8 ms·

and miss out on all the awesome aspects of the language/environment?

by ux-app 10y ago

peteretep 10y ago
What are "all the awesome aspects"? The being embedded in the web server and the benefits that brings I understand. The rest?
- justinhj 10y ago
  Disclaimer I worked on a large php app server that ran on about 50 servers and I miss it. The documentation is really good. A model for programming language documentation. Process per request is really simple to understand and scale. Your servers almost never crash completely, you don't get threads silently dying or run out of memory or thrash the CPU doing garbage collection. It runs like a tank. It will, for better or worse, just keep running when more fussy languages would have seg faulted or shut down The tooling, framework and libraries are very advanced and in active development It's easy to train a programmer in php It's close to the c library The combination of a very flexible array/map and functional programming tools like map and reduce let you write pretty declarative code and development can be very fast Php storm Facebooks replacement runtime I work with Java and Scala now which I also love but development is much slower and more expensive, whilst deployment is cheaper (less hardware for same request throughout)
  - premium-concern 10y ago
    I stopped taking this seriously after "the documentation is really good". Not sure whether this is your real opinion or you are just making fun of people who say that.
    - justinhj 10y ago
      We can't argue objectively about an opinion but take a look at this typical page of the php.net documentation: http://php.net/manual/en/function.usort.php http://php.net/manual/en/function.usort.php It has everything I need to know about the function clearly laid out. The behaviour of sort when elements are the same. A list at the side of related functions that I may want to look at instead. I also like documentation that includes user contributions as these often add useful caveats and usage examples that don't fit well in the general documentation.
      - babyrainbow 10y ago
        Php documentation is the worst. Some of the reasons.. 1. They have exactly one set of documentation pages for all the php versions. 2. Another thing is that documentation can be quite wrong for even the fundamental stuff. I have seen a core developer blast out in reddit that "The documentation is wrong!", when the other party pointed them towards a piece of documentation. 3. Incomplete or shallow description. Go check out the documentation page for Exceptions in php and try to find information regarding the behavior of return statements in a 'finally' block. Now go an see the respective page in Python documentation and see how in depth the documentation is. And having code samples is not exclusive to Php's documentation..
  - apotheon 10y ago
    Can you describe for me how the tooling, framework(s), and libraries are so advanced and excellent? How easy is it to train a programmer to use PHP in a way that results in fairly secure, reliable, bug-free code? (Note my use of the word "fairly", knowing that there's no such thing as perfect security, reliability, or freedom from bugs.) I do know that, for instance, TDD is possible with PHP. In my experience and observation, though, the available developer tooling does not even come close to that of (for instance) Ruby, so I figure I must be missing something if "the tooling, framwork[s,] and libraries" constitute a major advantage to PHP over other options.
    - justinhj 10y ago
      Good questions. Well firstly phpstorm is a very high quality. I can work with php code in various contexts such as running test suites, normal development and connecting to a live server. It definitely has good support for running and debugging test suites including unit, integration and functional. There is support for vagrant and docker as well. The tooling is good because there are lot of users willing to pay for good tooling, but at the same time it can only exist if the underlying language supports the features needed. I wouldn't say the libraries and tools give it a significant advantage over other languages actually, but it's a notable factor of php development that there is likely a framework and library for your needs. Regarding training, once we had a reliable application and we'd figured out as a team some best practises regarding avoiding php's bad parts, how to avoid or detect and handle runtime errors and how to organize and layout code, it's a fairly simple matter to point a new programmer at these documents and code samples. There's really not much to the language and a smart and/or experienced programmer can be productive in days. I'm not sure that's the case if you move someone from say c to Python or from Ruby to Scala.
    - spronkey 10y ago
      PHP is about 1/3rd of my day job. Java 1/3rd, and support languages for ops (mainly Python and shell scripting) 1/3rd. Find myself commenting a lot on PHP threads in the last few days... In my earlier days I did quite a bit of developer tutoring, and I have trained developers in PHP codebases on quite a few occasions, so I can speak to the training aspect first hand. I actually find PHP is fine to train developers in - certainly to produce simple code that is reasonably bug free, if not particularly high performance. The 'everyday' use of the language is usually quite straightforward - most projects don't deal with concurrency primitives, long running code, or low level interop. Scoping is quite straightforward. The only real gotchas are type coersion (use === for primitives or write comparator functions) and superglobals (use a library). To be honest, JavaScript causes just as much confusion in my experience with scoping. Heck, a scarily high number of developers I know would struggle to implement a bug-free equals() method in Java. As for tooling - here are some examples of good tooling in PHP: - Dependency management - Composer and it's centralised library, Packagist (npm/rubygems/maven analogue) - TDD and testing: - PHPUnit (ubiquitous, fairly well featured - built in fakes, code coverage) - Behat (BDD-style testing a la Cucumber) - Codeception (DSL-based) - All three tools have decent integrations with IDEs, can be run easily through Composer's CLI, can be combined with stuff like Grunt/gulp easily for file watchers. - I haven't needed the really esoteric features in my Ruby projects so I'm probably not the best to judge, but I can't say that I find PHP testing tools all that lacking compared to rspec, cucumber etc. I don't feel like you need complex tools for good testing... - Frameworks such as Laravel provide bootstrapping on top of e.g. PHPUnit that provide integration test componentry - PHPDoc - ubiquitous, well documented, well supported by IDEs, linters, docgens - PhpStorm (on par with the best IDEs out there), Zend Studio (very good IDE in its own right, eclipse-based), and Eclipse PDT are definitely servicable IDEs with good integration, good code inspections, good support for refactoring (especially now with PHP7 and it's further push into gradual typing). - PDO - something most other languages have to be fair, but a language-supported SQL database engine abstraction layer is a must for working with SQL databases these days - Gearman for task queues Libraries and frameworks available in PHP are much the same as other languages in my experience, when it comes to stuff for the web. Not really much point going through them, suffice to say that there are some poor choices (Wordpress), and some good choices (Flysystem).
NMDaniel 10y ago
There are plenty of great server-side languages and environments. C#,Java,Scala,Python,Ruby,Haskell. If this was about JavaScript and Front-End I might've agreed with you (there are transpilers but interoperability with JS modules can be tricky), however in the realm of servers there's so much freedom.. so why choose PHP out of them all?
- mastazi 10y ago
  > plenty of great server-side languages and environments Depending on the type of project, I would choose PHP over at least some of the languages you mentioned; I guess "great" is not a significant quality when making architectural choices. Just to be clear: I was thinking about factors like performance, choice of servers, how easy it is to hire good developers, library ecosystem etc. EDIT: obviously the "awesome aspects" mentioned by GP are a similarly unsubstantiated claim ;-)
- brianmurphy 10y ago
  If you are building software that will be deployed by a large number of users, having PHP provided by every $3.99 & up hosting company can't be underestimated. Languages like Haskell are nonstarters.
- raarts 10y ago
  C#: windows or mono-on-linux Java: keyboard wear Scala: not enough programmers Python: not bad Ruby: too slow Haskell: math grad required
  - NHern031 10y ago
    The .NET CORE is now open source and cross platform. Cross platform compatibility with the exact same source code, and the killer features/speed of C# makes its my personal choice for a server-side language. I would like to add that C# devs are not cheap and also seem to be slightly more limited in today's market compared to PHP devs.
    - sjellis 10y ago

and miss out on all the awesome aspects of the language/environment?

by ux-app 10y ago

and miss out on all the awesome aspects of the language/environment?

What are "all the awesome aspects"? The being embedded in the web server and the benefits that brings I understand. The rest?

justinhj 10y ago
Disclaimer I worked on a large php app server that ran on about 50 servers and I miss it. The documentation is really good. A model for programming language documentation. Process per request is really simple to understand and scale. Your servers almost never crash completely, you don't get threads silently dying or run out of memory or thrash the CPU doing garbage collection. It runs like a tank. It will, for better or worse, just keep running when more fussy languages would have seg faulted or shut down The tooling, framework and libraries are very advanced and in active development It's easy to train a programmer in php It's close to the c library The combination of a very flexible array/map and functional programming tools like map and reduce let you write pretty declarative code and development can be very fast Php storm Facebooks replacement runtime I work with Java and Scala now which I also love but development is much slower and more expensive, whilst deployment is cheaper (less hardware for same request throughout)
- premium-concern 10y ago
  I stopped taking this seriously after "the documentation is really good". Not sure whether this is your real opinion or you are just making fun of people who say that.
  - justinhj 10y ago
    We can't argue objectively about an opinion but take a look at this typical page of the php.net documentation: http://php.net/manual/en/function.usort.php http://php.net/manual/en/function.usort.php It has everything I need to know about the function clearly laid out. The behaviour of sort when elements are the same. A list at the side of related functions that I may want to look at instead. I also like documentation that includes user contributions as these often add useful caveats and usage examples that don't fit well in the general documentation.
    - babyrainbow 10y ago
      Php documentation is the worst. Some of the reasons.. 1. They have exactly one set of documentation pages for all the php versions. 2. Another thing is that documentation can be quite wrong for even the fundamental stuff. I have seen a core developer blast out in reddit that "The documentation is wrong!", when the other party pointed them towards a piece of documentation. 3. Incomplete or shallow description. Go check out the documentation page for Exceptions in php and try to find information regarding the behavior of return statements in a 'finally' block. Now go an see the respective page in Python documentation and see how in depth the documentation is. And having code samples is not exclusive to Php's documentation..
- apotheon 10y ago
  Can you describe for me how the tooling, framework(s), and libraries are so advanced and excellent? How easy is it to train a programmer to use PHP in a way that results in fairly secure, reliable, bug-free code? (Note my use of the word "fairly", knowing that there's no such thing as perfect security, reliability, or freedom from bugs.) I do know that, for instance, TDD is possible with PHP. In my experience and observation, though, the available developer tooling does not even come close to that of (for instance) Ruby, so I figure I must be missing something if "the tooling, framwork[s,] and libraries" constitute a major advantage to PHP over other options.
  - justinhj 10y ago
    Good questions. Well firstly phpstorm is a very high quality. I can work with php code in various contexts such as running test suites, normal development and connecting to a live server. It definitely has good support for running and debugging test suites including unit, integration and functional. There is support for vagrant and docker as well. The tooling is good because there are lot of users willing to pay for good tooling, but at the same time it can only exist if the underlying language supports the features needed. I wouldn't say the libraries and tools give it a significant advantage over other languages actually, but it's a notable factor of php development that there is likely a framework and library for your needs. Regarding training, once we had a reliable application and we'd figured out as a team some best practises regarding avoiding php's bad parts, how to avoid or detect and handle runtime errors and how to organize and layout code, it's a fairly simple matter to point a new programmer at these documents and code samples. There's really not much to the language and a smart and/or experienced programmer can be productive in days. I'm not sure that's the case if you move someone from say c to Python or from Ruby to Scala.
  - spronkey 10y ago
    PHP is about 1/3rd of my day job. Java 1/3rd, and support languages for ops (mainly Python and shell scripting) 1/3rd. Find myself commenting a lot on PHP threads in the last few days... In my earlier days I did quite a bit of developer tutoring, and I have trained developers in PHP codebases on quite a few occasions, so I can speak to the training aspect first hand. I actually find PHP is fine to train developers in - certainly to produce simple code that is reasonably bug free, if not particularly high performance. The 'everyday' use of the language is usually quite straightforward - most projects don't deal with concurrency primitives, long running code, or low level interop. Scoping is quite straightforward. The only real gotchas are type coersion (use === for primitives or write comparator functions) and superglobals (use a library). To be honest, JavaScript causes just as much confusion in my experience with scoping. Heck, a scarily high number of developers I know would struggle to implement a bug-free equals() method in Java. As for tooling - here are some examples of good tooling in PHP: - Dependency management - Composer and it's centralised library, Packagist (npm/rubygems/maven analogue) - TDD and testing: - PHPUnit (ubiquitous, fairly well featured - built in fakes, code coverage) - Behat (BDD-style testing a la Cucumber) - Codeception (DSL-based) - All three tools have decent integrations with IDEs, can be run easily through Composer's CLI, can be combined with stuff like Grunt/gulp easily for file watchers. - I haven't needed the really esoteric features in my Ruby projects so I'm probably not the best to judge, but I can't say that I find PHP testing tools all that lacking compared to rspec, cucumber etc. I don't feel like you need complex tools for good testing... - Frameworks such as Laravel provide bootstrapping on top of e.g. PHPUnit that provide integration test componentry - PHPDoc - ubiquitous, well documented, well supported by IDEs, linters, docgens - PhpStorm (on par with the best IDEs out there), Zend Studio (very good IDE in its own right, eclipse-based), and Eclipse PDT are definitely servicable IDEs with good integration, good code inspections, good support for refactoring (especially now with PHP7 and it's further push into gradual typing). - PDO - something most other languages have to be fair, but a language-supported SQL database engine abstraction layer is a must for working with SQL databases these days - Gearman for task queues Libraries and frameworks available in PHP are much the same as other languages in my experience, when it comes to stuff for the web. Not really much point going through them, suffice to say that there are some poor choices (Wordpress), and some good choices (Flysystem).

NMDaniel 10y ago

There are plenty of great server-side languages and environments. C#,Java,Scala,Python,Ruby,Haskell. If this was about JavaScript and Front-End I might've agreed with you (there are transpilers but interoperability with JS modules can be tricky), however in the realm of servers there's so much freedom.. so why choose PHP out of them all?

mastazi 10y ago
> plenty of great server-side languages and environments Depending on the type of project, I would choose PHP over at least some of the languages you mentioned; I guess "great" is not a significant quality when making architectural choices. Just to be clear: I was thinking about factors like performance, choice of servers, how easy it is to hire good developers, library ecosystem etc. EDIT: obviously the "awesome aspects" mentioned by GP are a similarly unsubstantiated claim ;-)
brianmurphy 10y ago
If you are building software that will be deployed by a large number of users, having PHP provided by every $3.99 & up hosting company can't be underestimated. Languages like Haskell are nonstarters.
raarts 10y ago
C#: windows or mono-on-linux Java: keyboard wear Scala: not enough programmers Python: not bad Ruby: too slow Haskell: math grad required
- NHern031 10y ago
  The .NET CORE is now open source and cross platform. Cross platform compatibility with the exact same source code, and the killer features/speed of C# makes its my personal choice for a server-side language. I would like to add that C# devs are not cheap and also seem to be slightly more limited in today's market compared to PHP devs.
  - sjellis 10y ago