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I'm happy PHP is still there, because other much better languages missed a lot of good things that PHP got right immediately (in the context of web development)

I'm happy PHP is still there, because other much better languages missed a lot of good things that PHP got right immediately (in the context of web development): 1. You may add complexity if you want but the bare metal of web is that you have some printf() like output construct plus a trivial <? ?> interpolation thing. Then who wants more can add more, but this should be what you get immediately for free, without template languages. 2. Languages, even high level ones, should be reasonably fast. 3. Setting up an environment should be trivial. 4. By default things are created and die in the context of a page load. Then if you want to optimize things, you may have additional constructs to create persistent connections, objects, whatever. But give me this huge garbage collector that is a stateless execution, by default. 5. A set of libraries already included so that for most things I don't have to go and find some solution. Many other competitors failed so big in that regards that I really wanted PHP to get better as a language (like it is doing) so that it was not a so bad experience like at the start, because I was pretty sure the others would hardly fix the above points.

aasasd 8y ago
Now, the actual tragedy of PHP isn't that coding in it feels soul-drainingly tainted, but that it was always ‘good enough’ for armies of people. Because, as a result, there wasn't any incentive to add features outside of the paradigm of one-shot scripts. E.g. there are at least three async frameworks, with barely any adoption―and this new ‘Swole’ one is advertised like ReactPHP never existed, with its promises and everything. Meanwhile, somehow, the poster notion of PHP's versatility is that it's purportedly just fine for desktop GUI programming, of all things―while being single-threaded (its ‘pthreads’ aren't threads). The topic of UI freezes never comes up in these pamphlets, for some reason.

aasasd 8y ago

Now, the actual tragedy of PHP isn't that coding in it feels soul-drainingly tainted, but that it was always ‘good enough’ for armies of people. Because, as a result, there wasn't any incentive to add features outside of the paradigm of one-shot scripts. E.g. there are at least three async frameworks, with barely any adoption―and this new ‘Swole’ one is advertised like ReactPHP never existed, with its promises and everything. Meanwhile, somehow, the poster notion of PHP's versatility is that it's purportedly just fine for desktop GUI programming, of all things―while being single-threaded (its ‘pthreads’ aren't threads). The topic of UI freezes never comes up in these pamphlets, for some reason.