10 ms·

Even with PHP7, PHP still feels like it is playing catch up. There is nothing new or revolutionary in PHP7, just adopting features present in other major langu

by Svip 6y ago

Even with PHP7, PHP still feels like it is playing catch up. There is nothing new or revolutionary in PHP7, just adopting features present in other major languages. Adopting as other newer languages like Go and Rust seems to be moving beyond those features. A catch up into a world that's on its way out, if one will feel so blunt. PHP's raison d'être remains its ease of getting an instance running on a webserver. But with fewer people self-hosting these days, that has become less an advantage. And even for those who do self-host, the advantage is becoming narrower as other languages have made it easier to distribute their web applications. Pascal, COBOL, Oracle DB and PHP today seems like technologies that only stick around because they are legacies being maintained, not because people start new grand projects with them. Would Wordpress have chosen PHP if they started today?

cbg0 6y ago
> Would Wordpress have chosen PHP if they started today? You could replace "Wordpress" and "PHP" with whatever you want, depending at which point in history this comment is made.
- enitihas 6y ago
  Kubernetes and go for example.
Tomte 6y ago
> There is nothing new or revolutionary in PHP7, just adopting features present in other major languages. There is nothing wrong with that. Java also follows that philosophy. > Would Wordpress have chosen PHP if they started today? According to Matt Mullenweg: no, but does it matter? People do start new PHP projects, and people use old, but still maintained PHP projects. If you're looking for shiny new things, look elsewhere. But you don't have to take away the working, well-known "old" away from others.
simion314 6y ago
Most of the time you do not chose a language or ecosystem because it has some cool syntax or some new feature. As an example if you need to do X you look at what solves X the best, if I can do X by installing say ffmpeg and write a bash script I will do that and not cry that bash does not have some cool feature. I think languages like PHP, Java, C++ appeal for people that solve hard problem where the fact that you have a giant ecosystem of existing libraries and a large number of existing developers compensates the fact that the language is not "cool" or is missing some feature that you probably don't need anyway or workaround it with a library.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- valand 6y ago
  X sometimes stands for problems above technical problem, such as: - Existing team is comfortable with using PHP - Existing project is tightly coupled PHP monolith - Existing project cannot be migrated to other language fast enough if needed All are valid and justifiable reasons. Learning new language is not the easiest and we should think of the people. I must emphasis though, all party must not freeze in time. They should learn to adapt. PHP is getting smaller. The decline is slow enough to let people migrate or jump ship but fast enough that it is recognizable. Demands are growing for languages and environments which provide more than PHP, simplest examples would be granular websocket connection control, explicit process control, whitelist-by-default security, rise of cloud and edge computing, and of course, trends, "cool new stuffs" which is not always good for everybody, but always exciting especially for the naives. There might be a day Java is getting replaced due its huge memory usage or its tendency to be verbose and hard to read. Golang is a contender for the memory usage side of the spectrum, NodeJS is the contender for the ease of use side of the spectrum. There might be a day C++ is getting replaced due to its "harder to write secure code". C++20 is quite cool, but there's a new cool kid Rust where you most probably won't write bad code, can be actually faster than C++ / C in some cases, and can run on browsers. May all programmers of old languages survive and thrive and in the new world.
  - simion314 6y ago
    Sure, but sometimes X is something like you have a video and you want to use the GPU to analyze it and the best library for that is in C and there are great python bindings. So a professional developer would use C or Python and not waste his client time by trying to create it's own unmaintainable CoolLang bindings (where this dev is just now learning CoolLang and there are not that many people that know CoolLang). Even for new projects, say you have a desktop app and you want to let the users submit some data and save it on your server(like feedback or crash reports), you can do this on your server with 1 PHP file and a few lines of code, no dependencies on 300 packages.
frenchman99 6y ago
I remember reading about Ghost.org team members saying that if they had chosen PHP instead of Node.js when they got started, they'd be much further along in their roadmap [0]. PHP has a reliable ecosystem of 3rd libraries with LTS releases. I am not aware of something like Symfony [1] for Rust or Go. [0] https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/007-john-onolan-of-ghost https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/007-john-onolan-of-ghos... [1] https://symfony.com/ https://symfony.com/
- luckylion 6y ago
  Another big bonus for PHP to me is: there are plenty of people who are comfortable with it. Most things aren't genius-scientist-required kind of things where you lock some genius in a room for eighteen months and they revolutionize the industry. Most things are pretty average and you just need somebody with a good understanding of the problem and experience to do them. You'll want plenty of those people to get things done, and using a very common tool helps with having a large pool of people you can call upon.
  - mxschumacher 6y ago
    From a business perspective this might also translate into lower development costs and easier access to talent.
    - giantDinosaur 6y ago
      Generally lower quality talent. That's half the reason PHP got its abysmal reputation. Brilliant programmers using PHP must be annoyed that they're thusly tarnished. I suppose that's not so different from JS. To the flames with both of them, though, I find them genuinely depressing languages to work with.
      - luckylion 6y ago
        > Generally lower quality talent. Which is totally fine btw. Most work isn't "we're engineering a new motor for a F1 race car", most work is "this car's motor is broken, replace it". You don't need a CS degree and brilliance to write code that deals with databases and APIs, which is the super majority of code. You need smart people that spend a lot of time on difficult problems to create strategies that are easy to follow and tooling that is easy to use. And then you just need a lot of people using those tools and applying those strategies to real world problems. What good is it if you have something that allows those that fully grasp it to write things ten times as fast, but you only have 10 people that can actually do that? I'd much rather pick something where I have ten million people that can use it, the output is just so much higher, and you don't get single points of failure because the one guy in your city that knows that language and does freelance work has decided to move on to a different language.
jinzo 6y ago
> PHP's raison d'être remains its ease of getting an instance running on a webserver. But with fewer people self-hosting these days, that has become less an advantage. And even for those who do self-host, the advantage is becoming narrower as other languages have made it easier to distribute their web applications. And if you are doing something moderately complex/serious/modern you probably need/want composer anyway - because uploading all of the million files via FTP is cumberstone (let's not even get into the versioning/modern deployment practices). Then you are at shell already and not that far away from other language deployments.
- nucleardog 6y ago
  I think that's kind of part of the point though -- PHP provides a gentle slope from "single HTML file" to "big project". You can start with a plain HTML page and go "Hey, I want to do X" and just throw some code in the middle of the page. When you decide you need a database, MySQL is right there and easy to use. When you decide you need some libraries, you can just download and `include()` them. All of this can just be FTP'd up to some server somewhere. As this grows bigger, there are tools like composer and frameworks/libraries like Laravel and Symfony. You can still FTP those, but once that gets painful you can start to learn the bit of *nix skills it takes to start managing this different ways. At no point have you had to worry about nginx/apache/supervisor/anything else. But whenever you're ready, that's all there too. This is basically the path at least one guy I know took to going from working in a totally non-technical industry to building a massive (almost 2 million lines at this point) application that allowed people in the industry to stop working with a bunch of exploitative big name companies and instead self-manage and earn more money. And now that product makes a bunch of money for him. And then there's the scales that places like Twitter/Facebook/etc took it. I think the big thing that always gets missed here is PHP's... egalitarian nature. Yes, at some point it just ends up a in some ways less-good version of other things. But it provides an incredible opportunity for people who aren't engineers to realize their ideas without immediately becoming overwhelmed with needing to learn a huge amount of foundational knowledge before they can lay down their first line of useful code, and seeing that through to crazy places.
ehnto 6y ago
PHP still remains incredibly accessible, the documentation and legacy of problem solving means you can find help for any problem you'll encounter and the lack of complicated tooling makes it easy to focus on the problems that matter. There is also a maturity in the tooling and community for PHP that doesn't exist in newer, better languages. There's no shortage of developers, and moreso nowadays there's also a huge body of best practices that embody good software engineering. If what you want is a monolithic standalone web application paired with SQL, I'd argue PHP is a pragmatic choice from a business point of view. I would also argue that a monolithic web application is all the vast majority of companies need. The biggest source of bad software and failing to meet business requirements in my experience has been following the industry's whim and rebuilding every time the wind blows in a new tech stack. If you're a PHP shop delivering web applications, you will be able to do that successfully for years to come. Picking the "right" language is a wild goose chase, just be good at the language you choose and you'll be able to deliver good software reliably.
onli 6y ago
> But with fewer people self-hosting these days, that has become less an advantage. I don't think fewer people self-host. There are some going to big clouds, there are some using integrated offerings like squarespace, but there are still many hosting their website with a regular hoster. And probably in total many more than in the past. > And even for those who do self-host, the advantage is becoming narrower as other languages have made it easier to distribute their web applications. Did they? How? With PHP, all the users has to do is to fetch the project files and upload them with FTP to the directory the hoster told them to. No other environment matches that - and no other environment is supported by those hosters. If you want to run something else - like Ruby, which I prefer to use, or something that creates a binary for you - you are looking at a completely different type of hosting. Digitalocean, Heroku - and that's not as easy, if the application is not provided as a one-click-install.
- Okawari 6y ago
  I'll concede that PHP focused hosting solutions such as your traditional shared webpage hosting environment is better at hosting PHP than any other language, and sure there are less services out there that lets you deploy code "as easy as PHP". I had to check and I'm paying about 4$ a month for a traditional PHP server host vs 5$ for a VPS which I can run whatever I want on. And if you want a barebones deployment for lets say rails, what is stopping you from just copying files over with scp and running bundle and rails s from the shell. Then only thing that makes this harder is having to kill the server and restart on deployment. I dont find that to be that much harder.
  - onli 6y ago
    It's not really a question of money, the VPS where you can do what you want can even be cheaper. > And if you want a barebones deployment for lets say rails, what is stopping you from just copying files over with scp and running bundle and rails s from the shell. I mean, it's not like I'm not doing that for myself. Even my PHP blog is not with a traditional hoster. But there are many things that can go wrong there - for the ruby example starting with the ruby versions, additional system dependencies. And then you need something to make the app restart after a reboot (supervisor is thankfully excellent), and probably a nginx in front of the webapp, and letsencrypt, and does your VPS take care of backups? Each task not impossible, but in total vastly more complex. Some users can handle that, many don't. I just did some freelance work on a wordpress site (and I'm involved with a different PHP blog engine, serendipity), and it's so nice when the setup that those PHP projects present you with is clear and straightforward, and on top of that everything that might be complicated even a mediocre hoster had years to solve now.
petre 6y ago
Rust and Go for writing a cusomizable CMS like Wordpress, really? Also PHP playing catch up and not breaking up my stuff with every point release is just fine. It means stability, maturity. Even Node.js has LTS releases. Dart is more suited for this type of thing if one wants a new and shiny statically typed language with great performance.
fetbaffe 6y ago
Wait, Go hasn’t had any revolutionary change since it arrived 10 years ago. It is still basically the same language/package. I’m not saying that is bad, but why does a language need to be constantly revolutionary if it solves what it sets out to solve well? Catch up to other languages? You can easily argue the opposite, that other languages has finally catched up to PHP, ease of deployment, ease of horizontal scaling, fast reload/build time, built in string templating, simplified variable syntax (auto, var), etc I can go on, but if you already framed the question to the disadvantage of one party you will not really get a fair answer.
- creshal 6y ago
  > why does a language need to be constantly revolutionary if it solves what it sets out to solve well? That's a very big If in PHP's case.
  - hu3 6y ago
    If anything PHP is THE language that solves what it sets out to solve. It does a few things and does them well.
  - mekster 6y ago
    What is the problem of admitting PHP solves the problem of quickly deploying web sites?
    - fetbaffe 6y ago
      Because it fundamentally destroys the current agenda within software development, that tools should be created for developer satisfaction, not customer satisfaction.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
    - sfkdjf9j3j 6y ago
      Am I the only one scratching their head at this argument in 2020? 15 years ago when shared hosting was more common I would buy it, but I just don't find myself wasting time on figuring deployments out in other languages/frameworks. By far the biggest time sink in that area is setting up continuous integration and monitoring/alerting systems, and those problems are exactly the same regardless of language.
naranha 6y ago
A question I ask myself often is what niche does a language fill, and it seems a little like the traditional niche of PHP has been eroded away in the last decade. Many of the things that gave PHP an edge (ease of deployment, templating within your HTML files, direct SQL queries) are no longer considered the correct approach. At the same time PHP is trying to reinvent itself by adopting a strong type system and experimenting with async and long running processes. But these are niches that are already filled better by other languages (Java/C#, Node, Go), so it feels like they are fighting an uphill battle. But maybe it is that tenacity of the language to stay relevant that makes it attractive to a younger generation of developers and decision makers.
oblio 6y ago
> only stick around Greenfield projects are much less important than brownfield projects. After all, a project is new only for the first few months of its existence. After that, it all becomes legacy code :-) And techs with mainstream adoption in the post DotCom bust era, especially if they're free and Open Source, will be around for decades. A newbie PHP programmer in 2020 will most likely be able to retire in 2065 as a veteran PHP programmer, if he/she so wishes.
CiPHPerCoder 6y ago
> Even with PHP7, PHP still feels like it is playing catch up. There is nothing new or revolutionary in PHP7, just adopting features present in other major languages. Of the first programming languages that cater to novices to some degree (which is important to project health, because excessive gatekeeping is toxic), PHP was the first to make Curve25519 and Argon2id widely available (through the sodium extension). (7.2) Even with the "just use FFI" mindset of other languages, the experience is janky at best. For example: Before sodium-plus [1] came along (which was something I created, so I'm removing it from the table for my criticism of the JS crypto ecosystem), JavaScript required knowing which of the following packages to install: [2] [3] [4] There was no guidance available anywhere. Some of these APIs were suitable for browsers, others for mobile devices, and still others for server-side JavaScript. And their APIs were subtly incompatible with each other. Java's in a similar situation [5] today. > Java (Java Native Access): libsodium-jna > Java (Android): Lazysodium for Android > Java (Android): Libstodium > Java (Android): Robosodium > Java (Android): libsodium-JNI > Java: Apache Tuweni (crypto module) > Java: Lazysodium for Java > Java: jsodium > Java: Kalium Yikes. With PHP7, you just had to update to the latest version (and make sure your OS package vendor isn't huffing or eating glue, which was rare but still existent) and you had it. There are probably still languages and runtimes today that make using modern cryptography (Ed25519, X25519, etc.) a miserable experience. Miserable experiences moving to modern cryptography keep peoples' projects trapped in an early 2000's RSA-PKCS#1v1.5 + AES-CBC hellscape reminiscent of SSLv3 but somehow worse. Thus, I would argue that what PHP did with libsodium counts as revolutionary. Your move, $languagesThatHackerNewsFindSexierThanPHP [1]: https://github.com/paragonie/sodium-plus https://github.com/paragonie/sodium-plus [2]: https://www.npmjs.com/package/libsodium-wrappers https://www.npmjs.com/package/libsodium-wrappers [3]: https://github.com/sodium-friends/sodium-native https://github.com/sodium-friends/sodium-native [4]: https://www.npmjs.com/package/sodium https://www.npmjs.com/package/sodium [5]: https://libsodium.gitbook.io/doc/bindings_for_other_languages https://libsodium.gitbook.io/doc/bindings_for_other_language...
ragnese 6y ago
Not only is PHP playing catch-up. It's only playing catch-up to Java. That's... not the highest bar, IMO.
FranOntanaya 6y ago
Well, Rust is playing catch up with the "change code and run" speed of PHP.
- goatlover 6y ago
  Do the two overalp in their niches at all? You'd write a web server in Rust. But is there much effort put into Rust web frameworks? It's just a weird comparison. PHP is competitive with JS, Python, Ruby and even Java. But Rust? That's C/C++/D territory. And Go is somewhere in between.
  - bepvte 6y ago
    There is lots of effort by Rust devs, even if the libraries are not as mature or easy. I don't believe you meant to be disrespectful here. I think better a better words could be any of manpower, maturity, or time.
pvtmert 6y ago
Same as Java, ~adding~ backporting boilerplate from other JVM stuff.

by Svip 6y ago

cbg0 6y ago

> Would Wordpress have chosen PHP if they started today? You could replace "Wordpress" and "PHP" with whatever you want, depending at which point in history this comment is made.

enitihas 6y ago
Kubernetes and go for example.

Tomte 6y ago

> There is nothing new or revolutionary in PHP7, just adopting features present in other major languages. There is nothing wrong with that. Java also follows that philosophy. > Would Wordpress have chosen PHP if they started today? According to Matt Mullenweg: no, but does it matter? People do start new PHP projects, and people use old, but still maintained PHP projects. If you're looking for shiny new things, look elsewhere. But you don't have to take away the working, well-known "old" away from others.

simion314 6y ago

Most of the time you do not chose a language or ecosystem because it has some cool syntax or some new feature. As an example if you need to do X you look at what solves X the best, if I can do X by installing say ffmpeg and write a bash script I will do that and not cry that bash does not have some cool feature. I think languages like PHP, Java, C++ appeal for people that solve hard problem where the fact that you have a giant ecosystem of existing libraries and a large number of existing developers compensates the fact that the language is not "cool" or is missing some feature that you probably don't need anyway or workaround it with a library.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
valand 6y ago
X sometimes stands for problems above technical problem, such as: - Existing team is comfortable with using PHP - Existing project is tightly coupled PHP monolith - Existing project cannot be migrated to other language fast enough if needed All are valid and justifiable reasons. Learning new language is not the easiest and we should think of the people. I must emphasis though, all party must not freeze in time. They should learn to adapt. PHP is getting smaller. The decline is slow enough to let people migrate or jump ship but fast enough that it is recognizable. Demands are growing for languages and environments which provide more than PHP, simplest examples would be granular websocket connection control, explicit process control, whitelist-by-default security, rise of cloud and edge computing, and of course, trends, "cool new stuffs" which is not always good for everybody, but always exciting especially for the naives. There might be a day Java is getting replaced due its huge memory usage or its tendency to be verbose and hard to read. Golang is a contender for the memory usage side of the spectrum, NodeJS is the contender for the ease of use side of the spectrum. There might be a day C++ is getting replaced due to its "harder to write secure code". C++20 is quite cool, but there's a new cool kid Rust where you most probably won't write bad code, can be actually faster than C++ / C in some cases, and can run on browsers. May all programmers of old languages survive and thrive and in the new world.
- simion314 6y ago
  Sure, but sometimes X is something like you have a video and you want to use the GPU to analyze it and the best library for that is in C and there are great python bindings. So a professional developer would use C or Python and not waste his client time by trying to create it's own unmaintainable CoolLang bindings (where this dev is just now learning CoolLang and there are not that many people that know CoolLang). Even for new projects, say you have a desktop app and you want to let the users submit some data and save it on your server(like feedback or crash reports), you can do this on your server with 1 PHP file and a few lines of code, no dependencies on 300 packages.

frenchman99 6y ago

I remember reading about Ghost.org team members saying that if they had chosen PHP instead of Node.js when they got started, they'd be much further along in their roadmap [0]. PHP has a reliable ecosystem of 3rd libraries with LTS releases. I am not aware of something like Symfony [1] for Rust or Go. [0] https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/007-john-onolan-of-ghost https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/007-john-onolan-of-ghos... [1] https://symfony.com/ https://symfony.com/

luckylion 6y ago
Another big bonus for PHP to me is: there are plenty of people who are comfortable with it. Most things aren't genius-scientist-required kind of things where you lock some genius in a room for eighteen months and they revolutionize the industry. Most things are pretty average and you just need somebody with a good understanding of the problem and experience to do them. You'll want plenty of those people to get things done, and using a very common tool helps with having a large pool of people you can call upon.
- mxschumacher 6y ago
  From a business perspective this might also translate into lower development costs and easier access to talent.
  - giantDinosaur 6y ago
    Generally lower quality talent. That's half the reason PHP got its abysmal reputation. Brilliant programmers using PHP must be annoyed that they're thusly tarnished. I suppose that's not so different from JS. To the flames with both of them, though, I find them genuinely depressing languages to work with.
    - luckylion 6y ago
      > Generally lower quality talent. Which is totally fine btw. Most work isn't "we're engineering a new motor for a F1 race car", most work is "this car's motor is broken, replace it". You don't need a CS degree and brilliance to write code that deals with databases and APIs, which is the super majority of code. You need smart people that spend a lot of time on difficult problems to create strategies that are easy to follow and tooling that is easy to use. And then you just need a lot of people using those tools and applying those strategies to real world problems. What good is it if you have something that allows those that fully grasp it to write things ten times as fast, but you only have 10 people that can actually do that? I'd much rather pick something where I have ten million people that can use it, the output is just so much higher, and you don't get single points of failure because the one guy in your city that knows that language and does freelance work has decided to move on to a different language.

jinzo 6y ago

> PHP's raison d'être remains its ease of getting an instance running on a webserver. But with fewer people self-hosting these days, that has become less an advantage. And even for those who do self-host, the advantage is becoming narrower as other languages have made it easier to distribute their web applications. And if you are doing something moderately complex/serious/modern you probably need/want composer anyway - because uploading all of the million files via FTP is cumberstone (let's not even get into the versioning/modern deployment practices). Then you are at shell already and not that far away from other language deployments.

nucleardog 6y ago
I think that's kind of part of the point though -- PHP provides a gentle slope from "single HTML file" to "big project". You can start with a plain HTML page and go "Hey, I want to do X" and just throw some code in the middle of the page. When you decide you need a database, MySQL is right there and easy to use. When you decide you need some libraries, you can just download and `include()` them. All of this can just be FTP'd up to some server somewhere. As this grows bigger, there are tools like composer and frameworks/libraries like Laravel and Symfony. You can still FTP those, but once that gets painful you can start to learn the bit of *nix skills it takes to start managing this different ways. At no point have you had to worry about nginx/apache/supervisor/anything else. But whenever you're ready, that's all there too. This is basically the path at least one guy I know took to going from working in a totally non-technical industry to building a massive (almost 2 million lines at this point) application that allowed people in the industry to stop working with a bunch of exploitative big name companies and instead self-manage and earn more money. And now that product makes a bunch of money for him. And then there's the scales that places like Twitter/Facebook/etc took it. I think the big thing that always gets missed here is PHP's... egalitarian nature. Yes, at some point it just ends up a in some ways less-good version of other things. But it provides an incredible opportunity for people who aren't engineers to realize their ideas without immediately becoming overwhelmed with needing to learn a huge amount of foundational knowledge before they can lay down their first line of useful code, and seeing that through to crazy places.

ehnto 6y ago

PHP still remains incredibly accessible, the documentation and legacy of problem solving means you can find help for any problem you'll encounter and the lack of complicated tooling makes it easy to focus on the problems that matter. There is also a maturity in the tooling and community for PHP that doesn't exist in newer, better languages. There's no shortage of developers, and moreso nowadays there's also a huge body of best practices that embody good software engineering. If what you want is a monolithic standalone web application paired with SQL, I'd argue PHP is a pragmatic choice from a business point of view. I would also argue that a monolithic web application is all the vast majority of companies need. The biggest source of bad software and failing to meet business requirements in my experience has been following the industry's whim and rebuilding every time the wind blows in a new tech stack. If you're a PHP shop delivering web applications, you will be able to do that successfully for years to come. Picking the "right" language is a wild goose chase, just be good at the language you choose and you'll be able to deliver good software reliably.

onli 6y ago

> But with fewer people self-hosting these days, that has become less an advantage. I don't think fewer people self-host. There are some going to big clouds, there are some using integrated offerings like squarespace, but there are still many hosting their website with a regular hoster. And probably in total many more than in the past. > And even for those who do self-host, the advantage is becoming narrower as other languages have made it easier to distribute their web applications. Did they? How? With PHP, all the users has to do is to fetch the project files and upload them with FTP to the directory the hoster told them to. No other environment matches that - and no other environment is supported by those hosters. If you want to run something else - like Ruby, which I prefer to use, or something that creates a binary for you - you are looking at a completely different type of hosting. Digitalocean, Heroku - and that's not as easy, if the application is not provided as a one-click-install.

Okawari 6y ago
I'll concede that PHP focused hosting solutions such as your traditional shared webpage hosting environment is better at hosting PHP than any other language, and sure there are less services out there that lets you deploy code "as easy as PHP". I had to check and I'm paying about 4$ a month for a traditional PHP server host vs 5$ for a VPS which I can run whatever I want on. And if you want a barebones deployment for lets say rails, what is stopping you from just copying files over with scp and running bundle and rails s from the shell. Then only thing that makes this harder is having to kill the server and restart on deployment. I dont find that to be that much harder.
- onli 6y ago
  It's not really a question of money, the VPS where you can do what you want can even be cheaper. > And if you want a barebones deployment for lets say rails, what is stopping you from just copying files over with scp and running bundle and rails s from the shell. I mean, it's not like I'm not doing that for myself. Even my PHP blog is not with a traditional hoster. But there are many things that can go wrong there - for the ruby example starting with the ruby versions, additional system dependencies. And then you need something to make the app restart after a reboot (supervisor is thankfully excellent), and probably a nginx in front of the webapp, and letsencrypt, and does your VPS take care of backups? Each task not impossible, but in total vastly more complex. Some users can handle that, many don't. I just did some freelance work on a wordpress site (and I'm involved with a different PHP blog engine, serendipity), and it's so nice when the setup that those PHP projects present you with is clear and straightforward, and on top of that everything that might be complicated even a mediocre hoster had years to solve now.

petre 6y ago

Rust and Go for writing a cusomizable CMS like Wordpress, really? Also PHP playing catch up and not breaking up my stuff with every point release is just fine. It means stability, maturity. Even Node.js has LTS releases. Dart is more suited for this type of thing if one wants a new and shiny statically typed language with great performance.

fetbaffe 6y ago

Wait, Go hasn’t had any revolutionary change since it arrived 10 years ago. It is still basically the same language/package. I’m not saying that is bad, but why does a language need to be constantly revolutionary if it solves what it sets out to solve well? Catch up to other languages? You can easily argue the opposite, that other languages has finally catched up to PHP, ease of deployment, ease of horizontal scaling, fast reload/build time, built in string templating, simplified variable syntax (auto, var), etc I can go on, but if you already framed the question to the disadvantage of one party you will not really get a fair answer.

creshal 6y ago
> why does a language need to be constantly revolutionary if it solves what it sets out to solve well? That's a very big If in PHP's case.
- hu3 6y ago
  If anything PHP is THE language that solves what it sets out to solve. It does a few things and does them well.
- mekster 6y ago
  What is the problem of admitting PHP solves the problem of quickly deploying web sites?
  - fetbaffe 6y ago
    Because it fundamentally destroys the current agenda within software development, that tools should be created for developer satisfaction, not customer satisfaction.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - sfkdjf9j3j 6y ago
    Am I the only one scratching their head at this argument in 2020? 15 years ago when shared hosting was more common I would buy it, but I just don't find myself wasting time on figuring deployments out in other languages/frameworks. By far the biggest time sink in that area is setting up continuous integration and monitoring/alerting systems, and those problems are exactly the same regardless of language.

naranha 6y ago

A question I ask myself often is what niche does a language fill, and it seems a little like the traditional niche of PHP has been eroded away in the last decade. Many of the things that gave PHP an edge (ease of deployment, templating within your HTML files, direct SQL queries) are no longer considered the correct approach. At the same time PHP is trying to reinvent itself by adopting a strong type system and experimenting with async and long running processes. But these are niches that are already filled better by other languages (Java/C#, Node, Go), so it feels like they are fighting an uphill battle. But maybe it is that tenacity of the language to stay relevant that makes it attractive to a younger generation of developers and decision makers.

oblio 6y ago

> only stick around Greenfield projects are much less important than brownfield projects. After all, a project is new only for the first few months of its existence. After that, it all becomes legacy code :-) And techs with mainstream adoption in the post DotCom bust era, especially if they're free and Open Source, will be around for decades. A newbie PHP programmer in 2020 will most likely be able to retire in 2065 as a veteran PHP programmer, if he/she so wishes.

CiPHPerCoder 6y ago

> Even with PHP7, PHP still feels like it is playing catch up. There is nothing new or revolutionary in PHP7, just adopting features present in other major languages. Of the first programming languages that cater to novices to some degree (which is important to project health, because excessive gatekeeping is toxic), PHP was the first to make Curve25519 and Argon2id widely available (through the sodium extension). (7.2) Even with the "just use FFI" mindset of other languages, the experience is janky at best. For example: Before sodium-plus [1] came along (which was something I created, so I'm removing it from the table for my criticism of the JS crypto ecosystem), JavaScript required knowing which of the following packages to install: [2] [3] [4] There was no guidance available anywhere. Some of these APIs were suitable for browsers, others for mobile devices, and still others for server-side JavaScript. And their APIs were subtly incompatible with each other. Java's in a similar situation [5] today. > Java (Java Native Access): libsodium-jna > Java (Android): Lazysodium for Android > Java (Android): Libstodium > Java (Android): Robosodium > Java (Android): libsodium-JNI > Java: Apache Tuweni (crypto module) > Java: Lazysodium for Java > Java: jsodium > Java: Kalium Yikes. With PHP7, you just had to update to the latest version (and make sure your OS package vendor isn't huffing or eating glue, which was rare but still existent) and you had it. There are probably still languages and runtimes today that make using modern cryptography (Ed25519, X25519, etc.) a miserable experience. Miserable experiences moving to modern cryptography keep peoples' projects trapped in an early 2000's RSA-PKCS#1v1.5 + AES-CBC hellscape reminiscent of SSLv3 but somehow worse. Thus, I would argue that what PHP did with libsodium counts as revolutionary. Your move, $languagesThatHackerNewsFindSexierThanPHP [1]: https://github.com/paragonie/sodium-plus https://github.com/paragonie/sodium-plus [2]: https://www.npmjs.com/package/libsodium-wrappers https://www.npmjs.com/package/libsodium-wrappers [3]: https://github.com/sodium-friends/sodium-native https://github.com/sodium-friends/sodium-native [4]: https://www.npmjs.com/package/sodium https://www.npmjs.com/package/sodium [5]: https://libsodium.gitbook.io/doc/bindings_for_other_languages https://libsodium.gitbook.io/doc/bindings_for_other_language...

ragnese 6y ago

Not only is PHP playing catch-up. It's only playing catch-up to Java. That's... not the highest bar, IMO.

FranOntanaya 6y ago

Well, Rust is playing catch up with the "change code and run" speed of PHP.

goatlover 6y ago
Do the two overalp in their niches at all? You'd write a web server in Rust. But is there much effort put into Rust web frameworks? It's just a weird comparison. PHP is competitive with JS, Python, Ruby and even Java. But Rust? That's C/C++/D territory. And Go is somewhere in between.
- bepvte 6y ago
  There is lots of effort by Rust devs, even if the libraries are not as mature or easy. I don't believe you meant to be disrespectful here. I think better a better words could be any of manpower, maturity, or time.

pvtmert 6y ago

Same as Java, ~adding~ backporting boilerplate from other JVM stuff.