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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 th

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).

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).