7 ms·

I think PHP had a couple of obvious advantages - it almost had a "first mover" advantage in that it happened to be installed alongside CGI-BIN on shared webhost

• pushpop 8y ago
  Things may have changed since v7 but historically I’ve not found PHPs documentation any better than any other language. In fact I remember a few occasions where I’ve ended up going by the advice of the comments rather than the documentation itself because the documentation was either out dated or just plain wrong.
  • chiefalchemist 8y ago
    Perhaps not better, but there certainly have been worse. As for the comments. Yes. But at least they're there, and quite often helpful. Plenty of times I've read other docs where I wished they had commenting but alas didn't.
    • ptx 8y ago
      The comments are only needed because the documentation is often wrong or confused. And, of course, usually most of the comments are wrong too. Other languages don't need comments because they at least aim to have documentation that's correct.
      • chiefalchemist 8y ago
        I don't see it that way. The comments are there to prevent others from re-inventing the wheel, to share insights, etc. Yes, sometimes that also highlights a "bug" or some other "flaw" but that's the rare exception. Maybe it would help if you listed some links to language docs that you feel the rest should use as benchmarks?
      • chx 8y ago
        If you find the documentation wrong or confused please let us know. https://bugs.php.net/ https://bugs.php.net/ We do our best. I was granted access some ten years ago and whenever I find a confusing page I fix it. I know there has been terrible pieces before but for the last oh five or six years I don't really find anything too bad. Please let us know what you found wrong. Thanks!
        • ptx 8y ago
          I was mostly responding to the idea in an ancestor comment that PHP has unusually good documentation (better than that of other languages), "best of all" having comments. I'm sure the PHP documentation is getting better all the time! Other languages also have good documentation, though. And as pushpop said in an earlier comment, the reason that the comments were useful historically is that the documentation was not always correct or complete. (Perhaps in part because the the language used to have a lot more unintended quirks?)
      • welly 8y ago
        "Often wrong"? Really? By often, 50% more wrong than right or less? Or more? I can count on one hand the number of occasions I've found the documentation to be incorrect.
        • pushpop 8y ago
          "Often" is a fuzzy term and it's used subjectively here. It doesn't mean "most of the documentation" (which would be the >50% goal post you're driving at). It simply means "a lot of the time $OP checks the docs". It might be the case that the only time they need to check the docs is for some of the more advanced features of PHP where errors are more likely to be found in the docs. While you could correctly argue "selection bias", it doesn't still take away from the OPs perspective that it often happens to him.
  • conradfr 8y ago
    That has not been my experience but anyway there's a "Report a Bug" link on every doc page.
    • pushpop 8y ago
      That hasn’t always been there. Or of it has, then the maintainers haven’t ever done anything with bug reports because there have been errors in the docs for the entire life of 5.x. I don’t really recall earlier versions of PHP being any better either. So I really don’t think PHP became popular because of the docs. The other comments about how it was easy to learn and easy to deploy is far more accurate. If I recall correctly, back when PHP gained traction, your main options then were Perl (which understandably confused the hell out of a lot of people), ASP (VBScript / JSScipt and requires Windows NT + IIS so not a popular option) or JSP (Java and at that time was pain to deploy. So not something you’d expect a casual web developer to bother with). So PHP is like BASIC or Raspberry Pi of the 90s web. It was made for one specific job, it didn’t do it perfectly, but it was cheap, easy to learn and just about good enough to get the job done.
  • snazz 8y ago
    Maybe this is true, but by virtue of its popularity and ease of use, PHP has one of the largest selections of tutorials on everything, so that it’s possible to write code by just copy-pasting example snippets.
    • pushpop 8y ago
      Maybe within one very narrowly defined field. However move outside of your typical web services and tutorials take a sharp nosedive. Really the kind of stuff that is well documented in PHP is the kind of stuff that is well documented in most general purpose languages. They are also the kind of problems that aren’t particularly hard to solve anyway. But this is a moot point because the reason documentation was discussed was because it was credited as being one of the reasons for PHPs popularity. However tutorials wouldn’t exist if a language wasn’t already popular so your comment doesn’t reinforce the point made by the GP.
• tyingq 8y ago
  "it almost had a "first mover" advantage in that it happened to be installed alongside CGI-BIN on shared webhosts way back in the way" That's a good observation. Because the mod_php and mod_perl Apache modules were much faster and lighter weight than CGI-BIN, and pre-installed on shared hosting, both PHP and Perl dominated the early web days.
  • deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  • cutler 8y ago
    Not sure about lighter. Mod-perl at least was quite RAM-hungry if I remember.
    • tyingq 8y ago
      Lighter than original CGI-BIN, fork() and exec() for every request.
      • cutler 8y ago
        Faster, yes, but not lighter on RAM usage.
  • luckylion 8y ago
    When / where was mod_perl ever widespread? Perl was usually provided via CGI, and php was mostly deployed with mod_php back in the day which gave it a great speed advantage, often at the price of security.
    • wolco 8y ago
      When? Before 2000.. php came after PERL. PHP wasn't a serious language was the general though. ASP was seen as that.. or Java/JSP
      • luckylion 8y ago
• igi3ql 8y ago
  I haven't found PHP documentation to be better or worse than the documentation of other languages I've used. What I dislike about it is the comments that every page includes. Most of them are very poorly written snippets of code from 15 years ago. If you dislike those comments too, consider adding this to your ad blocker: php.net###usernotes
  • cubano 8y ago
    I've actually found many of the comments rather useful over the years, and although I'm not crazy on how old and random they often are, I find them at least worth a quick look.
    • wwweston 8y ago
      I've also found that the comments sometimes have very useful notes. There is the issue of bad advice, but recently I've noticed that there seems to have been a voting system introduced at some point (not sure how long that's been there, I was away from PHP for a good chunk of the last decade), and I think the moderation system is older, so in theory, some of the worst advice should be filtered down/out and some of the best should be filtered up.
  • glennpratt 8y ago
    Seriously? On the spectrum of things worth ad blocking, this would never even hit my radar.
    • igi3ql 8y ago
      I use uBlock Origin and its :style() feature to remove and modify parts of websites that I don't like. I don't block user comments on PHP doc pages out of spite, I do it because they are very long, making it harder to scroll vertically on the actual documentation.
      • glennpratt 8y ago
        How does comments at the bottom make scrolling harder?
• chessturk 8y ago
  > Better documented is better. I was talking to some kid who wanted to be a developer, and I echoed this sentiment. A complex tool with good documentation is easier to use than a simple tool with bad documentation.
• geitir 8y ago
  I learned to program through php and the documentation was a major part of that before the prevalence of stack overflow etc
• segmondy 8y ago
  Nah, PHP survived because it wasn't strict, it tolerated a lot of crap. It would process almost anything it can and not fail. Most other languages would error out seriously. Also it's model of running each request as a fresh process eliminated persistent bugs. PHP's documentation is garbage. I say this as someone that has made money handsomely from PHP. :-).
  • stephenr 8y ago
    > PHP's documentation is garbage Birds are Cats. See, we can all make unsubstantiated claims.
  • welly 8y ago
    Why do you say PHP's documentation is garbage? Just one reason is enough. I personally disagree, I think it's great.
• clairity 8y ago
  the very first first mover advantage was that php was the free alternative to asp, jsp, and coldfusion. all of these languages were built around the simple premise that web devs wanted to inject code into html, which is the way beginners tended to think about coding. asp locked you into microsoft, jsp was laden with heavy/expensive java app servers and semantics, and coldfusion was a paid product (and eventually locked you into macromedia/adobe). i think that if coldfusion had the same free+paid model as php, it would have taken the place of php in web history. despite its faults (maintenance and performance, for example), it was easier and faster to learn and matched the mental model of beginners, just like html itself.
  • kazinator 8y ago
    PHP started in 1994 and was released in 1995. It was the alernative to writing C code inside the web server (like CERN's httpd) and recompiling the server, or doing everything via CGI. (Yes, hacking servers was a thing. In 1994 I worked on a project in which I did exactly that. This was before Apache and modules.) ASP 1.0 was released in 1996. The first Cold Fusion in 1995. JSP not until 1998. Cold Fusion and PHP appear to be neck-and-neck, almost; it's plausible that if Cold Fusion had been free, it might have taken more mind share away from PHP. Interpolating results into HTML dynamically isn't an idea that originated with any of this software. Prior art is the shell "here document", also implemented by imitation in Perl and other languages. "Here documents" were used in CGI scripting before PHP. (I'm not saying that the shell's "here document" is the ultimate prior art, either). At your system prompt: $ cat <<! <table> $(for x in 1 2 3; do echo " <tr><td>$x</td></tr>" ; done) </table> ! <table> <tr><td>1</td></tr> <tr><td>2</td></tr> <tr><td>3</td></tr> </table>