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I recently had to work on a PHP codebase. It wasn't a very old one in terms of churn, but it had been around for a while. It was surprisingly clean and well-bui

by ljm 6y ago

I recently had to work on a PHP codebase. It wasn't a very old one in terms of churn, but it had been around for a while. It was surprisingly clean and well-built from what I could tell, it just got lost in a transition to a new server in a new language. Symfony itself still has some warts in terms of boilerplate but it wasn't difficult to poke around the code. In fact, the most painful bit was setting up on a Mac because the extensions for IMAP and other things weren't easy to add in. That's more of an issue with Homebrew and their decision to reduce what they were willing to support. Language wise, it's catching up a lot and the additions seem to be sensible enough. I'm not sure I would start a fresh project in it but it's great to see how it's matured over the years, and just like Typescript is to JS, I hope it provides a good introduction to things like static typing to novice programmers who are starting out with PHP for pure ease of use. Beyond that, what's the point in hating a language? I've found real joy and enthusiasm in playing with different ones just to get a feel for how you would approach certain problems with them.

the_af 6y ago
There's no point in hating a language. A former boss of mine had a saying (which I'm sure he didn't invent, but he definitely lived up to it and I admired him a lot) which was "love the problem, not the tech". He took pride in engaging with any problem to the best of his abilities, regardless of the language. He thought it was pointless to complain about the tech itself; if the tech wasn't suitable maybe it was part of a problem to be tackled rationally, not with hatred. That said, I'm uncomfortable working with languages which I feel are outdated and get in the way, such as COBOL. You could say I do hate COBOL. I really, really disliked javascript in its infancy; you fought the (lack of) tools and suffered a lot just to achieve something that would have taken you 5 minutes with other languages. This is not the javascript of today, mind you. One last thing: one should always be wary of the Blub Paradox (one of the best essays by PG in my opinion; I don't particularly like the rest, mind you). People who ignore advances in programming languages tend to look at "their" language, maybe praise its late-coming improvements, and wonder why other people think it's not enough. But it's often not enough indeed, once you learn those other languages... I've no opinion of PHP because I've never used it.
duskwuff 6y ago
The PHP IMAP extension is a bit of a sore spot. It's an interface to a C library (https://github.com/uw-imap/imap https://github.com/uw-imap/imap) which has been effectively abandoned for the last >10 years. There's been some off-and-on discussion about unbundling the extension from PHP or dropping it entirely.

by ljm 6y ago

the_af 6y ago

There's no point in hating a language. A former boss of mine had a saying (which I'm sure he didn't invent, but he definitely lived up to it and I admired him a lot) which was "love the problem, not the tech". He took pride in engaging with any problem to the best of his abilities, regardless of the language. He thought it was pointless to complain about the tech itself; if the tech wasn't suitable maybe it was part of a problem to be tackled rationally, not with hatred. That said, I'm uncomfortable working with languages which I feel are outdated and get in the way, such as COBOL. You could say I do hate COBOL. I really, really disliked javascript in its infancy; you fought the (lack of) tools and suffered a lot just to achieve something that would have taken you 5 minutes with other languages. This is not the javascript of today, mind you. One last thing: one should always be wary of the Blub Paradox (one of the best essays by PG in my opinion; I don't particularly like the rest, mind you). People who ignore advances in programming languages tend to look at "their" language, maybe praise its late-coming improvements, and wonder why other people think it's not enough. But it's often not enough indeed, once you learn those other languages... I've no opinion of PHP because I've never used it.

duskwuff 6y ago

The PHP IMAP extension is a bit of a sore spot. It's an interface to a C library (https://github.com/uw-imap/imap https://github.com/uw-imap/imap) which has been effectively abandoned for the last >10 years. There's been some off-and-on discussion about unbundling the extension from PHP or dropping it entirely.