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This back and forth appears in every single thread about PHP on HN: - PHP doesn't deserve its bad reputation! - Well, it used to be pretty terrible... - Ok,

by simias 6y ago

This back and forth appears in every single thread about PHP on HN: - PHP doesn't deserve its bad reputation! - Well, it used to be pretty terrible... - Ok, so first let's talk about the relativity about the definition of "terrible". The Oxford English dictionary defines [...] And from there it goes nowhere. It is true that PHP improved drastically over the past decade or so, it is also true that it used to be a garbage fire of a programing language and ecosystem. For the PHP proponents in the comments: I think you'd save you a lot of trouble if you didn't try to dismiss the history of PHP and pretend that it was just unfair criticism from haters. It was warranted. You can't win this one. But who cares? If PHP really is good now you're way better off arguing about that, because while you'll never manage to convince me that it was a good language in 2005, you might end up convincing me (and others) to give it a try in 2020.

CharlesW 6y ago
2005 means PHP 5/5.1. It may suck in retrospect, but it was fine at the time, and there were a lot fewer choices. There are excellent reasons why it powered (and continues to) large swaths of the web. I think a lot of the misunderstanding around PHP's past stems from its accessibility. But real software developers had no problems creating real software with it even then, and since then the ecosystem has become startlingly better. > …you might end up convincing me (and others) to give it a try in 2020. It's been in the TIBOE top 10 since it's debut in 2001. If you haven't tried it by now, it seems unlikely you ever will (and that's absolutely fine).
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- giantrobot 6y ago
  PHP 5 wasn't fine at the time which is what the GP was saying. It was inconsistent and stupid and only carried on because it was the default option on shared hosting so everyone could easily throw up their b2^H^H Wordpress blog. PHP would have been abandoned years ago if not for Wordpress' worse is better success story.
  - CharlesW 6y ago
    > PHP 5 wasn't fine at the time which is what the GP was saying. "Fine" (as in "adequate") is not a high bar, and so is easily defensible. I get that it's fun to say that PHP was "stupid", but history shows that PHP's historic imperfections didn't prevent developers from building everything from web-scale apps (Facebook, Wikipedia, Flickr, Tumbler, etc.) to, yes, millions of blogs. (Don't get me wrong, your favorite language seems nice too.)
    - giantrobot 6y ago
      Big websites used PHP in the distant past and have a handful of lines running today. PHP is eating the world! Come on man, you're well aware none of those "web scale" companies are running major portions of their sites on PHP anymore. Well, you should be aware of that. You can keep fighting for PHP if you want. Don't pretend that it's worse is better nature fifteen years ago somehow made it a good language or that it didn't have major failings. I wrote a ton of PHP 3 through 5. It was easier to deploy on $10 shared hosting than Perl/CGI and more capable than SSI. That was about it in terms of its advantages at the time. It wasn't easier to write than Perl and in fact had more and less obvious footguns. It's database access was shaky at best and downright dangerous at worst. The question today is why bother with PHP for greenfield development? It doesn't really offer anything unique or special. You can't really leverage your PHP skills anywhere but web development and really only a subset of that field. So good luck with that.
      - Aeolun 6y ago
        > It's database access was shaky at best and downright dangerous at worst. Lol. It literally offers you ‘one’ function to access the database. Any insecurity is your own fault.
      - CharlesW 6y ago
        What I actually said was PHP 5 was "fine". To that I'll add the wildly controversial assertions that PHP 7 is "pretty good" and PHP 8 "looks nice". I know that I'm supposed to have internalized that PHP Is Bad, but occasionally I have to do maintenance on a PHP project and I just can't find it within me to hate it. > It was easier to deploy on $10 shared hosting than Perl/CGI and more capable than SSI. Exactly. And for other folks who (unlike us) didn't use PHP at the time, the "Virtues of PHP" section of this Slack post that lists other notable reasons why people chose (and still might?) PHP: https://slack.engineering/taking-php-seriously/ https://slack.engineering/taking-php-seriously/
pjmlp 6y ago
Case in point, after coming to the conclusion that XML + XSLT wouldn't last for my web site, I went to search for something else, and wasn't that happy with my ISP alternatives (PHP + CGI/Perl). However, after a couple of trials with other stacks, I ended up going with PHP, it does the job, was already on the ISP without me having the hassle of being a special snowflake, I was anyway the only one coding it and now get to enjoy a JIT compiler that Python and Ruby communities are still not fully embracing on their reference implementations. And although I do mostly Java/.NET Web related projects, I do occasional PHP projects, because after I am done, I am sure that the customer is going to have an easy time finding someone else to take care of their issues, as I don't want to make a living out of it.
blub 6y ago
I don't know how it looked like in the US, but in several European countries the web was basically built in PHP. In 2005 the entire web market in my country was PHP with a few uncool Java enterprisey jobs here and there. Being able to mix PHP and HTML code was brilliant and setting up PHP on a server was child's play compared to Java. Because state was stored in the DB and individual pages were ephemeral, we didn't have any issues with e.g. memory usage or performance. At that time I was already familiar with C, C++ and C# and I didn't find it worse to use PHP. It was a good match for the job.
- tekromancr 6y ago
  But the web was also made of SQLi and reverse shells in 2005 as well. Nobody should argue the utility of using php in 2005; just as nobody should argue that it wasn't also a superfund site of a language in 2005 as well.
  - blub 6y ago
    In 2020 the number one OWASP security risk is injection and I don't think anyone's arguing that the current crop of languages are all crap. Evaluating a language without judging what kind of projects it enables is nonsensical and leads to pointless language ivory tower discussions. I'm sure that also back then there were all sorts of awesome programming languages that nobody was using, but checked all the boxes that would make the average HN language enthusiast happy.
    - hardwaregeek 6y ago
      As a counterpoint, the number one cause of death in America in 1950 was heart disease. It’s also the number one cause of death today. We’ve still made a lot of progress in treating heart disease in the last 70 years
      - blub 6y ago
        What kind of progress have we made since 2005 in preventing (not treating) SQL injection? I remember reading a book about PHP security that year where escaping strings and bound parameters were mentioned.

by simias 6y ago

CharlesW 6y ago

2005 means PHP 5/5.1. It may suck in retrospect, but it was fine at the time, and there were a lot fewer choices. There are excellent reasons why it powered (and continues to) large swaths of the web. I think a lot of the misunderstanding around PHP's past stems from its accessibility. But real software developers had no problems creating real software with it even then, and since then the ecosystem has become startlingly better. > …you might end up convincing me (and others) to give it a try in 2020. It's been in the TIBOE top 10 since it's debut in 2001. If you haven't tried it by now, it seems unlikely you ever will (and that's absolutely fine).

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
giantrobot 6y ago
PHP 5 wasn't fine at the time which is what the GP was saying. It was inconsistent and stupid and only carried on because it was the default option on shared hosting so everyone could easily throw up their b2^H^H Wordpress blog. PHP would have been abandoned years ago if not for Wordpress' worse is better success story.
- CharlesW 6y ago
  > PHP 5 wasn't fine at the time which is what the GP was saying. "Fine" (as in "adequate") is not a high bar, and so is easily defensible. I get that it's fun to say that PHP was "stupid", but history shows that PHP's historic imperfections didn't prevent developers from building everything from web-scale apps (Facebook, Wikipedia, Flickr, Tumbler, etc.) to, yes, millions of blogs. (Don't get me wrong, your favorite language seems nice too.)
  - giantrobot 6y ago
    Big websites used PHP in the distant past and have a handful of lines running today. PHP is eating the world! Come on man, you're well aware none of those "web scale" companies are running major portions of their sites on PHP anymore. Well, you should be aware of that. You can keep fighting for PHP if you want. Don't pretend that it's worse is better nature fifteen years ago somehow made it a good language or that it didn't have major failings. I wrote a ton of PHP 3 through 5. It was easier to deploy on $10 shared hosting than Perl/CGI and more capable than SSI. That was about it in terms of its advantages at the time. It wasn't easier to write than Perl and in fact had more and less obvious footguns. It's database access was shaky at best and downright dangerous at worst. The question today is why bother with PHP for greenfield development? It doesn't really offer anything unique or special. You can't really leverage your PHP skills anywhere but web development and really only a subset of that field. So good luck with that.
    - Aeolun 6y ago
      > It's database access was shaky at best and downright dangerous at worst. Lol. It literally offers you ‘one’ function to access the database. Any insecurity is your own fault.
    - CharlesW 6y ago
      What I actually said was PHP 5 was "fine". To that I'll add the wildly controversial assertions that PHP 7 is "pretty good" and PHP 8 "looks nice". I know that I'm supposed to have internalized that PHP Is Bad, but occasionally I have to do maintenance on a PHP project and I just can't find it within me to hate it. > It was easier to deploy on $10 shared hosting than Perl/CGI and more capable than SSI. Exactly. And for other folks who (unlike us) didn't use PHP at the time, the "Virtues of PHP" section of this Slack post that lists other notable reasons why people chose (and still might?) PHP: https://slack.engineering/taking-php-seriously/ https://slack.engineering/taking-php-seriously/

pjmlp 6y ago

Case in point, after coming to the conclusion that XML + XSLT wouldn't last for my web site, I went to search for something else, and wasn't that happy with my ISP alternatives (PHP + CGI/Perl). However, after a couple of trials with other stacks, I ended up going with PHP, it does the job, was already on the ISP without me having the hassle of being a special snowflake, I was anyway the only one coding it and now get to enjoy a JIT compiler that Python and Ruby communities are still not fully embracing on their reference implementations. And although I do mostly Java/.NET Web related projects, I do occasional PHP projects, because after I am done, I am sure that the customer is going to have an easy time finding someone else to take care of their issues, as I don't want to make a living out of it.

blub 6y ago

I don't know how it looked like in the US, but in several European countries the web was basically built in PHP. In 2005 the entire web market in my country was PHP with a few uncool Java enterprisey jobs here and there. Being able to mix PHP and HTML code was brilliant and setting up PHP on a server was child's play compared to Java. Because state was stored in the DB and individual pages were ephemeral, we didn't have any issues with e.g. memory usage or performance. At that time I was already familiar with C, C++ and C# and I didn't find it worse to use PHP. It was a good match for the job.

tekromancr 6y ago
But the web was also made of SQLi and reverse shells in 2005 as well. Nobody should argue the utility of using php in 2005; just as nobody should argue that it wasn't also a superfund site of a language in 2005 as well.
- blub 6y ago
  In 2020 the number one OWASP security risk is injection and I don't think anyone's arguing that the current crop of languages are all crap. Evaluating a language without judging what kind of projects it enables is nonsensical and leads to pointless language ivory tower discussions. I'm sure that also back then there were all sorts of awesome programming languages that nobody was using, but checked all the boxes that would make the average HN language enthusiast happy.
  - hardwaregeek 6y ago
    As a counterpoint, the number one cause of death in America in 1950 was heart disease. It’s also the number one cause of death today. We’ve still made a lot of progress in treating heart disease in the last 70 years
    - blub 6y ago
      What kind of progress have we made since 2005 in preventing (not treating) SQL injection? I remember reading a book about PHP security that year where escaping strings and bound parameters were mentioned.