5 ms·

I've had to do some PHP work recently, on a fairly old school PHP codebase for a high traffic website, after spending most oy my career working in Java and C# (

by rpeden 10y ago

I've had to do some PHP work recently, on a fairly old school PHP codebase for a high traffic website, after spending most oy my career working in Java and C# (and I still do most of my work in those languages). I've read a lot of PHP hate over the years, but I've found working with it in practice to be decidedly...not bad. Perhaps the codebase I inherited is better than most. But I've had to make some fairly major updates, and they've proven to be far less painful than I had expected based on the amount of PHP attacks I'd read online. Maybe the snobbery toward PHP is a good thing? There are some really big PHP-based communities out there, Wordpress being probably the largest. And in these communities, there appears to be a large demand for paid consulting and plugins. Sure, there's a ton of competition on the low end, but it's an area where a really great developer could stand out from the crowd and do very well financially, especially for more complex consulting and dev work since so many good developers turn their noses up at PHP.

overcast 10y ago
As long as you don't mind working on "boring" projects, there is TONS of small businesses in need of custom work to be done. It's very lucrative, because most people like you said, turn their noses up at the thought of it.
- throwanem 10y ago
  Not-so-small businesses, too.
- rpeden 10y ago
  Boring isn't always bad. Last time I tried to create an interesting project, I ended up with a couple hundred MB of node modules before I'd even done much. :)
  - tracker1 10y ago
    That's a fair criticism in node... I wouldn't want to work on it without an SSD (deployment is a different story)... the spinup and even npm install time on an HDD is dramatically slower than SSD. It's also not that hard to roll your own system and avoid many of the modules and frameworks in the space. The first API I wrote using node wasn't bad at all, and in the end actually simpler than the rewrite using express... And by the time you get to Hapi with a few addon modules for your needs, it'll get pretty big. All of that said, I still prefer it to just about everything else I've worked in... though I haven't done anything on Go or rust, but would like to.
    - rpeden 10y ago
      Yeah, the size of my node_modules directory doesn't bother me that much. I've worked on some large Node projects in the past, and didn't care too much about how many modules I had installed because I wasn't exactly running out of disk space. It only really bothered me in an aesthetic sense; although everything worked fine, it just felt messier than necessary. The huge JS bundles we're sending to the browser after running Webpack or Browserify bother me a lot more. Since we're using npm for pulling in front end dependencies, and CommonJS modules aren't statically analyzable, tools like the Closure Compiler and Rollup can't perform a lot of their advanced optimization and tree shaking. We'll get to a better place soon enough, though.
      - tracker1 10y ago
        Yeah, the migration to ES6-style modules, Webpack2 etc will help a lot. There's still some bits to work out... about ready to do a new version of a few module in NPM and just declare that said module need to be used with babel+es6, async functions and decorator transforms... I'm tired of waiting, and it'll make the modules themselves cleaner not having to transform before publishing to npm in the end. It's funny that a lot of this stuff is finally making it into the browsers and platform, when I've been using it for almost 2 years now. Looks like async is going in behind a flag in node 7.
leeoniya 10y ago
The language is not beautiful, it is full of signature and func naming inconsistencies [1] it inherited from C. The devs are ultra-conservative and stubborn to cause BC even at major version bumps (like the forever-incorrect ternary associativity [2][3]). But PHP7 is both fast and productive with many modern first-class features. You can in fact write excellent code without much effort that will handily outperform Python, Ruby and even Node. The Wordpress codebase [plugin api included], though, is utter garbage. [1] http://www.phpsadness.com/ http://www.phpsadness.com/ [2] http://php.net/manual/en/language.expressions.php http://php.net/manual/en/language.expressions.php [3] https://www.mail-archive.com/internals@lists.php.net/msg71964.html https://www.mail-archive.com/internals@lists.php.net/msg7196... (yes, i asked for this in 2014)
- gravypod 10y ago
  > The language is not beautiful, it is full of signature and func naming inconsistencies [1] it inherited from C. It was consistent with the thing it inherited most of it's syntax from so that makes it inconsistent? > The devs are ultra-conservative and stubborn to cause BC even at major version bumps (like the forever-incorrect ternary associativity [2][3]) You shouldn't be judging the way operators work in one language with the way they work in others. Is lisp inherently bad since it's operators are prefix and not infix? No I'd say not, it's just different. On the other hand, the PHP devs changing the ternary would cause major problems for anything that uses it. The most the PHP devs have done is deprecate methods and add features. That's great. I think that changing something, that has been there since the beginning, to a new behavior is stupid. Much much much worse then having ternary work backwards. > The Wordpress codebase [plugin api included], though, is utter garbage. Yes, yes it is. That's not the language's fault.
  - leeoniya 10y ago
    > On the other hand, the PHP devs changing the ternary would cause major problems for anything that uses it. If you read the thread, no one could actually recall having ever seen code that relies on the current behavior. It has been discouraged in the docs for years. The stop-gap proposal was to have PHP7 deprecate it with a warning rather than silently changing the behavior. Then change the behavior in a future version (say php 8). Disregarding any of that, this is an admitted language bug. It was not ever meant to work this way. Do you have a list of languages where ternary works backwards? PHP devs don't just work in PHP. Having one C-style language work this way and another C-style language (js) in another editor tab work the opposite way is a major PITA.

by rpeden 10y ago

overcast 10y ago

As long as you don't mind working on "boring" projects, there is TONS of small businesses in need of custom work to be done. It's very lucrative, because most people like you said, turn their noses up at the thought of it.

throwanem 10y ago
Not-so-small businesses, too.
rpeden 10y ago
Boring isn't always bad. Last time I tried to create an interesting project, I ended up with a couple hundred MB of node modules before I'd even done much. :)
- tracker1 10y ago
  That's a fair criticism in node... I wouldn't want to work on it without an SSD (deployment is a different story)... the spinup and even npm install time on an HDD is dramatically slower than SSD. It's also not that hard to roll your own system and avoid many of the modules and frameworks in the space. The first API I wrote using node wasn't bad at all, and in the end actually simpler than the rewrite using express... And by the time you get to Hapi with a few addon modules for your needs, it'll get pretty big. All of that said, I still prefer it to just about everything else I've worked in... though I haven't done anything on Go or rust, but would like to.
  - rpeden 10y ago
    Yeah, the size of my node_modules directory doesn't bother me that much. I've worked on some large Node projects in the past, and didn't care too much about how many modules I had installed because I wasn't exactly running out of disk space. It only really bothered me in an aesthetic sense; although everything worked fine, it just felt messier than necessary. The huge JS bundles we're sending to the browser after running Webpack or Browserify bother me a lot more. Since we're using npm for pulling in front end dependencies, and CommonJS modules aren't statically analyzable, tools like the Closure Compiler and Rollup can't perform a lot of their advanced optimization and tree shaking. We'll get to a better place soon enough, though.
    - tracker1 10y ago
      Yeah, the migration to ES6-style modules, Webpack2 etc will help a lot. There's still some bits to work out... about ready to do a new version of a few module in NPM and just declare that said module need to be used with babel+es6, async functions and decorator transforms... I'm tired of waiting, and it'll make the modules themselves cleaner not having to transform before publishing to npm in the end. It's funny that a lot of this stuff is finally making it into the browsers and platform, when I've been using it for almost 2 years now. Looks like async is going in behind a flag in node 7.

leeoniya 10y ago

The language is not beautiful, it is full of signature and func naming inconsistencies [1] it inherited from C. The devs are ultra-conservative and stubborn to cause BC even at major version bumps (like the forever-incorrect ternary associativity [2][3]). But PHP7 is both fast and productive with many modern first-class features. You can in fact write excellent code without much effort that will handily outperform Python, Ruby and even Node. The Wordpress codebase [plugin api included], though, is utter garbage. [1] http://www.phpsadness.com/ http://www.phpsadness.com/ [2] http://php.net/manual/en/language.expressions.php http://php.net/manual/en/language.expressions.php [3] https://www.mail-archive.com/internals@lists.php.net/msg71964.html https://www.mail-archive.com/internals@lists.php.net/msg7196... (yes, i asked for this in 2014)

gravypod 10y ago
> The language is not beautiful, it is full of signature and func naming inconsistencies [1] it inherited from C. It was consistent with the thing it inherited most of it's syntax from so that makes it inconsistent? > The devs are ultra-conservative and stubborn to cause BC even at major version bumps (like the forever-incorrect ternary associativity [2][3]) You shouldn't be judging the way operators work in one language with the way they work in others. Is lisp inherently bad since it's operators are prefix and not infix? No I'd say not, it's just different. On the other hand, the PHP devs changing the ternary would cause major problems for anything that uses it. The most the PHP devs have done is deprecate methods and add features. That's great. I think that changing something, that has been there since the beginning, to a new behavior is stupid. Much much much worse then having ternary work backwards. > The Wordpress codebase [plugin api included], though, is utter garbage. Yes, yes it is. That's not the language's fault.
- leeoniya 10y ago
  > On the other hand, the PHP devs changing the ternary would cause major problems for anything that uses it. If you read the thread, no one could actually recall having ever seen code that relies on the current behavior. It has been discouraged in the docs for years. The stop-gap proposal was to have PHP7 deprecate it with a warning rather than silently changing the behavior. Then change the behavior in a future version (say php 8). Disregarding any of that, this is an admitted language bug. It was not ever meant to work this way. Do you have a list of languages where ternary works backwards? PHP devs don't just work in PHP. Having one C-style language work this way and another C-style language (js) in another editor tab work the opposite way is a major PITA.