15 ms·

P++ idea: FAQ

167 points by tnorthcutt 7y ago

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
qwerty456127 7y ago
> dynamic, with strong BC bias > it could be more daring with BC What is BC?
- no_wizard 7y ago
  Backward compatibility in this context.
  - qwerty456127 7y ago
    Thanks. I have used the "backward compatibility" term many times but never abbreviated it nor seen it abbreviated. The only idea that comes into my mind when I see "BC" is "Before Christ" which actually feels pretty much relevant :-) Indeed they should really have spelled it out first and only used the uncommon abbreviation for subsequent occurrences.
- hn_throwaway_99 7y ago
  I upvoted you, because I had the exact same question, but I also wanted to comment. It seems SOOO common, especially for technical writers, to overuse, or invent, acronyms and to expect that people automatically know what they are talking about. I've been in software for about 20 years, I'm very familiar with the concepts around backwards compatibility, but I have never seen it abbreviated 'BC' before. If you want to use uncommon acronyms, please be sure to spell it out (e.g. "backwards compatibility (BC)") the first time you mention it.
mjburgess 7y ago
I really struggle to see what the case is for PHP anymore. I maxed out '04 to '14. After working in a dozen other languages, the only motivation left seems to be sunk-costs and job-market openings. It's so domain-specific that you're hamstringing yourself in the future. That you'd create a new language out of PHP just seems mad. Who's the audience? The pragmatic (market) motivations don't exist.
- no_wizard 7y ago
  I agree with this. I'm struggling to get out of my current role/job right now, because I want to move away from PHP (I'm really growing to dislike it as a whole, and in my personal experience have some very negative connotations around the development practices of the PHP developers I deal with on a day in day out basis) I been looking at C#, what did you find was easy to translate to quickly?
  - mjburgess 7y ago
    Might seem cliche (?) but Python. Ignore all the java lipstick that went on after PHP5; PHP doesnt work like a static language and C#/Java really quite different. Python fits the mental model of PHP far more closely, in that everything you expect to be able to do easily (dynamic dispatch, OO, closures, etc.) are easy. And everything hard (mixins, metaprogramming, etc.) is about as hard. Most things are easier. C# may seem more "grown up". From a PHP-culture perspective "Java OO" is grown up, and "procedural C" is babyish. That has more to do with PHP3 vs PHP5 than either Java or C. The latter of which, as with python, includes the best programmers in the world. From a web job-market perspective I can't say. I got into data science a few years ago, and haven't much contact since. C# may make more sense; it would have back when I was in the area.
    - no_wizard 7y ago
      I actually started with Python, and ended up on PHP because of job changes in the last 2 years (my employer closed their satellite teams so I jumped to a local university. Turns out Drupal is huge in university land, and so PHP. Has not been a stellar experience. I think I had some pre-formed notion that I'd at least be working on more interesting problems, but alas). I would love to get back to Python, but where I live I mostly see Java/C# job openings (I don't want to live in the Bay Area. My wife has health issues and its complicated to get her care set up again). and I can't seem to find any places hiring remote Python devs (I did web backends in Python, for reference, not data science. I don't have a CS degree, so I feel timid trying to pushing into Data Science even though I'm a quite knowledgeable Python programmer. I still keep up with all the latest Python news and libraries even). I'm torn on what to do next. I really would love writing Python full time again. Hell, I'd love to do just front-end web development full time even. I have so much more passion for either than I have writing PHP code. I feel like a glorified Forms creator. Nothing of remote interest is happening in PHP land for me. When I wrote Python full time we did real-time networking and web back ends. Lots of websocket programming. Async/Await had just taken hold (I came up on Python 3.4 and by the time I was writing it full time we had updated to Python 3.6+). DataClasses was sooo exciting to me. I just miss that energy. Now with static site generators becoming so vogue I can see all the potential in the world Python has to make the day to day web development experrience so good (IMO, its better at munging data than even gatsby is. Numpy, SciPy, etc. combined with a gatsby-like platform that normalizes all your data into consumable views would be mind blowing) I know this is a bit of a rant, but I really miss that energy I had when I was living in Python all day. Things just made sense to me. And if I ever had a real performance bottleneck, I could always write a C extension. Maybe I just need to job hunt better. Unforunately if I can't do C#/Java it needs to be remote work, and I don't feel like I meet the qualifications for any places that hire remote workers. They all want super engineers and I don't really know if I am one :(
maxk42 7y ago
The people who wanted strong static typing have already left PHP. I don't think they're catering to their userbase.
- probablybroken 7y ago
  The PHP base is huge, I've known many good PHP developers who prefer stricter implementations, but work with PHP because they get paid to, and because they know the language and libraries end up using it for new projects. This proposal provides a gradual migration path for those users, and makes adoption a lot more likely.
- muglug 7y ago
  A lot of people can't easily leave PHP, because they work at companies that use it. Tools like [Psalm](https://psalm.dev https://psalm.dev), [Phan](https://github.com/phan/phan https://github.com/phan/phan) and [PHPStan](https://github.com/phpstan/phpstan https://github.com/phpstan/phpstan) have cropped up to help users deal with PHP's slight type system.
- paulddraper 7y ago
  Maybe not their current userbase. But things are always changing.
atdt 7y ago
It's a little galling that the proposal makes no mention of Hack (https://hacklang.org/ https://hacklang.org/), which is also an evolved PHP with static typing that is designed to coexist with PHP 5/7 code on top of a single runtime (HHVM). Edit: as noted below, since I made this comment, a new section has been added to the doc about this topic.
- no_wizard 7y ago
  It does make a reference to it further down from the synopsis. The difference here I think is that most of the PHP community seems to abandon support for Hack, so Hack (as far as I can see. I am happy to be corrected) in the wild is more or less contained to Facebook and its properties. I think a couple of large companies like Slack use it in some places too, but its mainly been disregarded by the broader community (none of the largest frameworks support Hack anymore, for instance). Which makes sense why Hack is no longer developing with PHP compatibility in mind.
  - spullara 7y ago
    Slack is also a large scale user of Hack: https://slack.engineering/streamlining-your-workflow-debugging-for-hhvm-effd7db3c72d https://slack.engineering/streamlining-your-workflow-debuggi...
- Jwarder 7y ago
  Perhaps they updated the file. I see a "This is Hack all over again, isn't it? Why would it fair any better?" section about 3/4 down. Was Hack a pain to setup? Getting P++ "for free" with PHP 8 seems convenient.
- bryanlarsen 7y ago
  https://wiki.php.net/pplusplus/faq#this_is_hack_all_over_again_isn_t_it_why_would_it_fair_any_better https://wiki.php.net/pplusplus/faq#this_is_hack_all_over_aga...
skrebbel 7y ago
If they pull this off I just might return to PHP for a lot of work. I love PHP's pragmatism, I love that it's batteries included, and most of all I love the deployment story. It's basically zero-config AWS Lambda without vendor lockin. If they manage to split off a better language without splitting up the community like Python 2/3 or Perl 5/6 did, then that's a spectacular win in my book. Having a little header on top of each file is real nice (and it also opens the door for mixed PHP/P++ projects, another thing Perl and Python failed at). I find it telling that the PHP community keeps getting this sort of stuff right (they also got the php4->5 migration right back in the days, through collective community action; they fixed the error that was PHP 6 before it was too late, and so on). Pragmatism to the max, things have to not just keep working, but also stay convenient (like Hack wasn't).
- codesushi42 7y ago
  How is PHP pragmatic compared to other languages? Do tell.
  - whatshisface 7y ago
    Instead of having a trillion build steps, you write PHP right in the HTML.
    - monk_e_boy 7y ago
      It’s so easy to teach. Learninh html css and php is such a win. Quick to bash out a simple site.
      - echelon 7y ago
        > Quick to bash out a simple site. This is precisely why I don't think it's the appropriate tool for any substantial, serious, or long-lived projects. The language feels kludgey, and it attracts an ecosystem of beginners that don't necessarily have to learn much in the way of CS fundamentals or engineering to succeed. (Indeed, I've run into more than a few that don't know the difference between lists and dictionaries or the runtimes of the operations performed on them.) It's not that I think that a language should be a barrier, but I've wasted so much time reading confusing and poorly-written PHP code, and it feels like the language actively empowers code to be written this way. A tool should also teach. There are other languages that have this problem as well (C++ comes to mind), but I think they tend to be hard enough to use that practitioners already understand the do's and don't's. I know it's irrational of me to be so irate that this language is still active, but it bothers me that real engineering work and human productivity is spent on supporting one of so many scripting languages that are marginally different. I suppose I should be even more angry at all the cognitive effort being put into marketing and adtech, but PHP makes me sigh.
stcredzero 7y ago
The first likes PHP roughly the way it is - dynamic, with strong BC bias and emphasis on simplicity Personally, I have a strong AD bias. Seriously, though, what does this term mean?
- EdwinHoksberg 7y ago
  BC = backwards compatibility
- skrebbel 7y ago
  Backward compat - something that's been pretty holy in PHP land for ages and hence got abbreviated in the internals community. Pretty fair IMO to abbreviate something that's so core to a language's vision. Don't forget that HN isn't the target audience of this post: it's people who are involved with PHP internals.
  - stcredzero 7y ago
    Pretty fair IMO to abbreviate something that's so core to a language's vision. When talking to the faithful, sure. Language communities need to constantly fight against a tendency towards navel-gazing and only wanting to talk to the faithful.
    - skrebbel 7y ago
      Come on, this not a blog post. It's a page on the internal dev wiki.
      - stcredzero 7y ago
        Sure. Maybe I came across harsher than I meant. Please take this in a constructive spirit. I'm a hoary old veteran who has been a part of a non-mainstream dynamic language community which fell under the naval-gazing trap. In the age of the Internet, a language should always be thinking about outreach. It doesn't matter if you have the best technology, or it it's faster and more nimble. The community needs to keep up with the outreach side.
muglug 7y ago
There's a long discussion of the FAQ in the internals mailing list: https://externals.io/message/106503 https://externals.io/message/106503 It's important to understand that this is just a proposal from a core PHP developer - at the moment it seems that most other prominent core developers aren't enthusiastic about this particular approach.
codesushi42 7y ago
There's already a statically typed version of PHP, it's called Hack. Why anyone would use any variation of PHP for a new project in 2019 is simply inconceivable.
- alexhutcheson 7y ago
  Somewhat surprisingly, the main PHP implementation has made huge performance improvements since Hack was released in 2014, and has actually become one of the fastest mainstream scripting languages. Speed + ubiquity in shared hosting environments + a huge corpus of existing frameworks and code make it pretty attractive for web applications, especially of the CRUD/CMS variety.
  - echelon 7y ago
    > shared hosting environments I see shared hosting and VPS eventually going the way of the dodo now that cloud hosting is mainstream. Has the market seen any growth recently?
  - codesushi42 7y ago
    Speed is irrelevant because Hack is compiled. Shared hosting environments are also irrelevant in 2019.
alexhutcheson 7y ago
I think proponents of this change are dramatically underestimating how difficult and limiting it will be to maintain seamless interop between two dialects of a language. Interop between languages is hard, and many of the features and changes that you might like to add to a "P++" would make it either expensive or verbose to call or be called by "legacy" PHP. Ultimately I think this could go one of two ways: A. The "P++" effort ends up hamstrung by the need to maintain seamless interop with "legacy" PHP, and is therefore only able to implement a small subset of the clean-ups and enhancements they envision. It's not clear that this is better than continuing to improve PHP in a backwards-compatible way. B. Changes to P++ make it so that interop with "legacy" PHP is either very verbose (specifying types, casting, etc.) or incurs a heavy runtime cost. To avoid this, most significant PHP libraries get a P++ clone, and the language effectively forks into two separate communities. It would be awesome if it's possible to avoid this, but I haven't seen a specific technical proposal for a significantly improved language that maintains seamless interop.
- tottenhm 7y ago
  The same concern definitely crossed my mind as a reader, but I think the coloring of the critique should be less #000000 and more #888888. A lot depends on the technical goals of the "P++" variant - and on the culture among the language maintainers. * If everyone generally views both language frontends as equal and shared responsibilities with valid technical rationales and only some specific/reasoned differences, then it's probably sustainable. * If the team becomes polarized, or if one subteam wants to substantially reinvent their language ("Let's make it purely functional too! Bring on the monads!"), then yes... they'll feel hamstrung. It might be interesting for them to consider comparisons with other systems that support multiple language frontends, e.g. * GCC supports C and C++ (not to mention C++11, C++14, ad nauseum). * HHVM support(ed) PHP and Hack * JVM and CLR both support a range of language frontends. My guess is that GCC is a more favorable analog (it feels normal+realistic to support C99 alongside C++11 and C++14). JVM/CLR seems like an unfavorable analog (they've supported many very different languages... but involve many large teams and diverse technical specs). HHVM is probably the most pointed analog. It's just... mixed. On one hand, HHVM succeeded in supporting two similar languages for a long time (in spite of significant idiosyncrasies of PHP). On the other hand, HHVM eventually gave up on PHP and went pure-Hack. But (as an outsider) I'm not really sure the reason. It could be that they got boxed-in on a technical issue of language-interop, or it could be they got boxed-in organizationally (being a separate team maintaining a secondary implementation amid a continuous drip-drip of external changes - not a great position). I interpret the original link above as basically an assertion (crude paraphrase): "The HHVM folks were broadly right about PHP and Hack and technology and all that; but their implementation hasn't succeeded on organizational grounds, and we-here can do those organizational things better."
burk96 7y ago
I'm very interested in this and will be watching to see where this goes. I've just started PHP this summer as an intern at a company that uses it. At first I was really put off by the language, I had never seriously worked with either web languages or languages that used dynamic typing. So many things seemed strange, dated, or even just plain wrong. On top of that, the official documentation is often confusing as far as best practices go and the ~20 year old comments can only add to confusion (though it is neat when one helps out). All that said, I've come to enjoy the language for what it is. It works seamlessly with HTML/CSS and can provide so much function with little effort put into configuration. Nearly everything I need to be done can be accomplished without frameworks or libraries, maybe just Bootstrap's CSS to make things pretty enough for the end user. I could see P++ being useful for PHP as a chance at rebranding. PHP horror stories had made me believe it just had to be bad language. If P++ brings all of the good of PHP along with typing and better syntax in general, I believe it would be a much easier sell to devs in a situation like my own.
- porker 7y ago
  > At first I was really put off by the language, I had never seriously worked with either web languages or languages that used dynamic typing. So many things seemed strange, dated, or even just plain wrong. Did you keep a list of these things? That would be really useful to have, because the discussions on the internal mailing list end up saying "We need to talk to users and find out how they found it" and never do...
  - burk96 7y ago
    No I did not make a formal list, but I probably have some gists from when I started that could jog my memory a bit. Where would be the best place to provide feedback?
    - porker 7y ago
      If you don't blog, Medium. Or even a detailed gist. And then share it around - even on the php.internals mailing list if you're feeling brave (but wear a fire-retardant suit when you do)
goatlover 7y ago
I don't get the push to add static typing to dynamic languages. If you don't want to use a dynamic language, then use one of the statically typed ones, like Java, Typescript or Go. If it's a case of dynamic languages not scaling well beyond a certain point because of the lack of static typing, then right tool for the job should apply. Don't scale a dynamic language to that size.
- _hardwaregeek 7y ago
  It's mostly from companies with existing codebases built using dynamic languages. Plus everybody's standards for tooling are going up and one of the best ways to improve tooling is through types.
  - goatlover 7y ago
    It's the same argument for continuing to manage Excel applications as they scale up to complicated messes.
- eitland 7y ago
  Try Typescript and see. Pushing for static typing in dynamic languages means you can have the best of both worlds. Example: Any valid js file can also be a valid ts file, but now you can also introduce types, vastly reducing mental load since you always have a polite unpaid pair programmer (the type checker + language server) to help you.
throwawaysixthg 7y ago
I see a lot of comments defending PHP with arguments about how fast it is. They may be right about the PHP7 implementation generally executing faster than most popular Python or Ruby implementations, but they're really missing the point when we're talking about languages and language design, which is what these conversations are really about. Languages aren't fast or slow, implementations are fast or slow (and all to varying degrees in various contexts). Implementations are also limited in how much they can impact speed, because the speed of execution is primarily a function of the code, how it's written, and sometimes input size (not how it's executed). In other words, speed improvements derived from implementation optimizations are generally constant-time improvements, not improvements that scale with code complexity or input size. That means speed of implementation is mostly a concern of certain specific domains where milliseconds really matter. A few of them are HFT, computer graphics, UI rendering, systems programming, etc. Outside of that, code and system design optimizations will be far more fruitful than implementation optimizations. PHP's design is so intertwined with the HTTP request-response lifecycle that it has been (pretty much) completely and permanently relegated to a very narrowly defined set of use cases, mostly template rendering (or more organized code in the same vein as template rendering, WP, most Laravel projects, etc) and HTTP APIs. Nearly all PHP use cases involve network latency for every user interaction that makes it past caching layers (to where it's actually executed by the PHP7 interpreter). Allowing network latency to impact user experience for every user interaction (which is practically the only thing PHP knows how to do) isn't acceptable anymore in 2019, and the solution is client-side rendering (JS/V8/webkit/blink/etc). PHP cannot (could not) solve that, because no matter how much you optimize it, it will still take 500ms of network latency to reach the user's browser. So there's really no use case or domain where PHP is the correct choice if speed of execution is a primary concern, and that would continue to be true even if you made PHP's interpreter run as fast or even faster than V8. The language's design is inherently incompatible with use cases that care about speed, because of how deeply in bed it is with HTTP request-response lifecycle. What this leaves us with is a language that is only functional in environments and use cases where implementation speed does not matter. PHP's marriage to HTTP request-response lifecycle has also had the effect of enabling bad coding practices at the interpreter level, because when no process lives longer than a few seconds, a lot of things that should matter just stop mattering. This is why very few people have ever tried to use PHP outside the context of HTTP, and those who have returned with the worst kinds of horror stories. What that leaves us with is a language that can't even reasonably be called a general-purpose programming language. And through all the efforts to save PHP from these problems, what are we trying to save? The most inconsistent, cluttered, disorganized and ugly syntax and standard library of any prevalent modern language. I understand that a lot of people have to work with PHP, that good communities can form and be sustained around that, and that some people can even like it. But if there's going to be any semblance of objectivity in any conversation about language design, it has to be agreed that PHP is a terrible language. A language that served a great purpose and arguably accelerated the success of the web to a historical degree, but not a language that still needs to be here in 10 years.
xiaodai 7y ago
Sounds like python 3 saga all over again, but in php land.
- toxik 7y ago
  I disagree, Python 3.x was always meant to be the next version of the language. This seems to intentionally not take that position because the dev team can't settle on which way to go. Python 3.x was difficult to pull off, but it happened, and I actually think it was a bit too conservative with its changes. This would be a parallel language built-in to the same tool. It'd be kinda like if there was a way to declare your Python code's major version, and then having Python being able to run either.
foobar_ 7y ago
Rewrite is always a terrible idea. Doing it inside out is an awesome idea.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

P++ idea: FAQ

167 points by tnorthcutt 7y ago

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

qwerty456127 7y ago

> dynamic, with strong BC bias > it could be more daring with BC What is BC?

no_wizard 7y ago
Backward compatibility in this context.
- qwerty456127 7y ago
  Thanks. I have used the "backward compatibility" term many times but never abbreviated it nor seen it abbreviated. The only idea that comes into my mind when I see "BC" is "Before Christ" which actually feels pretty much relevant :-) Indeed they should really have spelled it out first and only used the uncommon abbreviation for subsequent occurrences.
hn_throwaway_99 7y ago
I upvoted you, because I had the exact same question, but I also wanted to comment. It seems SOOO common, especially for technical writers, to overuse, or invent, acronyms and to expect that people automatically know what they are talking about. I've been in software for about 20 years, I'm very familiar with the concepts around backwards compatibility, but I have never seen it abbreviated 'BC' before. If you want to use uncommon acronyms, please be sure to spell it out (e.g. "backwards compatibility (BC)") the first time you mention it.

mjburgess 7y ago

I really struggle to see what the case is for PHP anymore. I maxed out '04 to '14. After working in a dozen other languages, the only motivation left seems to be sunk-costs and job-market openings. It's so domain-specific that you're hamstringing yourself in the future. That you'd create a new language out of PHP just seems mad. Who's the audience? The pragmatic (market) motivations don't exist.

no_wizard 7y ago
I agree with this. I'm struggling to get out of my current role/job right now, because I want to move away from PHP (I'm really growing to dislike it as a whole, and in my personal experience have some very negative connotations around the development practices of the PHP developers I deal with on a day in day out basis) I been looking at C#, what did you find was easy to translate to quickly?
- mjburgess 7y ago
  Might seem cliche (?) but Python. Ignore all the java lipstick that went on after PHP5; PHP doesnt work like a static language and C#/Java really quite different. Python fits the mental model of PHP far more closely, in that everything you expect to be able to do easily (dynamic dispatch, OO, closures, etc.) are easy. And everything hard (mixins, metaprogramming, etc.) is about as hard. Most things are easier. C# may seem more "grown up". From a PHP-culture perspective "Java OO" is grown up, and "procedural C" is babyish. That has more to do with PHP3 vs PHP5 than either Java or C. The latter of which, as with python, includes the best programmers in the world. From a web job-market perspective I can't say. I got into data science a few years ago, and haven't much contact since. C# may make more sense; it would have back when I was in the area.
  - no_wizard 7y ago
    I actually started with Python, and ended up on PHP because of job changes in the last 2 years (my employer closed their satellite teams so I jumped to a local university. Turns out Drupal is huge in university land, and so PHP. Has not been a stellar experience. I think I had some pre-formed notion that I'd at least be working on more interesting problems, but alas). I would love to get back to Python, but where I live I mostly see Java/C# job openings (I don't want to live in the Bay Area. My wife has health issues and its complicated to get her care set up again). and I can't seem to find any places hiring remote Python devs (I did web backends in Python, for reference, not data science. I don't have a CS degree, so I feel timid trying to pushing into Data Science even though I'm a quite knowledgeable Python programmer. I still keep up with all the latest Python news and libraries even). I'm torn on what to do next. I really would love writing Python full time again. Hell, I'd love to do just front-end web development full time even. I have so much more passion for either than I have writing PHP code. I feel like a glorified Forms creator. Nothing of remote interest is happening in PHP land for me. When I wrote Python full time we did real-time networking and web back ends. Lots of websocket programming. Async/Await had just taken hold (I came up on Python 3.4 and by the time I was writing it full time we had updated to Python 3.6+). DataClasses was sooo exciting to me. I just miss that energy. Now with static site generators becoming so vogue I can see all the potential in the world Python has to make the day to day web development experrience so good (IMO, its better at munging data than even gatsby is. Numpy, SciPy, etc. combined with a gatsby-like platform that normalizes all your data into consumable views would be mind blowing) I know this is a bit of a rant, but I really miss that energy I had when I was living in Python all day. Things just made sense to me. And if I ever had a real performance bottleneck, I could always write a C extension. Maybe I just need to job hunt better. Unforunately if I can't do C#/Java it needs to be remote work, and I don't feel like I meet the qualifications for any places that hire remote workers. They all want super engineers and I don't really know if I am one :(

maxk42 7y ago

The people who wanted strong static typing have already left PHP. I don't think they're catering to their userbase.

probablybroken 7y ago
The PHP base is huge, I've known many good PHP developers who prefer stricter implementations, but work with PHP because they get paid to, and because they know the language and libraries end up using it for new projects. This proposal provides a gradual migration path for those users, and makes adoption a lot more likely.
muglug 7y ago
A lot of people can't easily leave PHP, because they work at companies that use it. Tools like [Psalm](https://psalm.dev https://psalm.dev), [Phan](https://github.com/phan/phan https://github.com/phan/phan) and [PHPStan](https://github.com/phpstan/phpstan https://github.com/phpstan/phpstan) have cropped up to help users deal with PHP's slight type system.
paulddraper 7y ago
Maybe not their current userbase. But things are always changing.

atdt 7y ago

It's a little galling that the proposal makes no mention of Hack (https://hacklang.org/ https://hacklang.org/), which is also an evolved PHP with static typing that is designed to coexist with PHP 5/7 code on top of a single runtime (HHVM). Edit: as noted below, since I made this comment, a new section has been added to the doc about this topic.

no_wizard 7y ago
It does make a reference to it further down from the synopsis. The difference here I think is that most of the PHP community seems to abandon support for Hack, so Hack (as far as I can see. I am happy to be corrected) in the wild is more or less contained to Facebook and its properties. I think a couple of large companies like Slack use it in some places too, but its mainly been disregarded by the broader community (none of the largest frameworks support Hack anymore, for instance). Which makes sense why Hack is no longer developing with PHP compatibility in mind.
- spullara 7y ago
  Slack is also a large scale user of Hack: https://slack.engineering/streamlining-your-workflow-debugging-for-hhvm-effd7db3c72d https://slack.engineering/streamlining-your-workflow-debuggi...
Jwarder 7y ago
Perhaps they updated the file. I see a "This is Hack all over again, isn't it? Why would it fair any better?" section about 3/4 down. Was Hack a pain to setup? Getting P++ "for free" with PHP 8 seems convenient.
bryanlarsen 7y ago
https://wiki.php.net/pplusplus/faq#this_is_hack_all_over_again_isn_t_it_why_would_it_fair_any_better https://wiki.php.net/pplusplus/faq#this_is_hack_all_over_aga...

skrebbel 7y ago

If they pull this off I just might return to PHP for a lot of work. I love PHP's pragmatism, I love that it's batteries included, and most of all I love the deployment story. It's basically zero-config AWS Lambda without vendor lockin. If they manage to split off a better language without splitting up the community like Python 2/3 or Perl 5/6 did, then that's a spectacular win in my book. Having a little header on top of each file is real nice (and it also opens the door for mixed PHP/P++ projects, another thing Perl and Python failed at). I find it telling that the PHP community keeps getting this sort of stuff right (they also got the php4->5 migration right back in the days, through collective community action; they fixed the error that was PHP 6 before it was too late, and so on). Pragmatism to the max, things have to not just keep working, but also stay convenient (like Hack wasn't).

codesushi42 7y ago
How is PHP pragmatic compared to other languages? Do tell.
- whatshisface 7y ago
  Instead of having a trillion build steps, you write PHP right in the HTML.
  - monk_e_boy 7y ago
    It’s so easy to teach. Learninh html css and php is such a win. Quick to bash out a simple site.
    - echelon 7y ago
      > Quick to bash out a simple site. This is precisely why I don't think it's the appropriate tool for any substantial, serious, or long-lived projects. The language feels kludgey, and it attracts an ecosystem of beginners that don't necessarily have to learn much in the way of CS fundamentals or engineering to succeed. (Indeed, I've run into more than a few that don't know the difference between lists and dictionaries or the runtimes of the operations performed on them.) It's not that I think that a language should be a barrier, but I've wasted so much time reading confusing and poorly-written PHP code, and it feels like the language actively empowers code to be written this way. A tool should also teach. There are other languages that have this problem as well (C++ comes to mind), but I think they tend to be hard enough to use that practitioners already understand the do's and don't's. I know it's irrational of me to be so irate that this language is still active, but it bothers me that real engineering work and human productivity is spent on supporting one of so many scripting languages that are marginally different. I suppose I should be even more angry at all the cognitive effort being put into marketing and adtech, but PHP makes me sigh.

stcredzero 7y ago

The first likes PHP roughly the way it is - dynamic, with strong BC bias and emphasis on simplicity Personally, I have a strong AD bias. Seriously, though, what does this term mean?

EdwinHoksberg 7y ago
BC = backwards compatibility
skrebbel 7y ago
Backward compat - something that's been pretty holy in PHP land for ages and hence got abbreviated in the internals community. Pretty fair IMO to abbreviate something that's so core to a language's vision. Don't forget that HN isn't the target audience of this post: it's people who are involved with PHP internals.
- stcredzero 7y ago
  Pretty fair IMO to abbreviate something that's so core to a language's vision. When talking to the faithful, sure. Language communities need to constantly fight against a tendency towards navel-gazing and only wanting to talk to the faithful.
  - skrebbel 7y ago
    Come on, this not a blog post. It's a page on the internal dev wiki.
    - stcredzero 7y ago
      Sure. Maybe I came across harsher than I meant. Please take this in a constructive spirit. I'm a hoary old veteran who has been a part of a non-mainstream dynamic language community which fell under the naval-gazing trap. In the age of the Internet, a language should always be thinking about outreach. It doesn't matter if you have the best technology, or it it's faster and more nimble. The community needs to keep up with the outreach side.

muglug 7y ago

There's a long discussion of the FAQ in the internals mailing list: https://externals.io/message/106503 https://externals.io/message/106503 It's important to understand that this is just a proposal from a core PHP developer - at the moment it seems that most other prominent core developers aren't enthusiastic about this particular approach.

codesushi42 7y ago

There's already a statically typed version of PHP, it's called Hack. Why anyone would use any variation of PHP for a new project in 2019 is simply inconceivable.

alexhutcheson 7y ago
Somewhat surprisingly, the main PHP implementation has made huge performance improvements since Hack was released in 2014, and has actually become one of the fastest mainstream scripting languages. Speed + ubiquity in shared hosting environments + a huge corpus of existing frameworks and code make it pretty attractive for web applications, especially of the CRUD/CMS variety.
- echelon 7y ago
  > shared hosting environments I see shared hosting and VPS eventually going the way of the dodo now that cloud hosting is mainstream. Has the market seen any growth recently?
- codesushi42 7y ago
  Speed is irrelevant because Hack is compiled. Shared hosting environments are also irrelevant in 2019.

alexhutcheson 7y ago

I think proponents of this change are dramatically underestimating how difficult and limiting it will be to maintain seamless interop between two dialects of a language. Interop between languages is hard, and many of the features and changes that you might like to add to a "P++" would make it either expensive or verbose to call or be called by "legacy" PHP. Ultimately I think this could go one of two ways: A. The "P++" effort ends up hamstrung by the need to maintain seamless interop with "legacy" PHP, and is therefore only able to implement a small subset of the clean-ups and enhancements they envision. It's not clear that this is better than continuing to improve PHP in a backwards-compatible way. B. Changes to P++ make it so that interop with "legacy" PHP is either very verbose (specifying types, casting, etc.) or incurs a heavy runtime cost. To avoid this, most significant PHP libraries get a P++ clone, and the language effectively forks into two separate communities. It would be awesome if it's possible to avoid this, but I haven't seen a specific technical proposal for a significantly improved language that maintains seamless interop.

tottenhm 7y ago
The same concern definitely crossed my mind as a reader, but I think the coloring of the critique should be less #000000 and more #888888. A lot depends on the technical goals of the "P++" variant - and on the culture among the language maintainers. * If everyone generally views both language frontends as equal and shared responsibilities with valid technical rationales and only some specific/reasoned differences, then it's probably sustainable. * If the team becomes polarized, or if one subteam wants to substantially reinvent their language ("Let's make it purely functional too! Bring on the monads!"), then yes... they'll feel hamstrung. It might be interesting for them to consider comparisons with other systems that support multiple language frontends, e.g. * GCC supports C and C++ (not to mention C++11, C++14, ad nauseum). * HHVM support(ed) PHP and Hack * JVM and CLR both support a range of language frontends. My guess is that GCC is a more favorable analog (it feels normal+realistic to support C99 alongside C++11 and C++14). JVM/CLR seems like an unfavorable analog (they've supported many very different languages... but involve many large teams and diverse technical specs). HHVM is probably the most pointed analog. It's just... mixed. On one hand, HHVM succeeded in supporting two similar languages for a long time (in spite of significant idiosyncrasies of PHP). On the other hand, HHVM eventually gave up on PHP and went pure-Hack. But (as an outsider) I'm not really sure the reason. It could be that they got boxed-in on a technical issue of language-interop, or it could be they got boxed-in organizationally (being a separate team maintaining a secondary implementation amid a continuous drip-drip of external changes - not a great position). I interpret the original link above as basically an assertion (crude paraphrase): "The HHVM folks were broadly right about PHP and Hack and technology and all that; but their implementation hasn't succeeded on organizational grounds, and we-here can do those organizational things better."

burk96 7y ago

I'm very interested in this and will be watching to see where this goes. I've just started PHP this summer as an intern at a company that uses it. At first I was really put off by the language, I had never seriously worked with either web languages or languages that used dynamic typing. So many things seemed strange, dated, or even just plain wrong. On top of that, the official documentation is often confusing as far as best practices go and the ~20 year old comments can only add to confusion (though it is neat when one helps out). All that said, I've come to enjoy the language for what it is. It works seamlessly with HTML/CSS and can provide so much function with little effort put into configuration. Nearly everything I need to be done can be accomplished without frameworks or libraries, maybe just Bootstrap's CSS to make things pretty enough for the end user. I could see P++ being useful for PHP as a chance at rebranding. PHP horror stories had made me believe it just had to be bad language. If P++ brings all of the good of PHP along with typing and better syntax in general, I believe it would be a much easier sell to devs in a situation like my own.

porker 7y ago
> At first I was really put off by the language, I had never seriously worked with either web languages or languages that used dynamic typing. So many things seemed strange, dated, or even just plain wrong. Did you keep a list of these things? That would be really useful to have, because the discussions on the internal mailing list end up saying "We need to talk to users and find out how they found it" and never do...
- burk96 7y ago
  No I did not make a formal list, but I probably have some gists from when I started that could jog my memory a bit. Where would be the best place to provide feedback?
  - porker 7y ago
    If you don't blog, Medium. Or even a detailed gist. And then share it around - even on the php.internals mailing list if you're feeling brave (but wear a fire-retardant suit when you do)

goatlover 7y ago

I don't get the push to add static typing to dynamic languages. If you don't want to use a dynamic language, then use one of the statically typed ones, like Java, Typescript or Go. If it's a case of dynamic languages not scaling well beyond a certain point because of the lack of static typing, then right tool for the job should apply. Don't scale a dynamic language to that size.

_hardwaregeek 7y ago
It's mostly from companies with existing codebases built using dynamic languages. Plus everybody's standards for tooling are going up and one of the best ways to improve tooling is through types.
- goatlover 7y ago
  It's the same argument for continuing to manage Excel applications as they scale up to complicated messes.
eitland 7y ago
Try Typescript and see. Pushing for static typing in dynamic languages means you can have the best of both worlds. Example: Any valid js file can also be a valid ts file, but now you can also introduce types, vastly reducing mental load since you always have a polite unpaid pair programmer (the type checker + language server) to help you.

throwawaysixthg 7y ago

I see a lot of comments defending PHP with arguments about how fast it is. They may be right about the PHP7 implementation generally executing faster than most popular Python or Ruby implementations, but they're really missing the point when we're talking about languages and language design, which is what these conversations are really about. Languages aren't fast or slow, implementations are fast or slow (and all to varying degrees in various contexts). Implementations are also limited in how much they can impact speed, because the speed of execution is primarily a function of the code, how it's written, and sometimes input size (not how it's executed). In other words, speed improvements derived from implementation optimizations are generally constant-time improvements, not improvements that scale with code complexity or input size. That means speed of implementation is mostly a concern of certain specific domains where milliseconds really matter. A few of them are HFT, computer graphics, UI rendering, systems programming, etc. Outside of that, code and system design optimizations will be far more fruitful than implementation optimizations. PHP's design is so intertwined with the HTTP request-response lifecycle that it has been (pretty much) completely and permanently relegated to a very narrowly defined set of use cases, mostly template rendering (or more organized code in the same vein as template rendering, WP, most Laravel projects, etc) and HTTP APIs. Nearly all PHP use cases involve network latency for every user interaction that makes it past caching layers (to where it's actually executed by the PHP7 interpreter). Allowing network latency to impact user experience for every user interaction (which is practically the only thing PHP knows how to do) isn't acceptable anymore in 2019, and the solution is client-side rendering (JS/V8/webkit/blink/etc). PHP cannot (could not) solve that, because no matter how much you optimize it, it will still take 500ms of network latency to reach the user's browser. So there's really no use case or domain where PHP is the correct choice if speed of execution is a primary concern, and that would continue to be true even if you made PHP's interpreter run as fast or even faster than V8. The language's design is inherently incompatible with use cases that care about speed, because of how deeply in bed it is with HTTP request-response lifecycle. What this leaves us with is a language that is only functional in environments and use cases where implementation speed does not matter. PHP's marriage to HTTP request-response lifecycle has also had the effect of enabling bad coding practices at the interpreter level, because when no process lives longer than a few seconds, a lot of things that should matter just stop mattering. This is why very few people have ever tried to use PHP outside the context of HTTP, and those who have returned with the worst kinds of horror stories. What that leaves us with is a language that can't even reasonably be called a general-purpose programming language. And through all the efforts to save PHP from these problems, what are we trying to save? The most inconsistent, cluttered, disorganized and ugly syntax and standard library of any prevalent modern language. I understand that a lot of people have to work with PHP, that good communities can form and be sustained around that, and that some people can even like it. But if there's going to be any semblance of objectivity in any conversation about language design, it has to be agreed that PHP is a terrible language. A language that served a great purpose and arguably accelerated the success of the web to a historical degree, but not a language that still needs to be here in 10 years.

xiaodai 7y ago

Sounds like python 3 saga all over again, but in php land.

toxik 7y ago
I disagree, Python 3.x was always meant to be the next version of the language. This seems to intentionally not take that position because the dev team can't settle on which way to go. Python 3.x was difficult to pull off, but it happened, and I actually think it was a bit too conservative with its changes. This would be a parallel language built-in to the same tool. It'd be kinda like if there was a way to declare your Python code's major version, and then having Python being able to run either.

foobar_ 7y ago

Rewrite is always a terrible idea. Doing it inside out is an awesome idea.

deleted 7y ago

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