled and I cannot assume how to interact with the objects in the basket.

This is a PHP array without types at the array level. I can put dung into it and have no idea how to interact with it.

Or are you saying that a container of any type is perfectly acceptable? Did the other languages (C++, C#, Java) get it wrong?

eg. on this line can you tell me what the array holds and how I interact with it? What does array $operations hold?

https://github.com/magento/magento2/blob/420a8b6209a4e62ede9...

enesunal• 6 years ago

"PHP is losing because of its maturity"

thrownaway9542• 6 years ago

people make fun of php all the time... just see the comments in this thread.

people forget though that wordpress, drupal, joomla and magento are all written in php and most likely accounts for 70% or so of all the websites online today.

php is going to be around despite all the negativity and fanboyism of other languages. you can't go wrong with knowing php if you always want something to fall back on if you need a job. while coding wordpress websites isn't the greatest job in the world, it is a job and be thankful for that especially during these times.

ainiriand5• 6 years ago

I am a PHP dev with 12 years of experience. I think I have been unemployed 1 week total.

thrownaway9542• 6 years ago

good to hear that. have an upvote :)

leeshire2• 6 years ago

so is PHP worth learning right now? and what is the job prospect looking like? if I study the language for the next few months what is the lickely scenario I will find a career in it.. I actually enjoy and like PHP unlike other people idk what it is about the languauge it looks fun and enjoyable to play with . Plus it's simple and easy opens doors to more complex languages later on down the road

creshal4• 6 years ago

what is the job prospect looking like?

I hope you like working on legacy projects full of spaghetti code.

leeshire2• 6 years ago

I do :) is interesting fixing stuff and turning into something better and more beautiful is rewarding.

michelb• 6 years ago

In that case it really doesn't matter where you work.

jjeaff• 6 years ago

If I was looking for a job as a developer, I probably would not go with PHP. But if I had a new saas that I wanted to build and turn I to a business, I would seriously consider using php to get to a rapid mvp.

PaulRobinson• 6 years ago

There will be work for PHP developers for many years to come. It will not be the sexiest work, but you'll get paid to write code, and any day being paid to write code is better than any day not being paid, or a day being paid to do something you don't enjoy.

I stopped coding it professionally almost 20 years ago (!), but it was a great foundation to a ton of stuff, and going back through the release notes and modern frameworks I'm actually thinking I might use it for a few side projects.

Don't let anybody put you off, I say if it appeals to you that you should go and learn it and get some work with it.

s1k3s• 6 years ago

The amount of misinformation, false claims and unsupported statements in this thread is mindblowing for the quality that I've been used to see on HN.

Here are some facts:

- Symfony was the backend framework with the most contributors in 2019 [1] (yes, out of any backend framework written in any language)

- PHP has more active contributors than it ever had [2]

- Laravel is one of the most used frameworks in the world [3]

Then I see statements like "PHP only exists today because of legacies being maintained". Can't provide stats on this, but neither can the people who make these statements. Might be just because I'm a PHP dev myself but I see a lot of new projects started with the above frameworks.

And last, people compare it to languages like Rust or Go since they consider those are "innovative". I hope everyone understands that a language is fit for a certain type of task. PHP was created for website development, and in that area neither Go or Rust are even close to matching it in terms of maturity.

I may be biased but for me, choosing php for a new project is a no-brianer. The only other 2 stacks to which I can compare it are the Spring stack of Java or .NET core, and except for these two I wouldn't seriously consider any other competitor for starting a new project. Unless, of course, that project is "for fun" and you want to experiment with new technologies.

[1] https://symfony.com/blog/symfony-was-the-backend-framework-w...

[2] https://github.com/php/php-src/pulse

[3] https://trends.builtwith.com/framework/Laravel

oblio5• 6 years ago

I'd assume that Django and Ruby on Rails can't be that far off.

hnarn5• 6 years ago

We can all assume things.

davidwparker• 6 years ago

Not sure why you're being downvoted.

If we just look at [3] above, we see these: https://trends.builtwith.com/framework/Django-Language https://trends.builtwith.com/framework/Ruby-on-Rails

Django, at least on that site, seems to be quite far off. Rails, at least on that site, is ahead of PHP.

tudorw2• 6 years ago

Symfony is an outstanding framework and a real pleasure to build with.

tasuki• 6 years ago

I've moved on from PHP some 5 years ago. I'm not missing the language. But damn I'm missing Symfony!

I prefer Scala to PHP, the language is much more expressive. When you want to replace a bit of core functionality, in Symfony, you extend the desired class, add it to the dependency injection container, and you're done.

In the Play framework, I once wanted to make a one-line change to the routing. When it turned out I'd have to touch 30+ files which have hardcoded dependencies on each other, I quickly gave up.

piotrkubisa3• 6 years ago

The really nice thing of Symfony framework is database schema mapping and migrations, which have compatibility with numerous database systems and provides abstraction layer [0], that among many options of interfaces have quite handy YAML-formatted schema mapping [1]. Nothing extraordinary these days but it is really stable and simple to use.

[0] https://symfony.com/doc/current/doctrine.html

[1] https://www.doctrine-project.org/projects/doctrine-orm/en/2....

conradfr2• 6 years ago

I have a love/hat relationship with Symfony but it is a a very well run project, the attention to developer experience is very underrated.

jackofalltrades• 6 years ago

I can't really understand the hate towards php in general, never was able to understand it. I started programming in PHP and then moved to c# and now mostly JS, but never really understood the motivations behind people bashing on PHP. Like, some of my friends that today mostly program in React/Nextjs praise the framework as something amazing and the SSR as something really innovative, and - honestly - it resembles PHP more than ever, but if you ask them about PHP they will immediately say it is a "bad language" and "a joke". Laravel, as you stated, is a really amazing framework, but some people are carrying baggage from the time of PHP4 or something even older and never really tried to see current/modern PHP and some other people just built their idea of the language around it because it was the cool thing to do.

kangoo17075• 6 years ago

no PHP framework is similar to the thing that NextJS/Reactis doing. The output is the same (well, isn’t the point of web framework is to spit out HTML?) but the methodology is totally different.

aganame6• 6 years ago

Because it's fairly popular (#6ish or something) as a language, it is more probable that people are forced to use it at the threat of unemployment.

Nobody is forced to write Haskell or Rust, you have to actively look for such positions.

Then again, this doesn't explain why the number #1 language (Python) is so liked...

joelbluminator12• 6 years ago

as a Ruby/Rails guy, I feel the same way. Seems like Rails became the top stack to shit on to feel better about your stack these days. People are just tribal. We need to feel superior to the "other" to feel better about ourselves.

hnarn5• 6 years ago

And last, people compare it to languages like Rust or Go since they consider those are "innovative". I hope everyone understands that a language is fit for a certain type of task. PHP was created for website development, and in that area neither Go or Rust are even close to matching it in terms of maturity.

I'm not disagreeing with you, but "website development" is a very broad category. For example, if you definitely need a website with server-side logic and database connections, yes, that's where PHP will shine. However, if you need a more or less static website for your restaurant or portfolio, is it really as straightforward to say "PHP is for website development, write your website in PHP"?

I want to be very clear that I'm differentiating between use cases here, but for something like a technical documentation website, a status page or something similar that does not require server-side logic and databases, I would much prefer using Hugo or some other type of static site generator, and not because PHP is bad but because we're still talking about "website development" but just not necessarily the kind of website that PHP was made to build.

That being said, there are of course static site generators in PHP as well (and probably every other language out there), but Hugo has a special place in my heart just because of the speed of it.

thawaway1837• 6 years ago

For a more or less static website, what’s probably the best bet, and has been the standard for many years, largely because it allows the non technical restaurant owner to easily update and make changes, is Wordpress.

In which case you’re back again in PHP land.

Ygg2• 6 years ago

So I take it all the things in this article (https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/) are no longer relevant?

For example "foo"==TRUE, "foo"==0 and TRUE !=0 are logically consistent now?

Or json_encode no longer returns null for invalid input?

AegirLeet10• 6 years ago

Some of it is still true, some of it isn't true anymore and some of it simply isn't very relevant.

Comparison still isn't transitive. Not very relevant in the real world because you simply don't use "==" unless you know what you're doing.

json_decode still returns null on invalid input, so you either have to use the JSON_THROW_ON_ERROR option to make it throw an exception instead or use json_last_error().

Both are unfortunate, of course, but it's hard to fix mistakes made 25 years ago.

sho_hn• 6 years ago

An argument I've heard advanced for both PHP and JS is that their evil is well-documented and well-understood (e.g. one of the Facebook efforts was to write an extensive spec for PHP). Contrast this with, say, Python, which is much more nicely designed, but implementation-defined and with some gotcha areas with poorly understood and documented behavior - rarely encountered, but when encountered, hard to grok or avoid, also because they can readily keep changing from version to version (some of the corner case details of slots come to mind as an example).

I can see a pragmatic point there - anything has warts, the warts you know and don't move are easier to contend with (and lint for). I'd still pick Python for most projects in that comparison, but at a certain scale of effort I'd possibly begin to wonder about the trade-offs.

sadfklsjlkjwt• 6 years ago

Why are you using "=="? Use "===" and make explicit casts as required.

ptsneves• 6 years ago

I do not do PHP and only have done a bit a long time ago, but I chuckle at the statement that nobody starts any project in PHP, only to find that a huge amount of new sites are wordpress sites, and they are a gateway to PHP. And do not discard WordPress, because it is amazing in how you can have a productive web site with no programing knowledge. After your site actually generates value then you can hire programmers to create more value. Bam, PHP to the forefront. I do asp.Net core for personal projects these days and I am so jealous of the fusion theme builders for WordPress plus the huge Eco system of plug-ins.

My day job is in embedded and systems engineering, so web is not even my thing, but I find it incredible a workhorse tool like PHP gets so much disdain. Reminds me of the answers Theo de Radt, gave to the enthusiasts: nobody cares about how cool a tool is if nobody is using it. PHP is used by a lot of people, so it is more important than my new favorite darling Nim. Even if Nim sounds awesome its useless and irrelevant from a non enthusiast point of view.

paulryanrogers4• 6 years ago

This was said of Cobol not too long ago. Today's enthusiasts decide tomorrow's workhorses.

_bxg12• 6 years ago

I was paid to build a Wordpress extension once. It was the most miserable programming experience of my life.

Wordpress is no doubt a powerful force on the web. As a no-code website-creation environment, it's fine. Maybe even good. But as a library, it is godawful.

watermelon0• 6 years ago

Where to begin?

- No proper connection pooling with circuit breakers.

- No proper multithreading (that works in web environment) or parallelism in general.

- Almost everything blocks (even `new PDO('mysql:...')` can block for whatever the execution time limit is, if there is an issue with connection or MySQL server).

- Most libraries are implemented in C instead of in PHP, whereas with other languages people try to avoid native code as much as possible. This means that code is not memory safe, and understanding or contributing is close to impossible.

The reason for this is because PHP doesn't support many things that are expected in any other language.

PHP C API is hard to understand, hard to use, and documentation is subpar.

- There is no way to easily share memory between processes. You have to rely on APCu (hack), because this cannot be implemented in PHP.

- Did I mention that almost anything can block? ODBC? PDO? Some 3rd party library? Even set_time_limit cannot help you here. Handling this gracefully is close to impossible.

norswap• 6 years ago

Something being written in C does not mean "understanding or contributing is close to impossible". That's as much of a boogeyman as I've ever seen.

alphadevx10• 6 years ago

Where to begin indeed!

- No proper connection pooling with circuit breakers.

PHP has had a "shared nothing" architecture since the very beginning, that includes DB connections. It helps it to scale (think micro-services being stateless in a modern context): nothing is shared between requests, again including connections, by design.

- No proper multithreading (that works in web environment) or parallelism in general.

I once asked Rasmus about this face-to-face, during one of his presentations, specifically his thoughts about the pThread extension (https://www.php.net/manual/en/intro.pthreads.php), and he responded that it was not required in a web context, as web servers already have threads per request so its a mute point.

- Almost everything blocks (even `new PDO('mysql:...')` can block for whatever the execution time limit is, if there is an issue with connection or MySQL server).

Well, it depends on your code of course, but pretty hard to proceed with some code that works with a DB when the connection can't be established, so proceed with what exactly other than error handling? Seems like a strange example. And as mentioned above, no (excluding optional pThreads) support for asynchronous threads in the language, so...?

- Most libraries are implemented in C instead of in PHP, whereas with other languages people try to avoid native code as much as possible. This means that code is not memory safe, and understanding or contributing is close to impossible.

Ok now you have just thrown away one of the main benefits of PHP. Remember, Rasmus is a C programmer, not a PHP programmer, so he wanted to leverage that HUGE library of existing C-code from his new scripting language, from the very beginning, deliberately by design.

The reason for this is because PHP doesn't support many things that are expected in any other language.

Yes it does, via the C-extensions, see above.

PHP C API is hard to understand, hard to use, and documentation is subpar.

Yes programming in C is hard.

- There is no way to easily share memory between processes. You have to rely on APCu (hack), because this cannot be implemented in PHP.

Deliberate design choice, "shared nothing architecture", stateless between requests, as above.

- Did I mention that almost anything can block? ODBC? PDO? Some 3rd party library? Even set_time_limit cannot help you here. Handling this gracefully is close to impossible.

Yes because each request is a synchronous thread, as described above above. By design.

ainiriand5• 6 years ago

- No proper multithreading

Maybe you are not familiar with PHP multithreading in recent times but I have been using https://github.com/krakjoe/pthreads and works perfectly. No process forking.

castis• 6 years ago

i think the whole point is that some of those things are not 100% necessary to build great stuff.

tzs2• 6 years ago

There is no way to easily share memory between processes

What about https://www.php.net/manual/en/ref.shmop.php ?

karatestomp• 6 years ago

- Most libraries are implemented in C instead of in PHP, whereas with other languages people try to avoid native code as much as possible. This means that code is not memory safe, and understanding or contributing is close to impossible.

You want this in any scripting language if you don’t want memory use and cycles to balloon out of control for simple tasks. Most any scripting language looking for performance is going “how can I GTFO of myself and into C (or assembly, or maybe these days Rust I guess, in some circles) as fast as possible”.

ivanhoe4• 6 years ago

The reason for this is because PHP doesn't support many things that are expected in any other language.

And the reason for this is that those parts are handled by web servers and php doesn't need to handle them. Isolation decision that simplifies things significantly infrastructure wise and that allowed for shared hosting to exist - which in turn brought the costs down and made web as popular and massive as it is today.

BTW, this architecture is not that different from what node and others are doing. Instead of having a language/framework that acts as a web server (but too simple, so you still need nginx in front), and then you need a queue service to delegate the jobs, you have a web server that delegates the jobs (requests) to isolated php processes. Model is the same and that's the model that's used everywhere today, just that the moving parts are partitioned a bit differently in different languages.

Of course, it's not a perfect solution to every problem, but works very good for any not-real-time web site/app and in the end RoR, Django, Symfony, etc. they all work in a very similar way (minus the syntactical nuances). For a massive traffic or language level high parallelism just use something else, no one argues against that.

winrid• 6 years ago

Simple blocking IO and no real multithreading are features of PHP.

It's all about simplicity.

In a web app you "multithread" using the web server...

gexla2• 6 years ago

PHP only exists today because of legacies being maintained
people compare it to languages like Rust or Go since they consider those are "innovative"

PHP is getting old enough for developers today to be unaware of the history of web development. If you don't know the history, then you haven't seen the twists and turns it has taken. If you don't know the twists and turns, then you don't see how everything from the past relates to the state of the present.

Perhaps the greatest accomplishment of PHP is that the ecosystem so thoroughly solved a certain approach of web development that the rest of the world could move on to try these other ideas (which are of questionable effectiveness.) There's only so many web frameworks, content management systems and general web development libraries that you can build before you start to realize what waste of time it is to keep reinventing the wheel. PHP has an ecosystem which is still strong (and growing) because there's no need to recreate what PHP has done so well.

Wordpress as an example is not going to be replaced. You can't replace Wordpress by building something in a different language. The code base represents mind blowing knowledge which has gone into solving such problems which have nothing to do with a specific programming language. Nobody cares that you can recreate some basic thing with the new shiny. The programming language isn't the problem.

Now Wordpress is possibly reinventing the CMS with Gutenberg (like it or not) and it's not the programming language which is making it possible or hindering. PHP is a great platform to build on.

As your system grows, then your problems change. The tools required to tackle those problems change as well. This is true of everything. You can't manage a Google the same way that you manage a 2 pizza team. To get to that scale, the systems need to change many times over. PHP solved a wide problem, but it's not perfect and it's not one size fits all. Go is great at solving other problems, and it's a generalist when applied to the web domain. It's not a good comparison.

We haven't even started on the business side of decision making. If I want a web presence, this thread is doing nothing for me. I'm just going to fire up Wordpress and move to the next step. Or Laravel if I want a fast prototype, etc.

Seeing how important this history has been in my own area of expertise makes me think I better start hitting the history books which would be important for my other areas of life. If you don't know your history, then you're handicapped when discussing the present.

filmgirlcw• 6 years ago

Just to interject — WordPress’ origins are indeed PHP, but most modern WordPress development, especially Gutenberg — is really JavaScript. And that’s the reality, for better or worse. Many longtime WP devs are struggling with this reality.

In fact, I would posit that many of the complaints about PHP come from WordPress’s widespread usage and its slowness to adopt modern PHP features (and to be fair, I do understand that slowness. If you power such a huge portion of the web, making breaking changes to things that could impact tens of millions of sites on the name of modernization is difficult to reconcile). If/when PHP becomes just a legacy part of WordPress, it’ll be interesting to see what impact (of any) that has on the languages perception.

echelon12• 6 years ago

PHP isn't being replaced by Rust or Go. It's being replaced by Medium, Wix, and Squarespace.

At this point, the predominant reason it's still undergoing active development is that there is a metric ton of legacy PHP code. As the businesses still using it either mature, evolve, or fail, the need for PHP will begin to dry up.

You're defending the language from an emotional standpoint.

choosing php for a new project is a no-brianer. The only other 2 stacks to which I can compare it are the Spring stack of Java or .NET core

This is absolutely not the case, and you know it. Almost every language has a wealth of HTTP tools and frameworks, and many of them come built-in.

Choosing PHP will be like choosing Python 2. In fact, that's my 2030 prediction.

tcd• 6 years ago

As the businesses still using it either mature, evolve, or fail, the need for PHP will begin to dry up.

People have been calling for PHP's death, or saying PHP is a dying language, for as long as the internet has been around.

It's always the same arguments, that $newHipLanguage will replace it.

Then you actually do some research and understand just how much of the internet is still powered by PHP and will continue to do so for the forseeable future.

So, I'm still waiting for PHP's death. Or for this same predictable comment in 2030.

AegirLeet10• 6 years ago

This is absolutely not the case, and you know it. Almost every language has a wealth of HTTP tools and frameworks, and many of them come built-in.

Lots of languages have HTTP tools and frameworks, but not many of them are even comparable in scope to Symfony or Laravel. Out of curiosity, can anyone point me at some frameworks in other languages that have the following things built-in?

* Route matching and dispatch

* URL generation (generate a URL for some route) including signed and temporary URLs

* Middlewares

* Abstractions for dealing with incoming HTTP requests (getting headers, body, uploaded files etc.)

* Abstractions for creating and sending HTTP responses (headers, body etc.)

* CSRF protection

* Database drivers for a couple of backends (MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite etc.)

* Database migrations

* Database seeding

* Views/HTML rendering

* Logging capabilities (configurable backends like rotating log files, syslog, Slack etc.)

* Sessions with different storage backends (filesystem, Redis etc.)

* Request validation ("this field is required, has to be a string, between x and y characters long" etc.)

* Translation and localization

* Broadcasting through WebSockets

* Caching with a couple of backends (filesystem, database, Redis etc.)

* Email sending with a couple of backends (SMTP, Mailgun, SES etc.)

* Notifications with different channels (Email, SMS etc.) and backends (SMTP, Mailgun, Twilio etc.)

* Job queues with different backends (database, Redis, SQS etc.)

* Scheduled jobs

* Authentication (different flavors like regular sessions, API tokens etc.)

* Authorization

* Hashing

* Encryption

* Query builder

* ORM with relations between objects, JSON serialization etc.

* CLI commands with option/argument parsing, colored output, progress bars etc.

* Events, including async handling of events

* File storage with a couple of backends (local filesystem, S3 etc.)

* Pagination

* Payment integration

* Full text search with different backends (database, Algolia etc.)

This is basically the feature set of Laravel, I probably missed some things too.

And I don't mean "oh yeah I'm sure there's a library for that" - I mean fully integrated, first-party, tested, dead simple to use and available by default.

Maybe I'm wrong, but I seriously doubt this just exists in any language.

jsjohnst• 6 years ago

PHP isn't being replaced by Rust or Go. It's being replaced by Medium, Wix, and Squarespace.

Funny that you mention Squarespace as replacing PHP when they themselves are a big PHP shop.

stunt• 6 years ago

Most of the comments against PHP are from developers that wrote PHP<5.4 long time ago as their first or second language. PHP had a bad ecosystem with lots of bad practices being a norm.

There are still some issues but considering the current state of language, frameworks, libraries, and the ecosystem, it's very practical and productive environment to build any project.

I've been doing Typescript, Scala, and recently also Go in last few years. Scala and Go have decent language design and I'm a fan of both of them. But, when it comes to productivity and ecosystem they don't come anywhere close to PHP. If I was about to build my own web startup, I'd definitely build it with PHP because I'm sure I could launch it 10 times faster with Laravel.

MisterBastahrd• 6 years ago

It's amusing to me to see all the hate for PHP, especially when the original lazy gripe was that people hated when faced with code that was mixed with templates. So completely different than the dominant modern front-end frameworks.

jbergens• 6 years ago

I think there is a huge difference between web sites and web applications. Most large applications today uses SPA and an api. The api can be done in any backend language and there is not many obvious benfits of using php but some clear drawbacks.

If you just want to create a web site quickly then php works fine but on the other hand you can do it quickly with js, c# or Typescript also.

phaedryx• 6 years ago

PHP 4 was the last time I wrote any PHP; I hated it. You are right, though. PHP now is not the PHP I knew.

pdimitar5• 6 years ago

If I was about to build my own web startup, I'd definitely build it with PHP because I'm sure I could launch it 10 times faster with Laravel.

Fair enough, and same applies to Ruby on Rails.

Let's not conflate "easy and quick to launch an MVP" with "sustainable for long-term development" however. There are many stories on the net how people started with something as basic as WordPress or Rails but had to rewrite in Phoenix or one of Python's frameworks down the line because the maintenance burden of the MVP-grade technology was too heavy.

dgb23• 6 years ago

I really like languages like Rust and Go and they certainly are good languages and I would love to use either on a regular basis as a freelance webdev.

But with two recent projects I‘ve worked on neither would be even feasible.

In one there was a requirement to generate custom designed PDFs, and in the other I had to implement authentication via SAML.

Other language ecosystems that would be feasible in these cases: Nodejs, .NET, Java or Clojure because it can live in either of those.

PHP doesn’t just have mature, battle tested and well documented web-frameworks. It also has libraries which do complex things that are very unattractive like PDF generation/manipulation and complicated standards like SAML.

dzonga3• 6 years ago

have you gone through the laravel docs ?

asdkjh345fd4• 6 years ago

And last, people compare it to languages like Rust or Go since they consider those are "innovative"

No, they do not. The entire appeal of go is that there is zero innovation at all. It is the most plain, boring, ordinary language around. It does absolutely nothing different or neat or new or special. Instead, it focus on being simple, easy and fast. Just like PHP apologists keep claiming about PHP. The difference is go was developed by competent software developers, so it isn't a broken, buggy, inconsistent mess.

PHP was created for website development

And yet it is outclassed for that purpose by general purpose languages like go.

and in that area neither Go or Rust are even close to matching it in terms of maturity.

Age is not maturity. PHP is old. It is less terrible than it was 20 years ago, but it is still worse that any other language except javascript.

mtnGoat5• 6 years ago

you are claiming the developers of PHP are incompetent? bold claim, coming from a throw away.

piotrkubisa3• 6 years ago

It is also worth noting the number of packages published on packagist.org [0] (kind of npmjs.com for PHP), which is rapidly growing.

[0] https://packagist.org/statistics

tjpnz• 6 years ago

Can't speak for others but I've worked on many legacy PHP codebases over the years, it has never been a pleasant experience. Even when it's a PHP 7 codebase the same bad practices from PHP 5 and earlier are all present and accounted for. As are the subtle bugs stemming from an inconsistent standard library and PHPs approach to error handling. I'm sure that there's plenty of good PHP code out there, maybe I've just been unlucky.

dubcanada3• 6 years ago

Ya?

Can't speak for others but I've worked on many legacy C++ codebases over the years, it has never been a pleasant experience. Even when it's a C++ 17 codebase the same bad practices from C++ 11 and earlier are all present and accounted for. As are the subtle bugs stemming from an inconsistent standard library and C++'s approach to verbose error handling. I'm sure that there's plenty of good C++ code out there, maybe I've just been unlucky.

I can literally copy and paste what you said replacing it with any language and end up being correct.

Every single language on a legacy code base will have good code and bad code. It has NOTHING to do with the language. It has to do with what the code is and who originally developed it.

k__3• 6 years ago

"PHP only exists today because of legacies being maintained"

I think, the reason is, Facebook poured a load of money/time into PHP. Otherwise it would probably on life-support right now.

tyingq• 6 years ago

FB poured a ton of money into Hack/HHVM. Which didn't directly benefit PHP. I do see that it inspired the PHP team to improve, but that's indirect.

boredpudding• 6 years ago

Facebook poured loads of money/time into HHVM. While I'm sure PHP also got benefits, your "Otherwise it would probably on life-support right now. " argument fits perfectly on the rest of the biased unsupported arguments.

johnchristopher• 6 years ago

Do you have some recommendations for books about laravel and lumen ? (I hate laracasts, I rather read than play/pause/type/play/type, etc.).

yurishimo• 6 years ago

"Laravel Up and Running"[0] is a popular choice. Lumen is just Laravel with a few features stripped out of the framework. They both use the same underlying packages.

0: http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920179467.do

rgbrenner2• 6 years ago

Go and Rust were designed for other things... why wouldn't you compare it to the big language that was actually designed to compete in the same space as PHP? NodeJS.

Front end devs are already programming in JS, so there's less adoption cost than PHP. I can't think of a single reason to use PHP over Node (I know both, and have delivered projects in both).

The comparison to .Net and Spring makes me think you might be a bit behind the curve. Have you tried Node?

lucideer• 6 years ago

Node developer here, but... two notes about your comment concern me a little.

1. "I can't think of a single reason to use PHP over Node" this is fine but can you think of a single reason to use Node over PHP. Is adoption cost the only one?

2. "you might be a bit behind the curve" while the original commenter was talking about PHP being "modern" and dimissing talk of it existing because of legacies, criticising someone for being "behind the curve" does smell a lot like that "must jump on every shiny new thing regardles of merit" mentality that drives a lot of the JS ecosystem. What are the material benefits of being on or ahead of the curve in this case?

goatlover4• 6 years ago

can't think of a single reason to use PHP over Node

Symfony, Laravel, Drupal and Wordpress would be reasons.

dzonga3• 6 years ago

I used to use node too, professionally and personally. There's nothing in the Node.js world that matches the vastness of libraries that enable you to be productive as in the PHP world. you surely, can't compare Express.js to Laravel. Node.js security libraries are lacking.

joelbluminator12• 6 years ago

The only other 2 stacks to which I can compare it are the Spring stack of Java or .NET core

Why not Django or Rails?

tmh88j6• 6 years ago

I've worked a lot with PHP and Java (Spring MVC & Spring Boot), and have made a few personal projects with Django. It's nowhere near as easy to get running and secure for a production environment, mainly because you have to deal with the WSGI server. There are tons of options (gunicorn, uWSGI, CherryPy, mod_wsgi if you want to go that route, etc...) and you're likely developing locally using a test server that's not suited for prod like werkzeug.

PHP runs right out of the box. As long as apache is running and you have an index.php file in your www directory, it just runs. Spring Boot is a pleasure to deploy as well with embedded tomcat, it's possibly even simpler than PHP for local development because you can just give a jar to someone and it works no differently than it would in production.

greatwhitenorth2• 6 years ago

Majority of the HN commenters argue irrelevant points or are trolls and have never gone deep in any technology to be an expert and comment about it. I've seen absolutely moronic comments here. You should see the comments on 'React' or 'Java'. I'm pretty sure most have never written a "hello world" equivalent in it. It's cool to hate something popular.

thefounder• 6 years ago

Some of commenters are "ex" php develops. For me PHP was painfull but I didn't know that until I moved on to Ruby and now Go. I would never go back to PHP programming(i tried few years ago) just like I would not go back to Windows(except for budget or political reasons). PHP was fun back in the day because you could host it anywhere and truth be told it was an easy scripting language to learn but I don't see many reasons to use it today. Not that you can't build great products or scale it but I can no longer enjoy programming in PHP.

buboard• 6 years ago

Being unpopular is one of the strengths of php. They rarely break stuff to make it look cool. Your 10 or 20 year old project can keep running, keep making money, allowing you to "learn the shiny stuff you ll never use"

cheez• 6 years ago

The only problem I have with PHP is that it is the C++ of backend scripting languages.

msla• 6 years ago

Here's some interesting facts about PHP I like to know and share. How many of them are now untrue?

"foo" == TRUE, and "foo" == 0, but TRUE != 0

NULL < -1, and NULL == 0

PHP sez:

    Parse error: syntax error, unexpected (T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM)

shakesbeard• 6 years ago

You may have missed it, but with PHP 7 the language has even more shifted towards stricter typing paradigms. People use strict comparison, typed properties, typed arguments, etc. Couple that with one of the popular static analysis tools and you'll never see any such errors.

innocenat2• 6 years ago

T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM was changed to T_DOUBLE_COLON ages ago

durbatuluk• 6 years ago

As someone who freelance php and do on-site go coding on daily basis, modern PHP is amazing (symfony/slim is everything I want).

One simple improvement I would love to see is namespace grouping in standard library. Go has all related functions inside some package. Go pls let me do http.notfound<tab/enter> = http.StatusNotFound. But in php even with inteli I need to google some function/const name.

simion31415• 6 years ago

There are some clueless people posting their ignorant opinions here, like some dude was hating on the guy that invented XML, sure XML might not be the best tool for everything but I can't see yaml or json to be better for documents, the thing XML was created for (but the guy probably has no idea what XML is, how it is used correctly), probably could be a good interview question to see who is inexperienced but has a giant ego and thinks he knows much.

lillesvin• 6 years ago

A lot of the common complaints about PHP are merely echoing the wildly outdated and misinformed "PHP: A fractal of bad design" that has been circulating for the better part of the last decade.

Unfortunately people tend to uncritically repeat whatever it says without actually paying any mind to the facts that, 1) it's 8 years old, 2) it's flat out wrong about a lot of its claims, 3) it's evidently written by a guy who has no idea what PHP is even intended to be.

ptx2• 6 years ago

In regards to your last point, I believe PHP was intended to be a quick and dirty templating language for C programs. Right?

But if we're not using it for that purpose anymore, why would we want a programming language that grew haphazardly out of a templating language and is suffused with the quirks of that legacy? Yes, it's better than a decade ago and getting better all the time, but is it good yet? Does it have any advantage over more coherently designed languages?

pdimitar5• 6 years ago

Even with all of that, PHP still has strange quirks that aren't exactly obvious and are head-scratchers. Like the implicit type inference. One prominent example is that if all the keys in your "string" array are actually number strings like "123" and "456" then PHP will silently convert them to integers.

WTF?

So what is "PHP intended to be" in this case? And how is the above behaviour the sensible thing to do?

Whatever PHP "was intended to be", this is a gotcha that is absolutely unnecessary and sticks out like a sore thumb in today's ecosystem of stricter and more predictable and stable languages.

Let's not forget that commercial programming should not be about joining tribes that share your personal philosophy. It's about getting a job done. Predictability and stability help a lot with that.

toohotatopic• 6 years ago

The amount of misinformation, false claims and unsupported statements in this thread is mindblowing for the quality that I've been used to see on HN.

What if the assumed quality is an illusion and every discussion is actually as misinformed as this one, you just lack the knowledge to recognize it? Which doesn't have to be a bad thing since the signal to noise ratio on hn can still be better than somewhere else.

(There is actually a name for this idea, I am unfortunately unable to find it.)

steerpike• 6 years ago

It's called Gellman amnesia but it's usually attributed to newspapers

throwawaymsft• 6 years ago

“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”

– Michael Crichton (1942-2008)

hpoe• 6 years ago

Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect. Is the word you are looking for.

eitland• 6 years ago

What if the assumed quality is an illusion and every discussion is actually as misinformed as this one, you just lack the knowledge to recognize it?

That would not be the entire explanation:

- I almost have bragging rights on certain topics and still find the discussions about said topics here on this site mostly good.

- Other people do actually have serious bragging rights and still continue to show up, so I guess HN isn't that bad.

Edit: although some of the reason for the last point could be the same as the reason why parents change diapers as pointed out a few hours or so ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23077102 ;-)

dzonga3• 6 years ago

people living in the sv | start-up bubble. folks tend to forget there's dozens of websites in mainstreet that run on php. they also think everyone out there using microservices etc. nah, people just kicking dozens of laravel monoliths every part of the world. getting shit done. & getting paid. I don't use php, but I will admit the world runs on PHP, not Go, Node.js or any of the hipster shit.

lkrubner• 6 years ago

The thing is, when I started using PHP in 1999, PHP had real advantages that no other eco-system offered. Regarding functionality, it had an "all in one" philosophy, whereas Perl had exactly the opposite attitude. With Perl, the first thing you had to do was research which modules you would have to download and install, but with PHP you could just start writing code. This was in the era before modern package managers, so it was a very big deal. PHP was open source, so it was a good choice relative to classic ASP. Worst of all, other languages, such as Java, were engaging in an orgy of unnecessary complexity, especially when it came to frameworks, of which Struts was perhaps the most awful exemplar. PHP was the first language to make automatic adaptations to the world of the Web, including loading $_POST and $_GET variables automatically -- some of these decisions were later seen to be huge security liabilities and so they were ended.

Above all else, circa 2000 we could still rely on Moore's Law and therefore we could rely on a single CPU getting faster and faster every year. But once Moore's Law came to an end, it became increasingly important to be able to leverage concurrency, and PHP had no real story around concurrency (except the course-grained method of starting a new process).

PHP 4 was a very easy language to learn. It did not have many Object Oriented features, instead it encouraged a simple style of simple functions. Ironically, when it came to objects, the default behavior was "pass by value" so PHP 4 was, in a sense, an immutable language, long before that became a popular development style (tragically, it was not optimized to manage memory in a manner that would allow ambitious use of its immutable qualities).

Later, PHP developed an intense envy of languages that were seen as "enterprise ready languages". This lead to a lot of nonsense. First of all, PHP 4 was already good enough that it could be used in an enterprise, but this fact was ignored. Second of all, PHP 5 suddenly adopted a lot of Object Oriented features which added a lot of complexity to the language, but without offering the benefits that might have come from using a language like Java, such as compile time checks.

I used PHP from 1999 to 2011. I built my first and second startups using mostly PHP. However, in the year 2020, I can not imagine why anyone would use PHP. It no longer offers the simplicity that it offered in 2000. It no longer offers the straightforward procedural style that it allowed in 2000. It's "all in one" philosophy is no longer an advantage because now every language has a modern package manager that makes it easy to include whatever is needed. Nowadays, with Javascript, you just type "npm install" and you get every module that you need. And yet PHP still doesn't offer some of what a complex language like Java or C# might offer, especially regarding strict typing or compile time checks or run time efficiency, or a separate set of runtime flags for a compiled version. PHP has become a weird mutant, imitating the more complex languages but without offering their benefits.

And crucially, the other languages have not been stagnant. The community around Java eventually gave up on Struts and started developing light-weight frameworks that made development much easier. And there sprang up dozens of languages that run on the JVM and which offer a wealth of good ideas about how to do modern development. (I became a huge fan of Clojure.)

I seriously can not imagine why anyone would use PHP now. It no longer offers simplicity, but developers don't gain much from all the extra complexity that's been added.

[Added] A final point: this article makes it seem like Composer is something of a victory for PHP: now PHP has a modern package manager just like all the other languages. But this strikes me as a defeat rather than a victory. Circa 2000 I loved PHP because of its "all in one" philosophy. If that style of automatic inclusion is no longer possible for PHP, and therefore PHP needs to become just like all the other languages out there, how does that reflect well on PHP? One more unique strength that PHP once had is now gone.

ronlobo2• 6 years ago

Hey Lawrence,

Thanks for this detailed comment and the historical background, it is very informational!

whycombagator• 6 years ago

The only other 2 stacks to which I can compare it are the Spring stack of Java or .NET core, and except for these two I wouldn't seriously consider any other competitor for starting a new project

Surely Django & Rails are also comparable to something like Laravel?

pdimitar5• 6 years ago

You claim "misinformation, false claims and unsupported statements" while you yourself only appeal to popularity and habit. Those are not directly correlated to quality. It simply means that PHP in the eyes of the businessmen is the safer choice due to a much bigger hiring pool. The popularity and adoption have a snowballing effect; once a certain critical mass is achieved then the whole thing sustains itself.

Every reasonable programmer will agree with you that different languages serve different niches. Nowadays however there are several mature and solid web frameworks in other languages, thus PHP is very far from the only -- or the best -- contender in this area.

And yes, you are biased. That's quite okay. I can also make a ton of smaller projects in 2-3 days with Elixir's Phoenix -- some that have a smaller scope I can also do with Rust's Rocket even. But I don't claim they are the "no-brainer" choice. You should not too.

Finally, implying that choosing anything other than PHP makes the project a "for fun" endeavour is disrespectful and does not do your argument any favours.

ctas• 6 years ago

My startups running on PHP and I definitely don't regret it. The language is simple, you have easy access to talent, knowledge, and thousands of mature libraries. Most of the times boring is better.

jeisc• 6 years ago

please check out these fast php products swoole, amp, workerman n peachpie at https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/

fredsted• 6 years ago

I wonder if most developers that trash on PHP for trivial issues like seen in this thread haven't been using it for many years, or had a bad experience (e.g. maintaining a legacy app).

Some developers live in a kind of technical vacuum where, I guess they assume, the technical features of their programming language are what makes the difference in the value of the business they're building.

In reality, the difference is in how easy it is to hire developers, the package library, overall ecosystem and developer experience, or: how can I make a great product.

asdkjh345fd4• 6 years ago

Some people simply have reasonable standards. I tried for years to hire a PHP dev. I never found a single one. I found tons of people who had PHP on their resume, and not a single one of them was anything close to competent. PHP only makes hiring easy if you don't care about the quality of work that gets done. I can hire a million PHP monkeys, but everyone who has the right combination of intelligence and conscientiousness to be a competent software developer moves on from PHP after 2 or 3 years as they discover what it is.

ludamad2• 6 years ago

You can hire "good programmers" and ask them to write PHP - Facebook does

enz• 6 years ago

Are you trying to hire vanilla PHP devs or framework PHP devs?

In my previous company (based in Paris, FR) we had a very hard time getting skillful PHP devs, even if there were a lot of candidates.

ragnese20• 6 years ago

I'm a PHP "hater", so take this for what it's worth.

You are very close to implying that the language doesn't matter if you can hire developers and there are a lot of good packages in the ecosystem.

Having worked on several PHP projects (Most being version 7.0+ and zero of them being older than 5.3), the languages is STILL full of gotchas, and it's a huge drag on productivity. I assert that this DOES matter. Even basic stuff like trying to use the default "array" as a dictionary has absolutely ridiculous issues like if you try to use a string as a key, but it is a string of digits. It will automagically convert your string to an int and totally F-up your dictionary.

I've actually been bitten by that one. And it showed up in production, because I didn't know or care what the string keys might be. Who the hell would've guessed that behavior after working with non-broken languages before?

Inb4 "That just means you're dumb. Just use SPL. You can write bad code in any language."

I've used Symfony. It's good. I haven't used Laravel. I assume it's also good. I still don't know why you'd choose to start a project in PHP today when there are great libraries in many other languages that are not as broken as PHP.

Honestly, PHP 7+ is not horrible, but it's also not better than anything else... In fact, the very best PHP code you can write today looks basically the same as the best Java code you could've written a decade ago.

dubcanada3• 6 years ago

What are "string keys"?

weego• 6 years ago

For a huge, huge potion of all work done by web developers day to day around the globe the language doesn't matter if the framework is productive and secure by default.

Most of it won't survive a handful of years at best and most companies won't ever benefit from the attitude of some developers that ever developer on ever task should be writing FAANG level code.

What 3nds yo happening it matter what you do is the next agency / person comes along and claims its not fit for purpose any more and redoes it 'better' and the cycle continues of low value

macinjosh3• 6 years ago

if you try to use a string as a key, but it is a string of digits. It will automagically(sic) convert your string to an int and totally F-up your dictionary

I've been a PHP programmer for over 15 years and I cannot think of a single time this has been an actual problem. It sounds like you were embarrassed by a bug in your code and have just decided to blame it on the tools.

unexaminedlife3• 6 years ago

I've done plenty of PHP programming (including modern) in the past. I'm excited about recent developments.

Not sure about the productivity claim. I once wrote from scratch (frameworks excluded) backend and frontend (version 1) of a multi-tenant, cloud-based video-sharing platform with PHP as the backend (aws cloud) in a matter of weeks.

I once wrote, from scratch (frameworks excluded), an entire backend (and front-end) of version 1 of a hybrid mobile app (backend in PHP) for a medium-size logistics company in a matter of less than 2 months.

I have other examples, but life is too short trying to convince "haters" that they might not be 100% correct.

I was the only developer on both of those projects. Your mileage may vary :)

Apofis• 6 years ago

Sounds like a jr dev misstep... you're not really bringing up any key points.

JadoJodo• 6 years ago

RE: string -> int, I'm not able to replicate this.

https://repl.it/@JadoJodo/SelfreliantEdibleUsers

edit: Not trying to discount your feelings overall, but just curious about that specific example.

romellem• 6 years ago

The PHP deal-breaker is that it casts[0] string keys that contain "valid decimal integers" to "the integer type"?

Seems like a fairly minor language quirk (of which almost every language has) rather than a huge feature that makes one want to avoid the language at all cost.

Of course, feel free to make your own choice when picking a language, but I don't think this is a compelling reason why one would always want to avoid using PHP for their web backend.

[0] https://www.php.net/manual/en/language.types.array.php

koheripbal• 6 years ago

Coming from Java, the one pet peeve I have is the automatic type conversion. I just find that I never really know what my variables are _really_ holding.

It's one of those foundational issues that I just can't get over.

...but it's my personal problem - I don't hate PHP.

tim_phpdev• 6 years ago

Work as a PHP dev, in a PHP/JS shop.

In all new work we require static typing on method parameters and defined return types. Of course, if your type is 'array' it could be an array of anything but we also try to avoid that and use collection classes. It honestly feels a lot like Java now, without the compile step.

techopoly2• 6 years ago

I wonder how many developers hate PHP because one is just supposed to hate PHP.

I'm sure there are many with well-thought-out reasoning though, like seen in this thread.

It's useful to keep an open mind about things though. I'm probably more a PHP fan, but I can't say that I'm a huge fan of its programming style. It's much more enjoyable to me to churn out applications in .NET or in Ruby, but it's hard to argue with the speed at which I can develop in PHP or with the level of support online for doing so.

fatbird2• 6 years ago

I think you're missing a third group of PHP haters that's actually a majority: those who've used PHP, sometimes extensively, and built up a backlog of "this is stupid" bits in their head about it. They don't have deeply reflective reasons or a strong theoretical basis for hating it, they've just suffered with it for a good while, found some better alternative, and are now sceptical that any amount of improvement will be able to outweigh the friction they "know" will be there if they try to come back.

So the anti-PHP feeling for this group is broad but shallow. Here's what I think is interesting: JavaScript is here right now. Like PHP, it's incredibly popular, almost mandatory to know in some degreee, and using it for any length of time causes one to build up a catalog of "WTF?" and workarounds and "use this library instead" and a constant churn of "it's great if you use <some framework or conceptual approach> on top of it".

I used PHP a lot, and found it quite pleasant with Laravel, but the latent pool of distaste means I'll never go back. I work heavily with JS now, and can feel that wide puddle of "why do I have to put up with this?" spreading, even while other parts are really good.

I don't know how you overcome this, broadly. Perhaps it doesn't matter, because I think this group (and I'm part of it) blows with the wind more than most, and if the winds shift back, we'll probably come along.

CommieBobDole• 6 years ago

I think this is probably an example of the larger tendency of people to overrate the importance of whatever it is they directly work with, and its effect on their workflow. Like a carpenter insisting that using a certain brand of hammer has an effect on the habitability of the resulting house.

After years of using a lot of products and seeing which ones succeed and which ones fail, I question whether there's much of a connection between code quality and product success, assuming of course that the code isn't bad enough that it prevents the use of the product.

Heck, I'm not even sure there's a strong correlation between basic product function and success, at least in the enterprise space; I've seen a number of successful products that barely even work. Seems like market positioning and sales are the bigger factor.

yjftsjthsd-h• 6 years ago

I think this is probably an example of the larger tendency of people to overrate the importance of whatever it is they directly work with, and its effect on their workflow. Like a carpenter insisting that using a certain brand of hammer has an effect on the habitability of the resulting house.

One brand of hammer causes RSI. This brand of hammer tends to bend nails unless they're made of titanium alloy at 80% higher cost. The houses built are basically fine, but they have quirks as a result of the builders trying to avoid having to use nails. You lose 10% of your workforce after every project to medical leave and burnout. Everything is fine because people keep buying houses (there's a shortage).

jrs95• 6 years ago

Not gonna lie my #1 complaint is that PHP jobs on average pay like shit in comparison to most other things. I don't want to work with it solely because it has no value on my resume.

That being said the biggest argument for PHP is productivity and I just prefer Ruby + Rails for that. Honestly though I will say I find PHP more pleasant to work with than Python these days.

wnevets• 6 years ago

I wonder if most developers that trash on PHP for trivial issues like seen in this thread haven't been using it for many years, or had a bad experience (e.g. maintaining a legacy app).

I wouldn't be surprised if many of them don't even have that experience. I've found a lot of people just parrot whatever someone else wrote or said without much thought. The tribalism within the development community is approaching what you'll find with in gaming, sports and even politics.

pinopinopino• 6 years ago

I wonder if most developers that trash on PHP for trivial issues like seen in this thread haven't been using it for many years, or had a bad experience (e.g. maintaining a legacy app).

Think this is true. I am one of those php haters, although I wouldn't trash it. I worked with 4 and 5 and the transition between the two, so it is a while ago. I am not fondly remembering that time and have moved to other branches than web development to evade it.

That being said, if I would go back to web development, I would have a look at it. Why not?

overgard• 6 years ago

Why would I ever want to use it again after php5? It might be better now but the competition is so much better than what php5 was that I have zero reason to revisit the language.

2ion• 6 years ago

Is it possible to write long-running processes well in PHP today? Is the memory management of PHP up to the task? Or is it all a *cgi-based execution model? This question still is what makes it hard to place PHP. Basically all "high perf"/"high load" applications of it I know about run under PHP-FPM or webserver modules or uwsgi.

AegirLeet10• 6 years ago

Long-running processes are definitely possible. You obviously have to be a bit more careful not to leak memory.

It's common to have things like queue workers implemented as long-running CLI processes. I just checked one of our services at work and there's a queue process that has been running for more than 4 months. There might be others that have been running even longer, but I don't feel like checking every service right now ;)

Projects like Swoole or ReactPHP are trying to make similar things possible for serving web requests too.

no_gravity• 6 years ago

PHP has a lot going for it. It is popular, fast, has a nice syntax and a ton of useful functionality baked right into the language.

The main weakness I see in PHP is the lack of modules. PHP provides namespaces to avoid name conflicts. First of all, that does not completely root out naming conflicts. The developer who puts a namescpace into their code can only hope that it does not clash with someone else's.

Secondly, it makes it necessary that both, the code that provides reusable functionality and the code that uses it have to deal with the issue of namespaces.

A module system like Python and Javascript have is superior to this. Then only the user of the reusable code decides where to put it into the namespace.

AegirLeet10• 6 years ago

I'm a PHP dev and I'm pretty happy with the language, especially some of the things introduced in recent versions. I think it's a fine choice for anything that doesn't fall in the "low-level, high-performance" or "mobile/desktop app" categories.

For web applications, I think PHP's idea of a clean slate for every request also makes a lot of sense and immensely simplifies development. I can write a simple PHP application that handles thousands of concurrent requests without even thinking about threading, synchronization, memory leaks or anything like that because handling that stuff is basically built-in.

PHP has a really good ecosystem. A framework like Laravel can do just about anything you'd need in an application out of the box. Routing, rendering HTML, generating URLs, handling sessions, logging, validating requests, an ORM, translations, encryption, sending emails, queues, schedules, caching - it's all there. I've never seen anything quite as fully-featured in any other language. On Packagist, I can find packages for pretty much anything from clients for obscure SOAP APIs to libraries for handling GraphQL. There's also a lot of great tooling, with a good package manager, static analysis tools like Psalm, code formatters etc. Also, PhpStorm is a fantastic IDE.

Outside of PHP, I mostly have experience with Java and JS.

If you know Java, modern PHP isn't all that different. Java has some nice stuff that I hope we'll get in PHP some day (generics is the big one). I built an application using the Play framework (Java version) a couple years ago and it was quite similar to modern PHP frameworks. However, there was always a bit more complexity with Java. Everything was just slightly more complicated. So with the trade-off basically being performance (which is better in Java) vs. ease of use and developer experience (which I think is better in PHP), I'd choose PHP most of the time.

Now, when comparing it to JS, I'm really glad I mostly get work with PHP instead of JS. I know this might sound strange coming from a PHP developer, but holy shit, JS is a mess. When writing JS, I'm constantly going between "oh, nice, this is really easy to do with Vue" and "what the fuck does that error even mean, how am I supposed to find any problem buried under several layers of bundlers, polyfills, loaders, transpilers and reactive frontend black magic?". If JS wasn't the only thing that works in a browser, I would avoid it like the plague.

cletus2• 6 years ago

It saddens me to see some of the (largely baseless and otherwise largely historical) hate for PHP. I use Hack in my day job, which has at this point diverged from PHP, and I like it for the most part.

The thing that PHP does right that so few languages do is having a stateless core in the webserver. This is an incredibly efficient approach to serving HTTP traffic. Consider the startup cost issues with Java, or Rails' single request at a time model or even Python's startup (and GIL).

The second thing PHP does right is it request scopes everything. Simply throw away everything you created when the request ends. No dangling references and memory leaks (pretty much) like you get with stateful Java services (eg whatever servlets is now).

And the third is no multithreading in the core API. Starting and synchronizing threads is incredibly difficult to get right and adds a huge overhead to everything with little gain when you're just servicing an HTTP request, almost all of the time.

Hack has 2 things PHP7 doesn't quite have that I'd miss:

1. A better type system; and

2. async/await for cooperative multi-tasking.

I still hate the backslash for namespaces though.

spdionis2• 6 years ago

The thing that PHP does right that so few languages do is having a stateless core in the webserver.

I never understood why the HN crowd always ignored this massive benefit of PHP, in a world where it's becoming clearer everyday that keeping things stateless across the stack provides many benefits towards managing complex systems.

q3k• 6 years ago

Because this is not always a benefit. Want to cache something in between requests? You have to use memcached/redis. Want to have some background or periodic processing? Set up cronjobs, and/or use an external job queue system.

Sure, if you're writing a simple CRUD app with and RDBMS backend it can be just fine. But when you're dealing with more complex work just being able to start a goroutine or use an in-memory cache structure is so much nicer than having to deal with external systems.

kstrauser2• 6 years ago

Most of the interesting things I’ve worked on would fall down if you couldn’t cache some stuff across requests, like database connections. If every request requires a new TCP connection, even if to something lightweight and fast like a local pgbouncer instance, requests are going to be a lot slower (and the time spent context switching from userspace to kernelspace and back a lot higher) than if you could reuse one from an in-memory pool.

I love stateless stuff and have started moving a lot of things to Lambdas where appropriate, but I wouldn’t use a completely stateless setup for handling large numbers of requests per unit time.

twhitmore3• 6 years ago

Request processing in Java (or any other sane language) is Request-scoped.

The Request is a variable, the Response is a variable, they're only in local scope?

And any data the developer uses will also be local -- and thus stateless -- unless they go out of their way to share something. (Caches are a common example, but harder in PHP since nothing by default is shareable.)

You don't need to deal with threads if you're seeking PHP-equivalent functionality.

And if you did need to deal with threads, I find your claims about overheads & difficulty hard to read without a little skepticism. An idle thread is faster to start than spawning a process, an uncontended synchronization takes only 20-250 CPU cycles (ie. a modest number of nanoseconds), and a thread pool can be sensibly managed in 2-3 lines of code.

ragnese20• 6 years ago

I think what the comment really means by "request scoped" is that the PHP process is totally torn down after each request. In Java you can mutate global state as its running. You can leak memory until you OOM.

fergie• 6 years ago

PHP -> much better that people often give it credit for

I've hardly ever used PHP over the course of my 20 year career, being mostly on C, Java and JavaScript, but on the few times that I have, I have always been really impressed with all aspects of the experience.

Whatever academic semantic deficiencies PHP might have, there is no more accessible language for making web site backends with and its sad that so many people are discouraged from using it.

fimdomeio• 6 years ago

It's sad that php as such a bad rep that I figured I should say "I code in Go. Php? Yeah I can do that too" so I don't get some eye rolling and an instant prejudice I'm a cheap coder. For it's age php is great and pretty easy to setup (having to intall separate modules for imagemagick and cryptography is just a tiny assle). Composer should really solve it's large memory usage problems, but other than that it's pretty good.

It's really good for it's intended purposes and is getting a lot better in latest versions.

thrusong2• 6 years ago

I've been programming in PHP since 2007 and I absolutely love it. I've long ignored the hate for it here. I worked hard and followed best practices to get good at PHP.

In 2015, I started writing "projectionist" software in PHP to completely automate my home theatre.

I was a projectionist at three different theatres for about half a decade. I spoke with old-timers to really get it right and have been tweaking this script regularly ever since.

I've got a Netflix-style website for my movie collection. I can watch a feature either in my browser or choose to play it in the cinema. I can even schedule a feature for 7:00pm and it will wake-up 30 minutes before with music and nice lighting, assemble all the dancing hot dog ads and trailers, play it, turn the lights on for the credits, and shut itself down 30 minutes after.

The little ODROID running the whole theatre opens a chat room connection over XMPP with my servers so it can respond to controls in the app, whether I'm adjusting lighting or sound levels, putting it in Desktop mode, or manually controlling the curtain and projector.

I just ignore the PHP hate because I find it extremely powerful- it can do everything I could ever need. I also always want to keep an open mind.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cc8K6lg7Ag8

infamia• 6 years ago

This is fantastic! Do you have a code repo somewhere?

thrusong2• 6 years ago

Unfortunately, no, I haven't published the source code. I'd maybe like to commercialize it in the future, but it would require either some tech to compile PHP or would need to be re-written.

I think it's a really simple system overall... It uses XMPPHP (updated for PHP 7) and otherwise it's just a lot of loops, network calls, and proc_* functions.

perlgeek• 6 years ago

Can anybody comment on the state of Unicode in PHP?

I dimly remember that "proper" Unicode support was planned for PHP 6, and being one of the features that delayed that version, and contributed to it being skipped altogether.

vatotemking2• 6 years ago

This may sound hurtful but hear me out - One thing worth mentioning why someone would not want to use PHP in 2020 is that a PHP programmer is looked down upon by other programmers.

And im saying this without hate or malice. I love PHP since I was a PHP dev from 5.2 - 7.0. I built PHP libraries and WordPress plugins that have helped many people. Ive since moved to Node because PHP jobs have dried up in my country.

PHP devs arent respected which is sad because we all belong to the same programming community. And PHP has contributed a lot to the proliferation of websites. At the end of the day programming languages dont matter to businesses as long as it gets the job done at a reasonabe cost.

gnarbarian• 6 years ago

Haters gonna hate. Node.js programmers are looked down upon too by go programmers. C programmers are an anachronism, haskell is for academic navel gazing etc. Small minds think their favorite language is the best because they can't see outside their own problem domain.

Languages are tools that suit different needs. Use the best tool for the job, pay attention to industry trends so you don't become a Cobol dinosaur with no job prospects. Switching to node is a good career move but it won't be your last. Node has incredible momentum and developer mindshare. You can accomplish a lot with it but node projects are difficult to maintain.

Never stop learning or growing.

wolco3• 6 years ago

In fairness the wheel has turned and node developers are seen as not respected. If you haven't moved to go/rust/serverless by 2018 the cool market has moved.

When I got started in 2000, php developers weren't as smart as perl developers. Then it was asp. No serious business would use php over asp. Java developers always had this attutiude but they were always treated as second class from c++ developers who were treated bad by c developers who were using a toy language compared to asm.

At some point 2006/2007 php became cool. But then the facebook movie came out and php was uncool again. Ruby on rails was better (unless you were twitter and wanted to scale). Then node. Go. Serverless.

PHP has always been anticool and looked down on. You need a strong sense of self to get involved.

optymizer• 6 years ago

As a fun, tongue-in-cheek project, someone should build a website with this timeline of languages going from cool to uncool.

For people who are busy with life and work, but who want to learn a new cool language, it would answer the question "what's the cool thing right now?". You look at the timeline, it's language X.

This also enables fun future oniony articles like "Go no longer cool", "Rust going the way of the dinosaur", "C++ is the new kid on the block", "Node.js is dead, long live X" etc.

lowercased• 6 years ago

I think you forgot the "ColdFusion" crowd looking down on PHP too... :)

joelbluminator12• 6 years ago

Oof you have no idea how Ruby devs are shat on, sometimes by other miserable Ruby devs.

mnm12• 6 years ago

I look down upon people who look down upon people for their technology choices and would never willingly work with such assholes. Your point is irrelevant because those are people I have no interest in working with. To look down upon others (rather than a language) indicates that one is a complete idiot, asshole, and someone I'd rather not meet. Better those people self select out of my life when they hear php because they would clearly be a detriment to me and to anyone who isn't a moron like them. Not to mention unprofessional, naive, and arrogant.

qu4ku• 6 years ago

If you want to know why-the-hate watch this[1] talk — one of the best and eye-opening talks I've ever heard.

It has nothing to do with the language itself and everything to do with the user of the language.

[1] The Pervert's Guide to Computer Programming Languages https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZyvIHYn2zk

ashtonkem• 6 years ago

I ended up using PHP while I worked in a design shop, as it was extremely easy to both implement designs in and easy for low-tech clients to run.

It wasn’t bad. Good docs, reasonably easy to run & deploy (except Wordpress). I don’t think I’ll ever use it again more due to career reasons, temperamentally I prefer the backend, but given the same circumstances I’d use it again.

somurzakov• 6 years ago

can anybody explain what is the purpose of static typing in a dynamic language ? It's not like you get benefit of compilation like java/C#.

Why is PHP trying to become java so hard, if there is already java and .NET ?

proto-n• 6 years ago

You can compare static typing in php to typescript or static typing in python. It's for correctness, not performance.

aceman22• 6 years ago

Laravel is the best REST api framework in existence for any language. Change my mind.

nuncanada• 6 years ago

REST is a waste of time and effort, use GraphQL.

tzs2• 6 years ago

How well are older releases of Laravel supported?

I see on their website they are on version 7.x, and have documentation online there also for 6.x, 5.8, 5.7, 5.6, 5.5, 5.4, 5.3, 5.2, 5.1, 5.0, and 4.2.

For those with a conservative server software approach who install a Linux distro that will have long term support and then stick with it up until near the end of that long term, and stick with the version of PHP that came with the distro, we have to go back to 5.5 or 5.4 or maybe even earlier to get a Laravel that works with our PHP.

(Symfony appears to be at 5.3, with 4.4 and 3.4 still maintained. 3.4 will work with most major distros that are still in LTS, except I'm not sure about RHEL. 4.4 has the same requirements as Laravel 5.6, and so misses out on some existing LTS distros).

mtnGoat5• 6 years ago

i would probably look at updating and keeping a more secure OS that can run modern software. Asking a framework to maintain a version of their framework for a version of PHP that is no longer supported, is not realistic.

also laravel is open source, if you want to update an old version because you want to run unsupported software, you are welcome to do it yourself also.

gabordemooij• 6 years ago

Funny, while I see that many people enjoy the features that come with this maturity (and I am happy for those people of course), I long for the simplicity of the classic style PHP.

Personally, I do not enjoy the Java-style 'enterprisey' direction of PHP. I don't like types, anonymous functions, treats and all the other fancy stuff. To be honest, I think I myself would still be happy with PHP4. I use thin scripts, almost no classes, alternative PHP template syntax and I am completely frameworkless. But I guess I am just a nihilist ;-).

luckylion5• 6 years ago

I do like the enterprisey direction personally, mostly because it works so well with a good IDE. I'm using PHPStorm and once you've got your project set up, code completion/suggestion and inspections are something I love.

DonHopkins• 6 years ago

Now the trash dumpster is no longer actually on fire, and it has nice bright orange flames painted on it, like a racing car!

chipotle_coyote3• 6 years ago

I'm starting a new project in PHP now. I've used the language for a long time, I think starting with the 3.x days, and it's come a long way. There's a lot of good things about it.

But.

I recently joked in frustration that I missed the days when PHP was a cargo cult version of Perl rather than a cargo cult version of Java. It's a joke, it's not a fully fair criticism, but I can't help but feel there's some truth to it. PHP is a fast dynamic language literally designed for embedding in web pages, with a batteries included mindset that shoves all sorts of useful things into the language itself (yes, kind of haphazardly and occasionally in slipshod fashion). If I want to know what the path of the request is, for instance, I could just do:

    $url = parse_url($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']);
    $path = urldecode($url['path']);

But that's not The Right Way anymore, is it? Instead, I should use a PSR-7 compliant request object, and do this:

    $request = Laminas\Diactoros\ServerRequestFactory::fromGlobals();
    $uri = $request->getUri();
    $path = $uri->getPath();

"Okay, Chipotle, but that's just one more line, stop whining." Sure, but it's three lines that instantiates a Request object that in turn instantiates Stream and Uri objects and importa two Traits and implements, I don't know, let's say four? four Interfaces, and--

"Come on, it's still fast." Yes! Sure But you know what's faster? Looking at the $_SERVER variable. I can't help but paraphrase a famous quote:

Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll use a design pattern." Now they have two problems.

I know. I know. Using factories and dependency injection containers and tying yourself into knots to avoid anything that remotely looks like a global makes things testable and composable and decoupled, but it is so freaking heavyweight compared to other dynamic languages. Python's Flask web framework has a global context object just called "g", which is essentially a singleton that lets you arbitrarily store properties on it, not just variables but database connections. OMG GLOBAL RUN AWAY AAAA no, you know what? It's fine. Yes, in some sense it's probably more dangerous because someone could come along and blow away your database connection by overwriting the "g.db" property, but maybe sometimes the simpler answer is "well, don't do that."

Look, I've used Symfony, and CakePHP, and Laravel 4. I think I even contributed a test to Laravel 4's testing framework way back when. They're great. And I'm not saying "let's all just throw out objects and all separations of concern and mix HTML and business logic like it's 1999, baby." But PHP is virtually a framework on its own, and at times it feels like many smart people have put a great deal of effort into building entirely different frameworks on top of it, paradigms that PHP wasn't intended to fit into.

So for my new project, I'm just... rolling it all from scratch. I don't have a composer.json file because I don't need PHP-FIG compatibility--although the four-line autoloader I have would technically load any PSR-4 compatible module if I wanted to. It's using the front controller pattern, it has regex-based routing, it has a simple template system with layouts, it has request and response objects, it uses type hinting. It's probably not super great, but it's... kind of refreshing to write this way.

I love PHP despite its warts, and it's great that it's learned so much from Enterprise JavaBeanServerNetSwingPattern land. But I admit I'm kinda hoping for it all to get a little more relaxed about, you know, still being a dynamic language.

block_dagger• 6 years ago

As someone who started my career in PHP in 2002 and switched to Rails in 2008, I can say I do not miss PHP. I still maintain my old apps only because of the high pay associated, not because it is joyful. PHP's version of "mature" does not match other modern langs, not even close imho.

anonyfox• 6 years ago

Many emotional language bashing comments here, and everything between „php is dead“ to „php is awesome now“.

Personally I liked that php has an ultra low entrance bar: shared hosting for $2, ftp deployment, no advanced syntax to understand. When starting work in teams instead of solo and coding nontrivial business rules, this ease of doing died for me. Moved on.

Many years of JavaScript, doing nodejs since 0.4, it was just like having superpowers and doing isomorphic things. Mixing things every other month with coffeescript, babel, typescript and trying a different framework for every new project. What once felt refreshing is now just exhausting and JS projects tends to end in rewrite loops.

Before/Inbetween/After there were many languages, from C at university, to C#, Ruby, Go, ... . Mostly the tech didn‘t change much, but over time emotions change for me. Longest streak of love had ruby, shortest had Go (just a few weeks before it became disgusting for me). I believe thats Personal and different for everyone.

After all my reflections I finally settled with just two choices of techstacks: Elixir/Phoenix for all things Web and Rust for everything else.

Writing highlevel businesscode , interactive exploration of things, CRUD things and realtime frontends in Phoenix is a breeze. But this ease of use has tradeoffs as always, I always feel that this dynamic code is somewhat „fluffy“, but ist seems that this is a key to prototype and ship things rapidly.

When i do want to do things that feel more „substantial“/„meaningful“ than just assembling yet another web product, I Switch to Rust. Producing a statically linked, crosscompiled binary that is „proven“ to work after discussing with the compiler is deeply satisfying for me. Unlike those „fluff“ / yet-another-web-product work.

Full Circle to PHP: awesome to see static typing available now! But this alone doesn’t make it feel so heavily baremetal for me, still fluffy with types bolted on. It is the fastest php ever, but still in the ballpark of scripting languages. It has mature, productive frameworks, but Phoenix feels superior and leading the way (next rails? Dunno), so why bother if php plays catch up to moving targets?

Software Development has become somewhat like fashion now, and PHP looks like those jeans jackets people had in east germany. Not inherently bad, fully functional for its purpose, but once you experience the taste of freedom in the western world you insist to have „real“ things. Best metaphor I can think of, but as stated: most discussions here are highly emotional, and it’s hard to put that in words.

dilandau• 6 years ago

PHP is great. Nothing comes near as close when you just want to shit some SQL-queries onto a page, or add some basic interactivity. Just drop your scripts in /var/www and let apache do the rest. It's like magic.

KerryJones2• 6 years ago

As someone who has programmed PHP professionally for 13+ years (and also JS and Python) I have never run into anyone who can place a solid argument since the PHP 7 + Laravel.

-- Let me clarify, PHP is useful with context. For building web apps. Each language has its best-uses. Laravel has the strongest ecosystem and community out of any language/framework combo I've seen.

I can literally setup and deploy a laravel application on a horizontally scaled setup with CI & autodeploy within an hour -- while maintaining industry standards.

PHP had its problems -- historically, but so did most languages. Do you remember Javascript before Node/React? Or before jQuery/Prototype? It was _trash_.

The biggest "con" to using PHP is that it's "bad" for the resume, no one is excited about it, so when looking to hire for it, most developers don't feel inspired by it -- which is a serious consideration depending on your circumstance.

dpacmittal• 6 years ago

Javascript is still trash. What with the insane amount of configuration and build tools, extremely small standard library forcing you to use third party modules which may or may not have tens of security issues and the dependency hell it brings with it. I can go on and on.

CSSer• 6 years ago

I was raised in the darkness, so things don’t often look as bad as they are to me. Regardless, the clear distinction between PHP and JavaScript seems to be that I can choose whether or not I’d like to use one but not the other (and no, wasm doesn’t count because it still requires JS).

For me, I just don’t why I’d choose to use it for a green field project. Sure, it’s better now, but people have warned me to stay away from the boogeyman lurking within. Maybe it’s there, maybe it’s not. But why should I take the risk if it’s pretty much the same as other modern languages that might have cool stuff.

srhngpr• 6 years ago

Do you remember Javascript before Node/React? Or before jQuery/Prototype? It was _trash_.

Anyone remember Dynamic Drive DHTML? http://dynamicdrive.com/

paulgrimes1• 6 years ago

Ha! I recall Dynamic Drive.

ronlobo2• 6 years ago

I agree to the point you're mentioning industry standard. PHP is not considered in the enterprise environment, simply for all it's flaws and it's security vulnerabilities and still has the same problems as before. Most languages don't have those problems.

Ayesh4• 6 years ago

PHP as a language had inherently insecure designs such as register_globals and RCE in unserialize().

When working on reviews, it's often as easy as grepping for "unserialize" and working your way from there for an easy bounty.

However, PHP has matured a lot. There is not a hint of register_globals as of now, and we have proper serializers, in addition to RCE-free improvements to original unserialize().

With native support for proper password hashing, sodium, and other improvements lately, one could argue that PHP is one of the most secure languages out there.

Ayesh4• 6 years ago

All my projects require PHP 7.4, and it's such a joy to write the modern almost-strict typed, namespaced, and code that is often inter-operable, tested with a nice testing framework, and managed with an excellent dependency manager.

I have my reservations against Laravel though. Its excessive use of static methods is not my appetite, and its rapid release cycle gives less headroom to keep track in contrast to Symfony for example, which follows Semver strictly.

KerryJones2• 6 years ago

What's wrong with the static methods? And do you mean beyond helpers?

Laravel gets a major update about once a year from what I've followed (disclosure: I've been to Laracon twice, you could probably classify me as fanboy) -- I _haven't_ used Symfony, but I have enjoyed the rapid release cycle of Larave. It also generally takes 20-30 minutes to update to the latest major release, and if not, there is a service for $10 or so to update it for you

root_axis2• 6 years ago

Ah, it's like old times again. Nowadays all the language-snob threads are directed towards JavaScript, but I remember the days when PHP was the language of choice for what HN considers the inferior programmer. Fun memories, all this thread is missing is a link to the fractal of bad design rant.

localareaman• 6 years ago

It's not language quality and merits per se that are important. It's much about establishing status within a tribe that counts. PHP is seen as a low status language because many junior or moderately skilled programmers use it. Rust is a popular language among up and coming young programmers because they expect to over throw the dominance of older C++ programmers. Haskell is for the high priests if that is your path to power and status.

root_axis2• 6 years ago

I agree with your analysis.

JadeNB• 6 years ago

Why was the title changed from "PHP showing its maturity in release 7.4", which doesn't seem clickbait-y or anything?

ChrisMarshallNY• 6 years ago

PHP is the Web's C++.

It keeps getting declared dead, but then, keeps rising from the grave.

I wrote PHP for a long time (more than 20 years). Many, many thousands of lines of it. I got fairly good at it. I wrote my last big application in it about a year and a half ago (PHP 7.3, I think). It's a great application, but no one would want it, as it does the same thing lots of big SaaS does.

Except one single person wrote it, from soup to nuts (no dependencies), in about six months -part time- (it was sort of a "thesis" project for me, as I was re-learning my engineering discipline), and it's quite good quality. So I guess PHP is good for something. I just open-sourced the application, and more or less sent it out to stud.

https://riftvalleysoftware.com/work/open-source-projects/#ba...

I discuss my design methodology for the project here: https://medium.com/chrismarshallny/forensic-design-documenta...

That said, I never really liked the language, and am glad to have seen the back of it. I write full-time in Swift, nowadays, and would be thrilled to never write PHP ever again.

Despite all the hate, though, it's a perfectly good language; especially with all the stuff added in 7+.

tabtab• 6 years ago

I really miss optional named parameters. I hope PHP adds that feature.

cutler4• 6 years ago

What put me off PHP for life was the assumption by employers and recruiters that PHP rates are at least 20% lower than for JS, Rails or Django. PHP just isn't respected professionally.

A look at modern PHP

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