7 ms·

Seriously, enough with PHP. Can we just let it die? I worked with PHP 5.6 years ago and I hated it. Recently I worked with PHP 7. Heard about all the work tha

Seriously, enough with PHP. Can we just let it die? I worked with PHP 5.6 years ago and I hated it. Recently I worked with PHP 7. Heard about all the work that's been done on it and I was kinda excited to try it. It's still so broken. It doesn't matter if they improve performance or add new cool features. PHP is broken in ways that can't be fixed without breaking compatibility. Fork it or put it out of its pain.

AdrianB1 6y ago
Live and let live. There is enough space in this Universe for you and PHP to coexist without interacting, if you don't like it then ignore it.
- pietrovismara 6y ago
  Yeah that's mostly true, at least until you get a new job and only a few weeks in you find out they have a "small" years old service written in PHP that no one else wants to maintain :) That's my story, I ignored PHP for years but since I had to work again on it recently and got pretty quickly hit by its "rough edges" I couldn't help but ask myself why such a bad language is still around.
  - Mikushi 6y ago
    Because unlike "good" languages it generates revenue.
sschueller 6y ago
The day you reach perfection is the day you finish your project as in never... PHP works (thought not perfect) lets me get things done.
- ptx 6y ago
  Lots of languages work and let you get things done. You don't have to choose PHP.
  - joseluisq 6y ago
    Yeah, It's because certain devs instead of adopting a defensive position in favor of PHP. They don't think in the fact that there are many alternatives of programming languages even superior than PHP for different use cases and exigencies. E.g Lua, Julia, Erlang, Python, even the slow Ruby just to name few of them.
    - codegeek 6y ago
      "Lua, Julia, Erlang" For most CRUD web development, using Lua/Julia/Erlang has a heavy cost upfront of learning, finding developers and many other issues like hosting etc. PHP works out of the box on most servers and has a mature ecosytem. So this is why I cannot just get into Lua or Julia because it is much better than PHP. It is all about cost vs benefit analysis. Sure, if I am building something like whatsapp, I should probably learn Erlang over PHP but if I am building yet another CRUD App (which most web apps are even in 2020), I am totally ok with PHP since that gives me the quickest and most mature way to get started. People who care too much about languages remind me of the "If you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail" situation. Not every application has to be built in Julia/Lua/Rust whatever.
      - ptx 6y ago
        Are you arguing that PHP is the quickest way to get started in the case where you already know PHP but not any other language, i.e. writing a program in PHP compared to learning another language from scratch and then writing the same program in that language? That's probably true. But if PHP is the only language you know, it might still be worthwhile to learn another one, when you have some time to spare. And "most mature"? Other web frameworks are plenty mature. Django, Rails and Spring MVC are all roughly 15 years old.
  - codegeek 6y ago
    PHP lets you get things done. You don't have to choose another language.
awestroke 6y ago
I have worked with PHP for years, and I agree completely. I think the people who defend PHP either have too much invested in it, or they have never gotten productive in a saner language. Or both.
- spiderfarmer 6y ago
  The people who invested "too much" in it don't have to defend it. They'll simply continue using it. They'll enjoy the new functionality. If I make millions upon millions of revenue with a PHP application, I don't care if tech nerds dislike the syntax used to build it.
  - awestroke 6y ago
    Syntax is very far down the list of problems with PHP
    - spiderfarmer 6y ago
      And even those problems are very far down the line if the business logic results in the expected revenue.
      - awestroke 6y ago
        Finding talented developers that want to work on your codebase is a factor in your example. More and more developers are realising they don't want to work with PHP. How much revenue will you get without developers? Go ahead, keep using PHP for your existing multi million dollar product. But using PHP for new projects is not wise.
        echelon 6y ago
        Recruiting emails from companies that use PHP go straight to trash. Wouldn't even consider it, and I know I'm not alone. PHP shops won't attract from the same pool of talent. It's not that there aren't good PHP developers, it's that there are so many brilliant engineers that are never going to consider such work. Languages matter.
0xy 6y ago
This is such a shallow elitist comment. A lot of the common criticisms levied at PHP have been corrected years ago, and PHP is responsible for hundreds of billions of dollars of turnover globally. Of the top 10 websites in the world, PHP is partially or wholly powering more than half of them. Wikipedia, Wordpress, online retail. I have personally created 6 figures of value because I could quickly dump some PHP scripts on a VPS server and start doing business. My employer makes billions with PHP. It's not perfect, but it's rock solid for gigantic businesses. Sure you can build yourself perfect shiny web services using modern bleeding edge languages, meanwhile businesses using PHP for decades are innovating and printing money daily.
- throw_m239339 6y ago
  > This is such a shallow elitist comment. A lot of the common criticisms levied at PHP have been corrected years ago, and PHP is responsible for hundreds of billions of dollars of turnover globally. So does Java, Python, C and C++. This is also a shallow argument. No language is perfect but PHP still suffer from the same design issues a 10/15 years ago, none of them have been correct and it's perfectly valid to point that out. > My employer makes billions with PHP. It's not perfect, but it's rock solid for gigantic businesses. And with C, since PHP is written in C and probably whatever fronts your PHP applications, and with Javascript because you sure ain't running PHP on the client and so on and so forth...
  - jonwinstanley 6y ago
    PHP is a great fit for the web, always will be. There are “better” languages and solutions but they are usually more difficult to setup or not as easy to learn.
    - throw_m239339 6y ago
      > PHP is a great fit for the web, always will be. There are “better” languages and solutions but they are usually more difficult to setup or not as easy to learn. Talking about shallow comment you could say that from dozens of languages that have saner foundations. > There are “better” languages and solutions but they are usually more difficult to setup or not as easy to learn. No they are not more difficult to set up, not in the era of containers and PAAS. Of course if you still rely on Go Daddy for hosting, it might be...
throw_m239339 6y ago
Well it's still broken because the broken stuff was never removed, PHP just added new some stuff on top of it. Typing is neat though, but no generics, no private classes/packages so you get the worst of Java "enterprise" OO on top of some dubious language foundations.
simion314 6y ago
Most of the bugs or spaghetti code I have to fix this days are not caused by the language, the issue is most of the time the requirements that changed or the developer was not experienced with that certain problem so he created a monster.
- cute_boi 6y ago
  its like saying most of the seg fault caused is not due to use of C. Common langauge pattern / design choices made php to have bugs/ spaghetti code. At the end developer control many thing but that doesn't mean language don't have any fault.
  - simion314 6y ago
    It is not fair to bring C into this, C is an old language and when all the kernels and core libraries were created it was the best tool for the job. You hate C please go and contribute to the many rewrites and one day 25 years from now maybe we will have an OS written in some language that is cool now but would be outdated then. My advice is use the best tool for the job when possible, if you don't have a choice then learn to accept that most of us work with less cool languages/frameworks/projects ... the skill we bring is to find solutions for our customers and implement this solutions as best we can with the tools we have, most of the time a developer should be spending reading stuff(documentation,articles, code), thinking and the least time should be spent on typing code or tooling.
    - giantDinosaur 6y ago
      If we want to really reduce typing we should make everyone program in Haskell (and start a national effort to improve its tooling) ;)
      - simion314 6y ago
        I think you misunderstand me , my point is think more and type less. Is not about clever one liners or languages with less verbosity but better implementations and abstractions and you can implement a good solution in a lot of languages. An example would be where a dev needs to implement X, then he goes on Google , finds some code sample , copy-pastes it, tests it, then changes here and there to make it work. The issue is that he maybe forgot to read the documentation for the functions used in the sample, or did not think that the sample is incomplete (maybe missinfg input sanitation) or is outdated or the solution was already in the project code if he only have asked or looked around in the code. Other example is when a dev wants to solve X, installs a package from npm that does X but does not understand it and in fact that npm package is just a few lines of code that you could have read, learn something, find limitations and improve that.
joseluisq 6y ago
Yeah, as another user has said, PHP is getting "cooler" (do you get it?). However not only because it is turning into a sort of "Java-like" is will be get heater again. PHP is fine for its stuff on FastCGI but more further than that, I don't think so, sorry. There are many of programming language alternatives out there.

AdrianB1 6y ago

Live and let live. There is enough space in this Universe for you and PHP to coexist without interacting, if you don't like it then ignore it.

pietrovismara 6y ago
Yeah that's mostly true, at least until you get a new job and only a few weeks in you find out they have a "small" years old service written in PHP that no one else wants to maintain :) That's my story, I ignored PHP for years but since I had to work again on it recently and got pretty quickly hit by its "rough edges" I couldn't help but ask myself why such a bad language is still around.
- Mikushi 6y ago
  Because unlike "good" languages it generates revenue.

sschueller 6y ago

The day you reach perfection is the day you finish your project as in never... PHP works (thought not perfect) lets me get things done.

ptx 6y ago
Lots of languages work and let you get things done. You don't have to choose PHP.
- joseluisq 6y ago
  Yeah, It's because certain devs instead of adopting a defensive position in favor of PHP. They don't think in the fact that there are many alternatives of programming languages even superior than PHP for different use cases and exigencies. E.g Lua, Julia, Erlang, Python, even the slow Ruby just to name few of them.
  - codegeek 6y ago
    "Lua, Julia, Erlang" For most CRUD web development, using Lua/Julia/Erlang has a heavy cost upfront of learning, finding developers and many other issues like hosting etc. PHP works out of the box on most servers and has a mature ecosytem. So this is why I cannot just get into Lua or Julia because it is much better than PHP. It is all about cost vs benefit analysis. Sure, if I am building something like whatsapp, I should probably learn Erlang over PHP but if I am building yet another CRUD App (which most web apps are even in 2020), I am totally ok with PHP since that gives me the quickest and most mature way to get started. People who care too much about languages remind me of the "If you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail" situation. Not every application has to be built in Julia/Lua/Rust whatever.
    - ptx 6y ago
      Are you arguing that PHP is the quickest way to get started in the case where you already know PHP but not any other language, i.e. writing a program in PHP compared to learning another language from scratch and then writing the same program in that language? That's probably true. But if PHP is the only language you know, it might still be worthwhile to learn another one, when you have some time to spare. And "most mature"? Other web frameworks are plenty mature. Django, Rails and Spring MVC are all roughly 15 years old.
- codegeek 6y ago
  PHP lets you get things done. You don't have to choose another language.

awestroke 6y ago

I have worked with PHP for years, and I agree completely. I think the people who defend PHP either have too much invested in it, or they have never gotten productive in a saner language. Or both.

spiderfarmer 6y ago
The people who invested "too much" in it don't have to defend it. They'll simply continue using it. They'll enjoy the new functionality. If I make millions upon millions of revenue with a PHP application, I don't care if tech nerds dislike the syntax used to build it.
- awestroke 6y ago
  Syntax is very far down the list of problems with PHP
  - spiderfarmer 6y ago
    And even those problems are very far down the line if the business logic results in the expected revenue.
    - awestroke 6y ago
      Finding talented developers that want to work on your codebase is a factor in your example. More and more developers are realising they don't want to work with PHP. How much revenue will you get without developers? Go ahead, keep using PHP for your existing multi million dollar product. But using PHP for new projects is not wise.
      - echelon 6y ago
        Recruiting emails from companies that use PHP go straight to trash. Wouldn't even consider it, and I know I'm not alone. PHP shops won't attract from the same pool of talent. It's not that there aren't good PHP developers, it's that there are so many brilliant engineers that are never going to consider such work. Languages matter.

0xy 6y ago

This is such a shallow elitist comment. A lot of the common criticisms levied at PHP have been corrected years ago, and PHP is responsible for hundreds of billions of dollars of turnover globally. Of the top 10 websites in the world, PHP is partially or wholly powering more than half of them. Wikipedia, Wordpress, online retail. I have personally created 6 figures of value because I could quickly dump some PHP scripts on a VPS server and start doing business. My employer makes billions with PHP. It's not perfect, but it's rock solid for gigantic businesses. Sure you can build yourself perfect shiny web services using modern bleeding edge languages, meanwhile businesses using PHP for decades are innovating and printing money daily.

throw_m239339 6y ago
> This is such a shallow elitist comment. A lot of the common criticisms levied at PHP have been corrected years ago, and PHP is responsible for hundreds of billions of dollars of turnover globally. So does Java, Python, C and C++. This is also a shallow argument. No language is perfect but PHP still suffer from the same design issues a 10/15 years ago, none of them have been correct and it's perfectly valid to point that out. > My employer makes billions with PHP. It's not perfect, but it's rock solid for gigantic businesses. And with C, since PHP is written in C and probably whatever fronts your PHP applications, and with Javascript because you sure ain't running PHP on the client and so on and so forth...
- jonwinstanley 6y ago
  PHP is a great fit for the web, always will be. There are “better” languages and solutions but they are usually more difficult to setup or not as easy to learn.
  - throw_m239339 6y ago
    > PHP is a great fit for the web, always will be. There are “better” languages and solutions but they are usually more difficult to setup or not as easy to learn. Talking about shallow comment you could say that from dozens of languages that have saner foundations. > There are “better” languages and solutions but they are usually more difficult to setup or not as easy to learn. No they are not more difficult to set up, not in the era of containers and PAAS. Of course if you still rely on Go Daddy for hosting, it might be...

throw_m239339 6y ago

Well it's still broken because the broken stuff was never removed, PHP just added new some stuff on top of it. Typing is neat though, but no generics, no private classes/packages so you get the worst of Java "enterprise" OO on top of some dubious language foundations.

simion314 6y ago

Most of the bugs or spaghetti code I have to fix this days are not caused by the language, the issue is most of the time the requirements that changed or the developer was not experienced with that certain problem so he created a monster.

cute_boi 6y ago
its like saying most of the seg fault caused is not due to use of C. Common langauge pattern / design choices made php to have bugs/ spaghetti code. At the end developer control many thing but that doesn't mean language don't have any fault.
- simion314 6y ago
  It is not fair to bring C into this, C is an old language and when all the kernels and core libraries were created it was the best tool for the job. You hate C please go and contribute to the many rewrites and one day 25 years from now maybe we will have an OS written in some language that is cool now but would be outdated then. My advice is use the best tool for the job when possible, if you don't have a choice then learn to accept that most of us work with less cool languages/frameworks/projects ... the skill we bring is to find solutions for our customers and implement this solutions as best we can with the tools we have, most of the time a developer should be spending reading stuff(documentation,articles, code), thinking and the least time should be spent on typing code or tooling.
  - giantDinosaur 6y ago
    If we want to really reduce typing we should make everyone program in Haskell (and start a national effort to improve its tooling) ;)
    - simion314 6y ago
      I think you misunderstand me , my point is think more and type less. Is not about clever one liners or languages with less verbosity but better implementations and abstractions and you can implement a good solution in a lot of languages. An example would be where a dev needs to implement X, then he goes on Google , finds some code sample , copy-pastes it, tests it, then changes here and there to make it work. The issue is that he maybe forgot to read the documentation for the functions used in the sample, or did not think that the sample is incomplete (maybe missinfg input sanitation) or is outdated or the solution was already in the project code if he only have asked or looked around in the code. Other example is when a dev wants to solve X, installs a package from npm that does X but does not understand it and in fact that npm package is just a few lines of code that you could have read, learn something, find limitations and improve that.

joseluisq 6y ago

Yeah, as another user has said, PHP is getting "cooler" (do you get it?). However not only because it is turning into a sort of "Java-like" is will be get heater again. PHP is fine for its stuff on FastCGI but more further than that, I don't think so, sorry. There are many of programming language alternatives out there.