Learn PHP the Right Way

There's certainly a ton of use cases where php is a few minute job and anything else is 10x more or even longer just like is true with shell scripts and perl

Snobbery is like saying you're intellectually superior to using a specific screwdriver or kitchen knife.

forgetfreeman3• 2 years ago

Or they're simply committed to using the wrong tools for the job out of some misguided ideology someone else handed them when they were too new to know better.

archerx6• 2 years ago

PHP is so much nicer to use on a webserver vs Python or JS. It’s almost like PHP was built for the web and fits it like a tailored suit!

Would I use PHP to make games? No! I wouldn’t use JS or Python for that either.

I try to use the best language for the job without letting any cargo cult biases get in the way.

Front end stuff? JS!

Backend stuff? PHP!

AI stuff? Python!

Games and microcontrollers? C/C++!

wiseowise• 2 years ago

PHP is so much nicer to use on a webserver vs Python or JS.

How?

bearjaws5• 2 years ago

Is it really that good for backend?

1. You will still need to learn JS, and now it may even be embedded in PHP depending on the type of app you are working with!

2. It still has horrible conventions, arrays being sorted maps has to be one of the worst design decisions, IMO its worse than having null and undefined as types. Mutlibyte strings are still an afterthought in the core of PHP. Inconsistent function naming. It's new typing system is plain worse than TS in every way. Async programming is still terrible. Needle Haystack swapparoos throughout the language.

3. It was built for the web as it stood 20 years ago, HTML embedded in code, single server sessions, cgi servers, and minimal latency server to server communication. It cannot feel more out of place today.

I will give it: Laravel is a robust framework that helps hide some of this, but its hard to hide most of it.

patmorgan23• 2 years ago

Disagree. Laravel is a great productive framework and there are actually a lot of high paying PHO jobs

LoganDark• 2 years ago

PHP is usually the only option for running server-side code on shared/managed hosting. (Either that, or a version of Ruby from 2004. Do you want to use Ruby from 2004?)

InsideOutSanta• 2 years ago

I think for probably more than half of all websites out there, something like LAMP is either the optimal, or very close to the optimal solution. It's absolutely bonkers to me what kinds of tech stacks people use to render what essentially amounts to a bunch of forms.

CM30• 2 years ago

At least half of all websites would probably be better of if their creators realised they needed something closer to a 'blog' than a 'web app'. It's especially true when it comes to the media industry, who seem to love creating the most over engineered SPAs possible for functionality that's barely changed since the 90s.

bearjaws5• 2 years ago

I'd say swap out MySQL but yeah, a CMS is 99% of what you need.

jim180• 2 years ago

After spending many years on Objective-C/Swift, I had a couple of opportunities to work with Django (Python), and then Laravel (PHP).

I'd take Laravel with Livewire (and some Alpine.js) over Django any-day. Plus my gut feeling says, that React would be as pleasant as Laravel and co.

rob• 2 years ago

Not if you're trying to make money and learn Web development. PHP is king.

I'd rather get paid $1,000 to build something that takes < 1 day and $50-150/month to maintain something on a $20 VPS using a tried and true Web technology with tons of developer support and a stable ecosystem.

I can start a new Laravel project and with a starter kit have 50% of the site done. Auth's already done out of the box. The ecosystem is amazing. The tooling is amazing. WordPress is amazing and its ability to extend itself and build almost anything you want is amazing.

I'm moving on to the next client while someone is crying about WordPress' arcane database structure or code and they're still sitting at a text editor with some Haskell code.

All I have to do is worry about my project, not create OCD for 2 weeks on the best way to set something up out of 10 different ways.

I'm not worrying about which flavor of JavaScript framework is in popularity this week - I'm not worrying about how to deploy my Python app and setting up Kubernetes. I'm not worried about compiling my Elixir project to WASM and deploying to Fly.io to support my 1 visitor a month.

ChrisMarshallNY2• 2 years ago

I didn’t mean to start a language war.

Lot of that going around; especially in venues like this, which has a lot of "Ooh! Shiny!" going on. I tend to be a bit more conservative than many; but not to any kind of extreme degree. I like new stuff, but I also like shipping, which doesn't come from the bleeding edge.

Personally, I use PHP on my backend work, mostly because it's a known quantity, and is an industrial-strength, massively-supported system, that is not going anywhere but up.

And I don't feel like learning a whole new language and API, just for some relatively minor-scale server work (I spend most of my time, writing native Swift frontends).

If it's good enough for PornHub, it's good enough for me.

That said, if PHP were, as is often falsely claimed, going away, I'd probably learn something new. I doubt it would be the tip of The Shiny Spear, but it would be a more modern system; maybe Python. I've never actually liked working with PHP, but the same could be said for most languages I've used. I like Swift.

As it is, I would still want to learn Laravel, before moving away from PHP. From what I understand, it's a fantastic framework, that makes PHP a much more effective server system.

muglug2• 2 years ago

Passively watching YouTube is probably not the right way to learn any progamming language.

frabert• 2 years ago

Anecdotal at best, but that is essentially the way I learned English, and definitely the reason I think I don't have a distracting accent when talking in English.

muglug2• 2 years ago

Edited to specify I'm talking about programming languages...

calvinmorrison• 2 years ago

PHP in 2024 is really nice. It's come a long way but is still very rock steady.

hu32• 2 years ago

This playlist is a great overview.

I watched it myself and learned a thing or two despite also working with PHP professionally for years.

Highly recommend to also stop after each video and try to implement a quick example of what it is teaching.

cletus• 2 years ago

It's disappointing that PHP still gets hate in 2024. PHP of 2024 isn't the PHP of 2004. As someone with a bunch of experience in Java, C, C++, Python, PHP, Hack, Javascript and a handful of others, PHP is (IMHO) almost a perfect language for serving HTTP requests because of these characteristics:

1. Essentially an HTML document is a valid PHP program. This is an excellent starting point for beginners;

2. PHP has a stateless API that means there's basically zero start up cost, unlike, say, loading libraries like you do in Java or even Python;

3. There's no threading within the context of a request. This is what you want 99.99% of the time. Hack extended this with cooperative async/await;

4. Because of (3) everything you allocate/use within a request context just gets thrown away. There's no persistent state (eg like Java's servlet model). Again, this is almost ideal;

5. Because of all the above, PHP hosting is incredibly cheap and accessible.

The two things I'd probably add to PHP come from Hack: a modern type system with nullable support and the collections (vec, map, set).

teqsun• 2 years ago

Honestly speaking, the main thing that always made me dislike PHP was lots of things related to the syntax. Call it petty, but it's the truth.

I've always felt that PHP could greatly benefit from a Kotlin-esque interop language with a more modern syntax and QoL upgrades, but I'm not sure if the juice is really worth the squeeze.

citrin_ru• 2 years ago

IMHO most of hate is just because it is fashionable to hate some languages including PHP and Perl. But there is some criticism which looks valid to me e. g. [1]

Regarding embedded into HTML PHP code - it's a easy for beginners but in a large application it leads to hard to maintain mix of app logic and presentation - AFAIK this feature is rarely used outside toy project for many years.

[1] https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/ (very old and some issues may be were addressed but it's hard to fix all of this without creating an incompatible language)

9dev• 2 years ago

Embedding PHP in HTML is often treated as a kind of dirty legacy we don’t talk about, even though is actually an amazing prototyping feature. As long as you use it like you would use Jupyter notebooks, you’re golden.

Alifatisk• 2 years ago

Take me back to the LAMP stack days, good times

replwoacause• 2 years ago

I like PHP, and guess what? I also like PowerShell for web apps. I don't really care what anybody says—I can build fast in PowerShell. My clients are happy, it's simple to debug, and I can tap into .NET classes when necessary. PowerShell + HTML + Alpine = productivity. I'm not building the next Netflix or Amazon and the end-user isn't going to notice or care that I haven't selected Node and React.

I just can't get behind the complexity of build steps and compiling, all just to get a website online. It's crazy. The simplicity that PowerShell (and PHP) bring to this process can't be overlooked... so I like to beat on this drum whenever I get the chance.

Choose the tool that is right for the job, and PHP can be that tool in a surprising number of cases.

mats852• 2 years ago

I really learned to appreciate what Powershell is after listening to @adamgordonbell CoRecursive episode with Jeffrey Snover (https://corecursive.com/building-powershell-with-jeffrey-sno...).

I really loved PHP, but now with go+templ (https://templ.guide) I personally don't have a use-case for PHP anymore, but that doesn't mean it's irrelevant for the world.

throwitaway11234• 2 years ago

I really loved PHP, but now with go+templ (https://templ.guide) I personally don't have a use-case for PHP anymore, but that doesn't mean it's irrelevant for the world.

This is the first time I've heard of Templ. It looks cool and it was really easy to set up. Apparently there are IDE extensions to enable syntax highlighting and HTML auto-completion, but is there a way to type check the templates? One of the things I love about JSX as a templating language is that errors in your markup get reported as type errors [1]. If I write `<a herf="/foo">` instead of `<a href="/foo">` and run `tsc --noEmit --watch`, TypeScript will complain until I fix the issue. You can even extend the types to support your own HTML custom elements. JSX is a first class citizen in TS (and by extension any editor or IDE with support for TS).

[1] https://github.com/DefinitelyTyped/DefinitelyTyped/blob/mast...

Learn PHP the Right Way

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