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> What's with people expecting frameworks to do everything for them these days? I don't think that's the expectation. PHPs reputation seems to surround the fac

> What's with people expecting frameworks to do everything for them these days? I don't think that's the expectation. PHPs reputation seems to surround the fact that it tends to be (or was) the first language amateur coders dabbled with. That crowd is especially susceptible (at least before mysqli, etc) to making mistakes that amount to serious security vulnerabilities. Historically, these seemingly benign things that can only go bad if you dont know better, do go bad [1]. It seems that this lead rampant conflation of whether php is a bad language and whether php made it easier to do things in an unsafe way. Frameworks that create safer environments for devs (especially newer ones) are certainly a good thing and the good frameworks often get out of your way when you need them to. [1] https://github.com/search?p=3&q=extension:php+mysql_query+%24_GET&ref=searchresults&type=Code https://github.com/search?p=3&q=extension:php+mysql_query+%2...

SomeCallMeTim 10y ago
>PHPs reputation seems to surround the fact that it tends to be (or was) the first language amateur coders dabbled with. That's certainly part of it. JavaScript suffers the same hate today -- amateur and junior developers produce thousands of lines of crap per year, and people blame it on the language. But PHP itself is just a mess. I'm an experience developer (about 30 years at this point), and about 12 years ago I decided to do a volunteer project for a nonprofit in PHP. Finished the project and the nonprofit used it for at least 10 years -- they may still be using it for all I know. Never. Again. I can't stand PHP and I will avoid its language and ecosystem like the plague. Even if they've fixed some of the problems in the core language and added types, the "standard" libraries were a random pile of mismatched garbage where the mysql_xxxx functions could have parameter signatures in different orders than the pg_xxxx versions. Maybe they've fixed that as well, but they'd have to break backward compatibility in pretty awkward ways to achieve that. I don't even remember all the other things that tortured me, but it wasn't fun. And it's not asynchronous. There's not even a good reason to use a synchronous language for web development today. Not to mention the ease of running NodeJS code in a debugger, or running tests in a browser and debugging it there... I'm using TypeScript and Go for all my web related code moving forward. Something better comes along, and I'll consider it. But PHP was just a nightmare. (Elm on client? Maybe, under the right circumstances?)
- marklgr 10y ago
  Sounds like you just had a very bad experience with PHP, but it could have happened with most languages, honestly. I got (only) 20-year experience, but I have come across quite bad C codebases, poor Perl applications and terrible Java code, and I have thought 'never again' more than once, too.
- stephenr 10y ago
  > I'm an experience developer (about 30 years at this point), and about 12 years ago I decided to do a volunteer project for a nonprofit in PHP > mysql_xxxx functions So, you used PHP 12 years ago and comment based on that. You have a point though. I used this internet thing about 17 years ago, it was terrible. Only dial-up. SLOW! And don't talk to me about browsers. Netscape? Internet Explorer? Ugh. Forget it. I don't care what they might have changed, or replaced or completely removed, its always terrible. The language/runtime have problems, just like every other language/runtime that exists, but complaining about a version from 12 years ago and comparing functions that aren't even part of the language anymore seems a little odd to me.
  - babyrainbow 10y ago
    >You have a point though. I used this internet thing about 17 years ago, it was terrible. Only dial-up. SLOW! And don't talk to me about browsers. Netscape? Internet Explorer? Ugh. Forget it. I don't care what they might have changed, or replaced or completely removed, its always terrible. We have only one Internet. But we have a lot of alternatives for Php to choose from. If you have an Internet provider that gave you horrible service, will you give them another try even when your current provider is great in every way, just because the only good thing with your past provider was they gave you a connection in a day, instead of 3 days as with your current provider....
    - corobo 10y ago
      After 12 years? I wouldn't consider them to be the exact same as when I left them at least.

SomeCallMeTim 10y ago

>PHPs reputation seems to surround the fact that it tends to be (or was) the first language amateur coders dabbled with. That's certainly part of it. JavaScript suffers the same hate today -- amateur and junior developers produce thousands of lines of crap per year, and people blame it on the language. But PHP itself is just a mess. I'm an experience developer (about 30 years at this point), and about 12 years ago I decided to do a volunteer project for a nonprofit in PHP. Finished the project and the nonprofit used it for at least 10 years -- they may still be using it for all I know. Never. Again. I can't stand PHP and I will avoid its language and ecosystem like the plague. Even if they've fixed some of the problems in the core language and added types, the "standard" libraries were a random pile of mismatched garbage where the mysql_xxxx functions could have parameter signatures in different orders than the pg_xxxx versions. Maybe they've fixed that as well, but they'd have to break backward compatibility in pretty awkward ways to achieve that. I don't even remember all the other things that tortured me, but it wasn't fun. And it's not asynchronous. There's not even a good reason to use a synchronous language for web development today. Not to mention the ease of running NodeJS code in a debugger, or running tests in a browser and debugging it there... I'm using TypeScript and Go for all my web related code moving forward. Something better comes along, and I'll consider it. But PHP was just a nightmare. (Elm on client? Maybe, under the right circumstances?)

marklgr 10y ago
Sounds like you just had a very bad experience with PHP, but it could have happened with most languages, honestly. I got (only) 20-year experience, but I have come across quite bad C codebases, poor Perl applications and terrible Java code, and I have thought 'never again' more than once, too.
stephenr 10y ago
> I'm an experience developer (about 30 years at this point), and about 12 years ago I decided to do a volunteer project for a nonprofit in PHP > mysql_xxxx functions So, you used PHP 12 years ago and comment based on that. You have a point though. I used this internet thing about 17 years ago, it was terrible. Only dial-up. SLOW! And don't talk to me about browsers. Netscape? Internet Explorer? Ugh. Forget it. I don't care what they might have changed, or replaced or completely removed, its always terrible. The language/runtime have problems, just like every other language/runtime that exists, but complaining about a version from 12 years ago and comparing functions that aren't even part of the language anymore seems a little odd to me.
- babyrainbow 10y ago
  >You have a point though. I used this internet thing about 17 years ago, it was terrible. Only dial-up. SLOW! And don't talk to me about browsers. Netscape? Internet Explorer? Ugh. Forget it. I don't care what they might have changed, or replaced or completely removed, its always terrible. We have only one Internet. But we have a lot of alternatives for Php to choose from. If you have an Internet provider that gave you horrible service, will you give them another try even when your current provider is great in every way, just because the only good thing with your past provider was they gave you a connection in a day, instead of 3 days as with your current provider....
  - corobo 10y ago
    After 12 years? I wouldn't consider them to be the exact same as when I left them at least.