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Doing PHP programming was my first programming job, lasted for about 3 years. While I agree with you about the allure of PHP, to be honest, I will never choose

Doing PHP programming was my first programming job, lasted for about 3 years. While I agree with you about the allure of PHP, to be honest, I will never choose PHP again or touch any projects that uses PHP. PHP is an awful, obsolete language, patched again and again to make it more modern. It's like wearing an old leather jacket that has been patched repeatedly, yet it still has a nasty smell. This is entirely subjective of course and I'll take old and trustworthy technologies technologies any day of the week. Except PHP isn't trustworthy and it never was. I have never seen a high level language plagued with so many security issues and this extends to apps built in PHP, like Wordpress. You could attribute that to sloppy coding, or to its popularity, yet if you take the top web vulnerabilities in the wild, most of them (like SQL injections, or remote code executions, or stupid bugs related to implicit conversions, session tampering, etc) aren't possible with modern libraries built in static languages, or at least very hard to accomplish by accident. For me there's also the issue that PHP is really inefficient. Any PHP app will crash your average server if it hits Hacker News, unless you end up caching the pages via Varnish or similar tricks that essentially avoid hitting the PHP interpreter. Configuring Wordpress to withstand a traffic spike can be very challenging, the best solution is to pre-generate the website, thus making it static, which is very weird considering for how long WP and PHP have been on the scene, you'd think there are better solutions by now. You say PHP is easy. I say that PHP is and will always be a security and scalability nightmare. And sure, it allows you to start something fast, but I can start as fast with my favorite technologies and without hitting a wall later. And of course, PHP is nice for beginners, but at the same time I believe you're painting yourself into a corner and it's very hard to grow from there. Besides the issues above, a beginner will be curious about trying new things. CLI utilities, desktop or phone apps, statistics, automation, embedded programming, etc. PHP is unsuitable basically for anything that's not querying MySQL and then spitting an HTML back, which means the learning curve will be worse, because you've picked a very limited hammer.

james_s_tayler 7y ago
Wow. That was the best insult-PHP-rant I've seen in my life.
gambler 7y ago
>I can start as fast with my favorite technologies and without hitting a wall later. What are your "favorite technologies"? Where can I get a hosting using your "favorite technologies" that would allow me to create dynamic server-size content just by editing a single file? (No command line fuckage.) Will the resulting solution be portable to other hosting providers?
girvo 7y ago
Absolutely none of that takes away from the original comment though. PHP as a language is pretty garbage. PHP’s deployment story and as a concept is pretty interesting, and we’ve dropped it entirely as a community. The reasons why are interesting to explore, I think. The closest to it is something like Node, I guess: install the language, you can wire up an HTTP server with a couple functions, but it’s still lacking the simplicity of PHP there. Python gets kind of close too, using something like Flask, but now we’ve got libraries we’re talking about. I’d love to see a web-first language with PHP-styled ease, but with a much better language, and the ability to go down the road of Python/Flask etc. with function-based routes if one pleases. Of course, frankly, a lot of your comments on PHP are out of date, but that’s neither here nor there: the language barely matters for what is under discussion.
- 15155 7y ago
  > The closest to it is something like Node, I guess: install the language, you can wire up an HTTP server with a couple functions, but it’s still lacking the simplicity of PHP there. How is configuring Apache/mod_php/whatever is used these days easier than require('http')...? How about the htaccess shenanigans that had to be used to achieve vanity/custom routing? There's no way the Node stdlib with a hand-rolled path-based router (so as to not require a dependency manager, mimicing PHP - even though npm is packaged) isn't an overall-better story from a simplicity (and performance, and maintainability, and security) standpoint than the Apache/PHP stack. "Drop a bunch of files into a directory and have a dynamic website" was a romantic idea. Most people probably just use(d) cPanel remotely and WAMP/MAMP.app locally and never needed to configure Apache, but that complexity was definitely still there. Analogously: Next.js might be the "WAMP/MAMP.app of today."
  - girvo 7y ago
    Of course the complexity is still there, but using WAMP/MAMP.app is exactly the context I'm thinking about this through :) I agree that Next.js is making big strides in this direction. I think other scripting languages could do similar, too. I imagine Lua would already have something like this floating around, ready to be packaged up in this way?
wolco 7y ago
Varnish? Wow I remember that. Maybe your opinion could use some refreshing. Even Javascript is very different nowadays.

james_s_tayler 7y ago

Wow. That was the best insult-PHP-rant I've seen in my life.

gambler 7y ago

>I can start as fast with my favorite technologies and without hitting a wall later. What are your "favorite technologies"? Where can I get a hosting using your "favorite technologies" that would allow me to create dynamic server-size content just by editing a single file? (No command line fuckage.) Will the resulting solution be portable to other hosting providers?

girvo 7y ago

Absolutely none of that takes away from the original comment though. PHP as a language is pretty garbage. PHP’s deployment story and as a concept is pretty interesting, and we’ve dropped it entirely as a community. The reasons why are interesting to explore, I think. The closest to it is something like Node, I guess: install the language, you can wire up an HTTP server with a couple functions, but it’s still lacking the simplicity of PHP there. Python gets kind of close too, using something like Flask, but now we’ve got libraries we’re talking about. I’d love to see a web-first language with PHP-styled ease, but with a much better language, and the ability to go down the road of Python/Flask etc. with function-based routes if one pleases. Of course, frankly, a lot of your comments on PHP are out of date, but that’s neither here nor there: the language barely matters for what is under discussion.

15155 7y ago
> The closest to it is something like Node, I guess: install the language, you can wire up an HTTP server with a couple functions, but it’s still lacking the simplicity of PHP there. How is configuring Apache/mod_php/whatever is used these days easier than require('http')...? How about the htaccess shenanigans that had to be used to achieve vanity/custom routing? There's no way the Node stdlib with a hand-rolled path-based router (so as to not require a dependency manager, mimicing PHP - even though npm is packaged) isn't an overall-better story from a simplicity (and performance, and maintainability, and security) standpoint than the Apache/PHP stack. "Drop a bunch of files into a directory and have a dynamic website" was a romantic idea. Most people probably just use(d) cPanel remotely and WAMP/MAMP.app locally and never needed to configure Apache, but that complexity was definitely still there. Analogously: Next.js might be the "WAMP/MAMP.app of today."
- girvo 7y ago
  Of course the complexity is still there, but using WAMP/MAMP.app is exactly the context I'm thinking about this through :) I agree that Next.js is making big strides in this direction. I think other scripting languages could do similar, too. I imagine Lua would already have something like this floating around, ready to be packaged up in this way?

wolco 7y ago

Varnish? Wow I remember that. Maybe your opinion could use some refreshing. Even Javascript is very different nowadays.