6 ms·

Having followed and at times heavily used PHP since the 4.x times, its story seems to be that of slowly (and begrudginly?) accepting modern language features li

Having followed and at times heavily used PHP since the 4.x times, its story seems to be that of slowly (and begrudginly?) accepting modern language features like classes, exceptions, lambdas, GC, static typing, etc., sometimes getting things wrong on the first try but still mostly converging towards modernness. That begs the question, what's PHP's value proposition for new projects? If PHP mostly chases feature parity with Java/.NET/TypeScript and doesn't attempt to do anything better/different (like Elm/Haskell/Rust/Go/Erlang arguably do), then why choose it?

blowski 7y ago
* Lots of cheap developers available * Strong community * Mature frameworks and libraries * Simple hosting model
- mpartel 7y ago
  Fair, though I'd say 1-3 are more or less matched by Java/.NET and probably NodeJS. Not sure if you meant this, but now that I think about it, the "one process per request" model is actually legit differentiator that obviates a lot of the concurrency trouble new developers can get themselves into with other languages. It makes good performance harder in some cases (though there are workarounds), but overall it's maybe the one thing in PHP that I'd like to see other languages make some note of.
  - blowski 7y ago
    I'd agree that there are other languages with equally strong communities and mature libraries. I would say it's easier to hire an OK PHP developer for £40K than for any other language, at least that's my experience hiring in London. The hosting model - what you said, plus not needing to think about memory leaks. There are so many Java and .NET boxes out there that need to be rebooted every 2 hours because of some insidious bug that nobody on the team can solve. It's also pretty easy to put PHP in a container, and scale horizontally.
    - mpartel 7y ago
      Good point about the memory leaks. Not aiming to contradict it, but I'll mention that https://www.eclipse.org/mat/ https://www.eclipse.org/mat/ is a great help in debugging Java memory leaks. .NET probably has something similar.
    - eyelidlessness 7y ago
      I can say with confidence if you're hiring a developer for £40K they're not okay. I know PHP communities can be insular and can fail to sell themselves, and I know that local economies can vary wildly, but London is not cheap and 51kUSD is less than half what an "okay" dev should be paid. If you're hiring at those rates you are hiring people who are either unhireable bad at their job or (like I was for the first half of my career) completely unaware of what's available.
quantummkv 7y ago
PHP's value proposition has always been one thing - ease of deployment. Seriously, all you need is one install command, one command to start the services, one to git clone the files and one for certbot. And you have a fully functional deployment ready in a single script that can be deployed at scale. No other language can even come close.
- aganame 7y ago
  These PHP praises frankly sound like trolling. No other language can even come close? You must be kidding. I mean I get it. It's obviously a counter-reaction to all the PHP hate that has been with every PHP thread for 2 decades, and much of it has been unfair, especially for the last 5 or so years. But please let's not swing the pendulum all the way to the other side.
  - ollyculverhouse 7y ago
    So given a web server, what language can 'come close' to the ease of deploying with PHP?
    - mgbmtl 7y ago
      I'm a mostly PHP dev, but with apps in other languages, all you need more is a systemd unit file to start the app? (ruby, nodejs, go, etc)
    - hombre_fatal 7y ago
      Unless your only experience is 1999 style FTP with shared hosting and you've never used anything else, I don't know how you can claim that `node server.js` or running your Cargo-built server.exe is somehow harder or more complicated. For example, PHP is complicated enough that people use WAMP/MAMP.exe just for local development.
    - eyelidlessness 7y ago
      "Given a web server" seems a pretty big caveat. I'm not a big node cheerleader (even though I work in it day to day), but it doesn't need to be given a web server to achieve the rest of this claim.
colecut 7y ago
I am currently working on a web application with two PHP components - one light base application in vanilla PHP, and an administration app driven by the same SQL database using Laravel. I am having a complete joy building these components, and I find two things to be striking: My base component does not use a single dependency and it accomplishes a lot! It is really amazing what can be done in PHP with very few lines of code without the help of ANY external libraries, efficiently. I use PDO for connecting to the my SQL database, which is available natively... It can all just be very simple. On the flip side, my administrative component is driven by Laravel, which yes, took heavy inspiration from Ruby on Rails, but by this point has greatly surpassed it and is very powerful and enjoyable to use. PHP is the only server side language I would say I have achieved mastery in, so while I am naive to what could be better in X or Y language, I never currently feel held back for what I need to do, and I enjoy doing it. If you are working in the web niche, what are the reasons not to choose it?
- mpartel 7y ago
  I mean, it's no longer horrible I guess :) With mainstream languages, there's rarely any single clear and/or insurmountable problem, it's all the little annoyances you run into every day that add up, plus the cognitive load imposed by the language directly as well as indirectly through the code it lets you write. I'm not 100% up to date on how much PHP has closed the gap in the last few years, but subjectively I never found it anything but tedious due missing features, various unnecessary pitfalls (sometimes with security implications), silly limitations (you can write a static type in this case but not in that, you can catch this error but not that, no inner classes, etc etc.), and numerous other small cases of poor "ergonomics". The "batteries included" nature of the standard library is nice, and in contrast to the somewhat fragmented world of RubyGems or NPM it can feel downright pleasant, but finding a SQL library or such is a pretty small effort in the scope of a project, and (popular) 3rd party libraries tend in my experience to be better than the equivalent standard library stuff in most of the languages I know. Every time I wrote a non-trivial amount of code with PDO, I had to look up the correct initialization rituals to get sane settings and copy or recreate a bunch of more or less "obvious" helpers. I'm sure there's something better in Composer by now.
timwaagh 7y ago
You don't choose PHP. PHP chooses you.
jonwinstanley 7y ago
The value proposition is how well the language suits stateless Web Development & HTTP. Every request is an new sandbox, it's easy to pick up for beginners and fast to get started, decent performance, no need to figure out how to compile anything. From my experience, a huge % of PHP companies started out with a Wordpress site, added a few features then a few years later they are now hooked and are doing things more seriously with Symfony or Laravel.
FranOntanaya 7y ago
May be easier to audit a project in a sense due to most common libraries being standard rather than imported. Has a decent track record for major version updates being easy to migrate to (even if many projects don't bother). Works for quick and dirty bash-style scripting (not specially better than Phyton, but it does work).

blowski 7y ago

* Lots of cheap developers available * Strong community * Mature frameworks and libraries * Simple hosting model

mpartel 7y ago
Fair, though I'd say 1-3 are more or less matched by Java/.NET and probably NodeJS. Not sure if you meant this, but now that I think about it, the "one process per request" model is actually legit differentiator that obviates a lot of the concurrency trouble new developers can get themselves into with other languages. It makes good performance harder in some cases (though there are workarounds), but overall it's maybe the one thing in PHP that I'd like to see other languages make some note of.
- blowski 7y ago
  I'd agree that there are other languages with equally strong communities and mature libraries. I would say it's easier to hire an OK PHP developer for £40K than for any other language, at least that's my experience hiring in London. The hosting model - what you said, plus not needing to think about memory leaks. There are so many Java and .NET boxes out there that need to be rebooted every 2 hours because of some insidious bug that nobody on the team can solve. It's also pretty easy to put PHP in a container, and scale horizontally.
  - mpartel 7y ago
    Good point about the memory leaks. Not aiming to contradict it, but I'll mention that https://www.eclipse.org/mat/ https://www.eclipse.org/mat/ is a great help in debugging Java memory leaks. .NET probably has something similar.
  - eyelidlessness 7y ago
    I can say with confidence if you're hiring a developer for £40K they're not okay. I know PHP communities can be insular and can fail to sell themselves, and I know that local economies can vary wildly, but London is not cheap and 51kUSD is less than half what an "okay" dev should be paid. If you're hiring at those rates you are hiring people who are either unhireable bad at their job or (like I was for the first half of my career) completely unaware of what's available.

quantummkv 7y ago

PHP's value proposition has always been one thing - ease of deployment. Seriously, all you need is one install command, one command to start the services, one to git clone the files and one for certbot. And you have a fully functional deployment ready in a single script that can be deployed at scale. No other language can even come close.

aganame 7y ago
These PHP praises frankly sound like trolling. No other language can even come close? You must be kidding. I mean I get it. It's obviously a counter-reaction to all the PHP hate that has been with every PHP thread for 2 decades, and much of it has been unfair, especially for the last 5 or so years. But please let's not swing the pendulum all the way to the other side.
- ollyculverhouse 7y ago
  So given a web server, what language can 'come close' to the ease of deploying with PHP?
  - mgbmtl 7y ago
    I'm a mostly PHP dev, but with apps in other languages, all you need more is a systemd unit file to start the app? (ruby, nodejs, go, etc)
  - hombre_fatal 7y ago
    Unless your only experience is 1999 style FTP with shared hosting and you've never used anything else, I don't know how you can claim that `node server.js` or running your Cargo-built server.exe is somehow harder or more complicated. For example, PHP is complicated enough that people use WAMP/MAMP.exe just for local development.
  - eyelidlessness 7y ago
    "Given a web server" seems a pretty big caveat. I'm not a big node cheerleader (even though I work in it day to day), but it doesn't need to be given a web server to achieve the rest of this claim.

colecut 7y ago

I am currently working on a web application with two PHP components - one light base application in vanilla PHP, and an administration app driven by the same SQL database using Laravel. I am having a complete joy building these components, and I find two things to be striking: My base component does not use a single dependency and it accomplishes a lot! It is really amazing what can be done in PHP with very few lines of code without the help of ANY external libraries, efficiently. I use PDO for connecting to the my SQL database, which is available natively... It can all just be very simple. On the flip side, my administrative component is driven by Laravel, which yes, took heavy inspiration from Ruby on Rails, but by this point has greatly surpassed it and is very powerful and enjoyable to use. PHP is the only server side language I would say I have achieved mastery in, so while I am naive to what could be better in X or Y language, I never currently feel held back for what I need to do, and I enjoy doing it. If you are working in the web niche, what are the reasons not to choose it?

mpartel 7y ago
I mean, it's no longer horrible I guess :) With mainstream languages, there's rarely any single clear and/or insurmountable problem, it's all the little annoyances you run into every day that add up, plus the cognitive load imposed by the language directly as well as indirectly through the code it lets you write. I'm not 100% up to date on how much PHP has closed the gap in the last few years, but subjectively I never found it anything but tedious due missing features, various unnecessary pitfalls (sometimes with security implications), silly limitations (you can write a static type in this case but not in that, you can catch this error but not that, no inner classes, etc etc.), and numerous other small cases of poor "ergonomics". The "batteries included" nature of the standard library is nice, and in contrast to the somewhat fragmented world of RubyGems or NPM it can feel downright pleasant, but finding a SQL library or such is a pretty small effort in the scope of a project, and (popular) 3rd party libraries tend in my experience to be better than the equivalent standard library stuff in most of the languages I know. Every time I wrote a non-trivial amount of code with PDO, I had to look up the correct initialization rituals to get sane settings and copy or recreate a bunch of more or less "obvious" helpers. I'm sure there's something better in Composer by now.

timwaagh 7y ago

You don't choose PHP. PHP chooses you.

jonwinstanley 7y ago

The value proposition is how well the language suits stateless Web Development & HTTP. Every request is an new sandbox, it's easy to pick up for beginners and fast to get started, decent performance, no need to figure out how to compile anything. From my experience, a huge % of PHP companies started out with a Wordpress site, added a few features then a few years later they are now hooked and are doing things more seriously with Symfony or Laravel.

FranOntanaya 7y ago

May be easier to audit a project in a sense due to most common libraries being standard rather than imported. Has a decent track record for major version updates being easy to migrate to (even if many projects don't bother). Works for quick and dirty bash-style scripting (not specially better than Phyton, but it does work).