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Wordpress is horrible. Never going to touch that again (Senior PHP Dev myself) or anything else like it (Magento, Drupal,...). And yes there is a lot of horrib

Wordpress is horrible. Never going to touch that again (Senior PHP Dev myself) or anything else like it (Magento, Drupal,...). And yes there is a lot of horrible PHP code out there, writting by bad developers. I guess newer or not as accessible languages don't have as many bad devs as PHP/JS. But if you have good devs, I prefer a good PHP codebase to any other language that I have come across (I tried a lot of them).

pthreadses 10y ago
Could you elaborate a bit on what you prefer about it? I've heard this from a few people and would be curious to hear it fleshed out a bit.
- dreistdreist 10y ago
  It has most of the OOP things that I want in a language (interfaces for one, looking at you python), few things still missing but hopefully coming soon (generics, nullable typehints). And it has sane nulls in my opinion, compared to Java at least. In the end good PHP code ends up looking like good Java code I think. But you don't have to worry about everything being nullable. But then horrible PHP code is something else... Luckily I don't really have to touch that very often.
TheLarch 10y ago
Around 2001 I felt jaded with the industry and determined to do whatever was expedient to earn money. That meant using PHP, because that was purportedly the place to be at the time. I have never felt so uninspired by a language. My overwhelming feeling from the get-go was that it was a collection of libraries, which would be fine -- but why create a new language? PHP has the rare distinction among languages of not containing any novel features or ideas. Not only that, but it borrows liberally from several other languages, resulting in an overabundance of syntax. Instead of a tool for attacking problems, it's a reheated leftover. There is not suggestion of a better or worse way to accomplish some goal. Finally, the original premise of PHP, interspersed functional code and HTML, is high on my list of really bad ideas. Code written in this style is doubly-challenged in terms of reuse and maintainability. Again, there is again no semblance of better or worse with this approach. If you had Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds produce the same website with PHP, there would be very little in common between their approaches. Given the success of Facebook et al, I presume that the interspersed code/html thing has been superseded, and further that the egregious security issues in PHP have been fixed. But the picture in my mind's eye is something that lumbers along despite its thorough mediocrity. I will allow that making PHP adequately consistent and secure are impressive feats. Sincere question: how am I wrong here? ====== edit ====== Drop extra 'the'
- jdhawk 10y ago
  Since when did something need to have novel features or ideas in order to be productive? I'll counter that one of the main reasons PHP became such a used language (other than ease of deploy) is exactly the reasons you dislike it. There are multiple ways to do things - that coincide with the ways you do things in many other languages (which it steals from). You dont have to learn anything radically new to use it, and that makes it very easy to do things quickly.
  - TheLarch 10y ago
    "Since when did something need to have novel features or ideas in order to be productive?" It doesn't. But if your language ideas are admittedly no better than the next guy's, what's the point?
    - dreistdreist 10y ago
      It can be a combination of different things that exist somewhere but not in this combination. For me PHP is like Java but with sane nullability. It's like python but it actually has interfaces so that I can do proper OOP.
    - jdhawk 10y ago
      It's easy, fast (both Development speed and Page Views), and can deploy anywhere with a few clicks? It has no novel concepts that require learning something new. It has a plethora of existing code, documentation, frameworks, and StackOverflow answers to solve almost any problem (albeit, not always correctly). Its the lowest barrier to entry web language - and honestly, I'm ok with people writing shit PHP. It gets good Ideas out there quickly - allowing the business to grow without a focus on the Development. This creates opportunities for sharp developers to come in and work on proven ideas.
    - Shorel 10y ago
      Currently, with version 7.0, its implementation is faster than most other scripting languages. That's one big important point.
gremlinsinc 10y ago
I'm a php dev, and as much as I try going to Rails/Django -- I keep coming back to Laravel. W/ Laravel + composer PHP finally grew up, wordpress is a hacky out-dated should-be-shot-and-replaced beast. The best way of modern web dev in my opinion is to use Vue or Angular for the frontend, and laravel as a backend. PHP 7.0 is extremely fast and proficient, and it's an easy framework to pick up. If you need anything more resilient server side then I'd recommend using a Golang or Elixir framework like Phoenix which has multi-threading.

pthreadses 10y ago

Could you elaborate a bit on what you prefer about it? I've heard this from a few people and would be curious to hear it fleshed out a bit.

dreistdreist 10y ago
It has most of the OOP things that I want in a language (interfaces for one, looking at you python), few things still missing but hopefully coming soon (generics, nullable typehints). And it has sane nulls in my opinion, compared to Java at least. In the end good PHP code ends up looking like good Java code I think. But you don't have to worry about everything being nullable. But then horrible PHP code is something else... Luckily I don't really have to touch that very often.

TheLarch 10y ago

Around 2001 I felt jaded with the industry and determined to do whatever was expedient to earn money. That meant using PHP, because that was purportedly the place to be at the time. I have never felt so uninspired by a language. My overwhelming feeling from the get-go was that it was a collection of libraries, which would be fine -- but why create a new language? PHP has the rare distinction among languages of not containing any novel features or ideas. Not only that, but it borrows liberally from several other languages, resulting in an overabundance of syntax. Instead of a tool for attacking problems, it's a reheated leftover. There is not suggestion of a better or worse way to accomplish some goal. Finally, the original premise of PHP, interspersed functional code and HTML, is high on my list of really bad ideas. Code written in this style is doubly-challenged in terms of reuse and maintainability. Again, there is again no semblance of better or worse with this approach. If you had Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds produce the same website with PHP, there would be very little in common between their approaches. Given the success of Facebook et al, I presume that the interspersed code/html thing has been superseded, and further that the egregious security issues in PHP have been fixed. But the picture in my mind's eye is something that lumbers along despite its thorough mediocrity. I will allow that making PHP adequately consistent and secure are impressive feats. Sincere question: how am I wrong here? ====== edit ====== Drop extra 'the'

jdhawk 10y ago
Since when did something need to have novel features or ideas in order to be productive? I'll counter that one of the main reasons PHP became such a used language (other than ease of deploy) is exactly the reasons you dislike it. There are multiple ways to do things - that coincide with the ways you do things in many other languages (which it steals from). You dont have to learn anything radically new to use it, and that makes it very easy to do things quickly.
- TheLarch 10y ago
  "Since when did something need to have novel features or ideas in order to be productive?" It doesn't. But if your language ideas are admittedly no better than the next guy's, what's the point?
  - dreistdreist 10y ago
    It can be a combination of different things that exist somewhere but not in this combination. For me PHP is like Java but with sane nullability. It's like python but it actually has interfaces so that I can do proper OOP.
  - jdhawk 10y ago
    It's easy, fast (both Development speed and Page Views), and can deploy anywhere with a few clicks? It has no novel concepts that require learning something new. It has a plethora of existing code, documentation, frameworks, and StackOverflow answers to solve almost any problem (albeit, not always correctly). Its the lowest barrier to entry web language - and honestly, I'm ok with people writing shit PHP. It gets good Ideas out there quickly - allowing the business to grow without a focus on the Development. This creates opportunities for sharp developers to come in and work on proven ideas.
  - Shorel 10y ago
    Currently, with version 7.0, its implementation is faster than most other scripting languages. That's one big important point.

gremlinsinc 10y ago

I'm a php dev, and as much as I try going to Rails/Django -- I keep coming back to Laravel. W/ Laravel + composer PHP finally grew up, wordpress is a hacky out-dated should-be-shot-and-replaced beast. The best way of modern web dev in my opinion is to use Vue or Angular for the frontend, and laravel as a backend. PHP 7.0 is extremely fast and proficient, and it's an easy framework to pick up. If you need anything more resilient server side then I'd recommend using a Golang or Elixir framework like Phoenix which has multi-threading.