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Taking PHP Seriously (2016)

139 points by ziodave 6y ago

asamarin 6y ago
Article written in 2016, mind you
zapt02 6y ago
A bit sad that despite Slack being (or being built) on top of PHP, there is still no official PHP SDK four years later.
say_it_as_it_is 6y ago
I thought Slack was running on Perl CGI..
deleted 6y ago
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apeace 6y ago
So the entire argument is that PHP is single threaded and each request starts with no state? Am I missing anything else? I’m trying so hard not to rant here, so I just wanted to confirm that those are the only positives he outlines about the language.
- zug_zug 6y ago
  IMO it's such a good thing about PHP that I think other stacks should follow that model (I assume ROR does). I think it's a superior model to the long-running application. Unless your company has 0 developers in it who make a memory leak, or make a fatal uncaught exception.
  - fuzzy2 6y ago
    Hm. This is this and that is that. It is perfectly possible to write a stateless service hosted in a stateful process. In fact, the popular PHP-FPM way to host PHP does just that. If you want to take it to the extreme, there's always CGI, of course.
  - pentium166 6y ago
    Ruby on Rails lives inside a long-running application server. In development, it has dynamic class loading and will reload on file changes, but in production an app can have a lengthy startup time. It does have the memory problem, but I have never seen the server crash outright as a result of an exception while handling a request.
- glaucon 6y ago
  You might have missed this bit - "Did Facebook, Wikipedia, WordPress, Etsy, Baidu, Box, and more recently Slack all succeed in spite of using PHP?"
  - IshKebab 6y ago
    They didn't provide any real arguments that the answer is anything other than "yes". Plenty of languages have support for hot reloading, which means you can just edit, save, refresh exactly the same as in PHP, with the added benefit of not having to use PHP.
- recursivedoubts 6y ago
  FTA: "I claim that PHP’s simpler “think; edit; reload the page” cycle makes developers more productive. I agree wholeheartedly with this. I prefer statically-typed languages w/ a bit of local inference (I end up in java usually, but C# got it right) and I consistently see people in my world underestimate the edit/reload workflow. Even a small compilation step is enough to break flow and make development a chore, once you've worked that way. As a side note: java not allowing signature changes and requiring a whole server restart is absolutely awful. It didn't have to be this way: the DCEVM[1] was presented at the 2009 JVM Language Summit[2], by Thomas Wuerthinger. He patiently demonstrated and explained how his work allowed for hot swap of arbitrary class changes, while the Sun guys sitting in the audience told him that what he was demonstrating was impossible. We ended up using the DCEVM for a long time, but as of right now I'm back to restarting my server when I make breaking changes. It's a funny world. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ [1] - This is a modern fork of the project: https://dcevm.github.io/ https://dcevm.github.io/ [2] - http://wiki.jvmlangsummit.com/Hotswap http://wiki.jvmlangsummit.com/Hotswap
  - apeace 6y ago
    It’s hard for me to relate, because I just don’t see “edit; reload” as being that important. I think the difference is I write tests. I usually code everything while writing/running tests. Then it always works the first time I run it, so there’s no need for “edit; reload”.
    - munk-a 6y ago
      I really like working in PHP but I'd actually agree that edit;reload is a virtue of the language (in the environment everyone normally assumes it's running in) that is losing value. This virtue was incredibly valuable to me when I was throwing a website together with ducttape and bubble gum and it was the only way (that I knew of) to be able to clearly and quickly see the results of my changes. With tests in the picture I think it loses a lot of that value - it still has some since nobody likes writing front-end tests but most of your code changes should be "proven" by some level of automated test coverage.
    - recursivedoubts 6y ago
- coldtea 6y ago
  >I’m trying so hard not to rant here Not that hard, there's a bias showing. First, those things you've mentioned are nothing to sneer at, are actual very good decisions (even if accidental) for a webserver-centric language. They enable even naive developers to achive good scalability and isolation, and make fast development/debug cycles trivial. Second, PHP has been improved by leaps and bounds from the days of 4, to the point of being a totally different language - all of the above points are already made in TFA. Most arguments against it are moot today, or only apply superficially to the standard library, not the language (order of arguments, and so on). Plus, it is speedy too, post 6, and especially post 7 (and there's a whole new JIT in 8). In any case, it has constant work on speed and memory reduction. And of course it has a huge ecosystem of libs, projects, and frameworks, including not available anywhere else projects like Wordpress. And the standard library (warts included) between JSON, DB drivers, LDAP support, SMTP, etc., is one of the most complete ones this side of Python, and perhaps even fitter than Python's for typical web development work. Plus the deployment model is one of the best. Copy your files to a directory. Done. Add a redirect instruction to your server if you want to make it more fancy... For third party libs, composer is up there with any major package dependency/install solution. And for the core libs, plugins, etc installation is handled perfectly by the standard package managers in all Linux distros (and probably Windows too), and is even easier with MAMP, WAMP, etc for local development. Trivial to dockerize too if that's your thing.
  - throw_m239339 6y ago
    > PHP has been improved by leaps and bounds from the days of 4, to the point of being a totally different language. No, most of bad parts are still here, all the stdlib inconsistancies and co are still here. Just because add more functions to a language doesn't change the bad design decisions at its core. The weird mix between dynamic typing and Java style rigidity (without most of its benefits) didn't go away. What makes it a different language since PHP 5? more type guards? no, it's still a templating language.
    - munk-a 6y ago
      Those strange naming choices definitely still have a cost but a lot of effort has been invested in documentation and alternatives to lessen their cost. The mixed typing is... honestly, it's amazing. You really need to try it out for yourself in PHP7 or 8 - you can lean on really strict type checking in your application, go the old route or generally adhere to strict typing and relax that for entry points and library calls. Lastly, PHP has come down hard and actually introduced backwards compatibility in a few key places to address some of the biggest WATs, I've been pretty impressed by the balance of the language stewardship. It does definitely have warts, but there are warts on everything that people actually use in industry.
nickthemagicman 6y ago
PHP after 5 is great. I guess from PHP 7 on things changed pretty significantly. Combine it with Laravel and nginx, and you've got an enjoyable stack in my opinion.
- iruoy 6y ago
  Nginx is great, but I've used Apache and Caddy as well and they're both great too. Does anyone start a new php project without a framework these days? There are some great ones (Laravel, Symfony, PimCore, etc.).
ed25519FUUU 6y ago
> Slack uses PHP for most of its server-side application logic, which is an unusual choice these days. Why did we choose to build a new project in this language? Should you? We already know the painfully obvious answer to this question even if it's not listed in the "reasons": because the technology decision makers were comfortable with PHP and they wanted to use it.
- mgkimsal 6y ago
  is this terribly different from many other choices made by other companies? "Whew... we're all totally psyched with node, and all have experience with it, know how to solve problems with it... but we're going to commit to Django. We don't want to, but we're going to." Does that exchange ever happen? I've seen the opposite - almost every tech stack I've seen at small and medium sized companies was primarily the result of the few decision makers who had experiences (good or bad) with specific tech which influenced their decision to use X.
rabuse 6y ago
This seems to be an unpopular opinion in the tech world, but I honestly enjoy working with PHP. It's such a simple, robust language, and you can use it in many different ways, depending on what you're building (OOP, scripting, microservices, etc).
- mgkimsal 6y ago
  I'm with you. 10 years ago I was doing moderate 'shell scripting' type stuff in PHP - if I needed to scan a dir, parse some files, etc. PHP seems usually far more useful than trying to shoehorn the problem in to bash. And... writing shell scripts in Java ain't ever going to be a thing.
  - pdimitar 6y ago
    For general scripting where bash is a poor fit PHP and Ruby remain pretty solid to this day and I like them for that. For web development though, not really. Elixir is much better there and I am saying this as a guy who had 8 years with Java and 6.5 years with Ruby on Rails (and consulted and helped 10+ PHP and JS projects in the meantime).
- i_like_to_post 6y ago
  It's a technology that mostly gets out of the way and allows you to get stuff done, even fairly quickly.
- breck 6y ago
  I think the design of PHP the environment is brilliant: no state, requesting a url just executes a file. So simple and solid. That being said, at some point in 2010-2015 timeline it became essential to master Javascript to do anything good on the web, and so it became a diversion of precious resources to continue to invest in PHP as well. Instead the progression has just been to recreate the PHP high level architecture in Javascript/nodejs. So we took the best parts of PHP and brought them to NodeJs land, and then you can cut your costs because you don't have to learn or invest in the full PHP stack.
  - 6y ago
blibble 6y ago
how's PHP's websocket support? presumably if it's a thread per websocket then they're using something else to serve that?
- TazeTSchnitzel 6y ago
  There isn't direct support for WebSocket in PHP like there is for HTTP requests. But there are WebSocket servers written in PHP that work in a similar way to node.js.
- meritt 6y ago
  Swoole (module) is extremely performant in anything networking, including as a websocket server. There are other php-only options (amphp/websocket-server, ratchetphp/Ratchet) but if performance is your need, stick with swoole.
- francislavoie 6y ago
  Pretty great with https://github.com/ratchetphp/Ratchet https://github.com/ratchetphp/Ratchet tbh. But yeah, different runtime. Ratchet is built on top of ReactPHP which is an event-loop runtime (think nodejs). It's helpful to be able to reuse some domain code between the two if necessary, but IO cannot be done the same in ReactPHP because it needs to be async. Good news is ReactPHP has a ton of really great async libs (mysql, redis, etc.) https://reactphp.org/ https://reactphp.org/ As others have said, Swoole is also an option, it's more like Go (coroutine style). Personally, I think it's super cool, but not something I want to use, because the majority of the userbase is chinese and the docs and ecosystem suffer from the language barrier.
  - meritt 6y ago
    fyi on swoole, this book [1] just came out (I cannot comment on the quality, haven't read yet) which hopefully will help bridge the English documentation gap. I've been using swoole for a couple of years and google-translating my way through the Chinese wiki and git issues/comments/etc. [1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0881B227S https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0881B227S
andreygrehov 6y ago
Given PHP 8 has been released, does Hack provide enough value to consider it as an alternative? My take on it is no, but I'm curious about other people's opinions.
- mgkimsal 6y ago
  only played around with it briefly a few years ago. my view is "probably not unless you've already used it, or have knowledge of some specific PHP issue you know you're going to need that Hack provides". I think 4-5 years ago, there was a point where Hack might have been able to grow out of niche status, but I think that time's passed, with the growing community around 'modern' PHP and the ecosystem provided via composer and frameworks.
- munk-a 6y ago
  It is good to keep in mind that this article is more than four years old. I would advise against Hack at this point since most of the good bits have been integrated into the main PHP release - typing is a lot more predictable and enforceable for instance.
  - andreygrehov 6y ago
    Oh boi, my apologize, I missed the "Written 4 years ago" part. Good call. Thank you.
deleted 6y ago
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paxys 6y ago
The best language for a startup is one the founders know the best. Every other discussion will at best make a 1% difference.
- munk-a 6y ago
  Close I think - the best language to use is the one you will have the easiest time hiring good talent for. If you found a startup and all really love and are fluent in COBOL that's great but... good luck when it comes time to hire another employee.
  - fiddlerwoaroof 6y ago
    This is strange to me because I’ve taken and succeeded at two positions now where I didn’t know the language going in.
    - munk-a 6y ago
      I just wanted to clarify that I specifically called out how easy it is to hire for. A lot of developers are pretty quick when it comes to adapting to a new language and there are virtues that lean in favor of a language being easy to pickup: sharing a paradigm with popular language, sharing conventions with popular languages and good documentation. I have yet to work a day job in Rust, but I've worked in Java, C++ and Go so I'd be quite confident applying to a Rust position as long as it wasn't specifically security focused... I would be less confident in how quickly I could pickup Prolog - I think my brain works well for the nuances of the language but I'm less certain.
      - fiddlerwoaroof 6y ago
        Yeah, this is why I’ve concentrated on learning different kinds of languages in my free time, rather than learning the latest thing: if I know Python, Ruby is relatively easy to learn but Haskell is more difficult. So, it’s worth my time to learn Haskell rather than Ruby.
  - 6y ago
pqb 6y ago
Discussed previously: * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12703751 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12703751 * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15262981 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15262981 PS. Would you mind adding a [2016] in the title? It will show readers they probably need to take a historic context to understand the article correctly.
aussieguy1234 6y ago
This was written 4 years ago. Since then, PHP7 and PHP8 have incorporated many of the benefits of HHVM.
- okareaman 6y ago
  Thanks for pointing this out. I read this article as "PHP is bad, use Hack instead"
ransom1538 6y ago
Long live PHP. 15 years of PHP dev work. Games, mobile apps, health care, etc. I have been unemployed for 2 days in 15 years. PHP runs %80 of the internet. Talk to anyone at facebook that wears a suit on friday -- they code PHP (and it seems to scale for them). I think I will be 90 years old hacking on PHP.If you really don't like how the arguments are passed just use an IDE. Or get stuck with real problems like a transition from python2 to 3. (wtf)
- deleted 6y ago
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- sodapopcan 6y ago
  "Use an IDE" is never an answer to shitty language design. Shitty language design is shitty language design. That said, I cut my teeth on PHP and still have a fondness for it. It's especially great being able to deploy small little backend-driven pages with rsync or sftp in a pinch. I just discovered other languages and environments I enjoyed working in much better.
  - blunte 6y ago
    If there's room for Javascript, there's room for PHP. Both are sloppy, inferior languages, but both can do anything you need. And unfortunately, both have immense momentum from being first in the web game.
    - sodapopcan 6y ago
      Ha, I was going to make a comment along these lines. I didn't mention the languages I enjoy over PHP but I can assure you JavaScript ain't one of them. I don't hate JS but as a server-side language I would pick PHP over it any day.
    - aussieguy1234 6y ago
      It's worth pointing out back end JavaScript didn't really start to take off until the 0.x versions of NodeJS came out
hu3 6y ago
Do they still create new backend code mainly in PHP or have they also adopted other languages for new code?
Superfrag 6y ago
"For instance, 123 == “123foo” evaluates to true (see what it’s doing there?), but 0123 == “0123foo” is false (hmm)." Can anyone explain this to me? I know if a string starts with the number, PHP takes the number part and throws the rest, so "0123foo" should be 0123 for the comparison, so why is that false?
- tsm 6y ago
  Edit: I was wrong. 0123 is octal, not decimal [Incorrect original post: 0123 evaluates to the integer value 123]
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - mam2 6y ago
    So ?
    - bugfix 6y ago
      0123 (octal) != 123 (int)
  - civilized 6y ago
    But the integer part of the string "0123foo" is also 123
  - munk-a 6y ago
    Not quite - 0123 is the octal value 123 which happens to be 83 in decimal. Numbers starting with a 0 in PHP are assumed to be in octal but I this isn't the case for strings[1] - to add to confusion "123foo" == 123 => true but "0123foo" = 0123 => false. 1. https://3v4l.org/hAoL2 https://3v4l.org/hAoL2
  - deleted 6y ago
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latenightcoding 6y ago
Somewhat unrelated comment, but the fact that PHP got so good and most people are still not willing to give it a second chance goes to show how hard it is for a language to regain market share after people left for greener pastures.
- pvg 6y ago
  Forum share, maybe, but it's been and remains an extremely popular language.
  - draw_down 6y ago
    Yes, it is a bit silly to paint it as some unloved, underrated diamond in the rough. It's hugely popular.
- throw_m239339 6y ago
  > Somewhat unrelated comment, but the fact that PHP got so good and most people are still not willing to give it a second chance goes to show how hard it is for a language to regain market share after people left for greener pastures. I guess some of the reasons why some devs would not chose PHP (horrid syntax, std lib mess, stupid error reporting system, language inconsistencies, the very existance of php.ini, overreliance on C extensions for speed ...), haven't changed. As companies move to single page applications backed by javascript and REST API, PHP CGI style classic execution model provides no advantage, when it comes to generating or serving web content.
  - i_like_to_post 6y ago
    > As companies move to single page applications backed by javascript and REST API, PHP CGI style classic execution model provides no advantage, when it comes to generating or serving web content I lol'd. SPAs are a fad. Apps that rely heavily on REST API and browser rendering rank terribly on Google. Create a SPA and help your customers discover your competitor on the first page of Google.
    - 6y ago
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okareaman 6y ago
I've used a lot of PHP in my life and now feel Go is better suited for my needs. My gut tells me Go libs are written by professionals, while there is a ton of PHP code written by amateurs to contend with. I'll know more once I get further into Go.
- namanaggarwal 6y ago
  That's an unfortunate comparison. Go came around 10 years back and has started to become mainstream fairly recently. PHP has been around for 25 years. So ofcourse the number of libraries you see in PHP are much more and hence much more "amateur" libraries. The professionals writing go code today are the same professionals who wrote PHP code few years back.
spacemanmatt 6y ago
How seriously am I supposed to take a language that executes after numerous syntax errors that should be fatal compile/runtime errors in every other language? It keeps on trucking no matter what "code" you give it.
- deleted 6y ago
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haffla 6y ago
The argument that you don't have to restart the server after editing a file? I mean I've used a couple of web dev environments and I know for a fact that Rails, Django and Express all come with some sort of automatic reloading in development - provided by the framework itself or by a library. Quite sure there is a solution for most environments.
- francislavoie 6y ago
  You still need to contend with build and startup times with those setups though, even if a rebuild is triggered on file save. With PHP, there's no such thing as build or startup, because it's interpreted.
  - pdimitar 6y ago
    An Elixir Phoenix's page live-reload never took more than one second even on a fairly weak i3 laptop for me. And on my desktop Mac it usually takes 0.2s. Not that big a deal at all.
kypro 6y ago
PHP was the first language I learnt and although I don't use it as much today I still think it's a great language for startups. Languages like Java, Node, C#, etc are great but unlike PHP you can't just drag and drop a .php file on a webserver, point your browser at it and go. Basic things required for web development like connecting to a MySQL database are made trivial in PHP. Code is executed synchronously in PHP and as mentioned in this article requests are stateless which makes the logic much easier to follow and debug than say Java where you have state or Node where you have callbacks and promises. PHP also gives you the flexibility to write procedural, OO, or even functional code. This flexibility is off putting to some, but it allows the language to be useful no matter what your skill level or preferences are. Another thing that's easy with PHP is debugging. You don't have to worry about compiling code or accidentally taking down your entire server (most of the time) if you encounter a critical error. If one of your PHP pages runs into an issue you can enable debugging with a line of code, make your fix then hit the refresh to see if it's working. I learnt to code writing PHP when I was 16 years old. Me and my friend had an idea for a startup but neither of knew how to program beyond a little bit of ActionScript. We were good with computers, but if we decided to use Java I'm certain the project would have never have gotten off the ground because of the steep learning curve. PHP allowed us to skill up with the language and enabled us to move fast despite not really knowing what we were doing. Writing PHP in the ICT room at lunch with my friend was some of the best memories I have of school... I doubt I'd be doing this today if it wasn't for how much fun I had learning and building stuff with PHP when I was younger.
- pdimitar 6y ago
  And this has led to countless SQL injection vulnerabilities some of which WordPress in particular is still fighting with (in community extensions, not in their core) to this day. "Trivial to connect to a database" isn't a selling point. It is a liability when put in the hands of inexperienced programmers.
  - icedchai 6y ago
    People really need to be taught about prepared statements. I once worked on a code base (mainly PHP and Java, with a bit of Perl here and there) where someone had built their own SQL parameter escaping. It still didn't work some percentage of the time.
hashamali 6y ago
I hated PHP for the longest time (worked extensively with PHP5 and various homebrewed frameworks in the early 2010s), but I gotta admit, it's come a long way with PHP7+ and great frameworks like Laravel.
blunte 6y ago
It's like an ugly C. It's a perfectly reasonable choice for web development, just like a Chevy Caprice is a perfectly reasonable car for a taxi service (as evidenced by the thousands of them in NYC, still plodding along). You'd still rather ride in a Mercedes E430 taxi (long time European standard)... unless you had never experienced both, in which case you probably think the Caprice is just fine. And if you knew Ruby, Python, Java, C#, Kotlin, or better yet F#, Clojure, or Elixir, you'd most likely enjoy using one of them rather than PHP. There are three reasons to use PHP. 1. it works 2. it is well integrated with web servers 3. you can find some of the cheapest contract labor who know how to program in it (compared to other, less common/popular languages) Bonus 4. you need to extend Wordpress by writing a plugin or theme (and Wordpress is the Caprice of CMSs...)
- Ayesh 6y ago
  Eh, both take you from point A to point B if that's what you are looking for.
- holoduke 6y ago
  What a load of bolax. A language is nothing more than a hammer or a saw. PHP is just like the other languages you mentioned very mature. It's up to the developer to make good furniture. Entirely different skillset and not linked to a language. I have seen low level drivers for hardware written in PHP operating for over 15 years. I have seen JavaScript used in a medical device. You sound like that creepy negative 'you don't wanna hire' developer complaining about everything you have never worked with. A good developer generally appreciates most technologies.
  - miskin 6y ago
    Nobody says it is not possible to use PHP in all the use cases you mentioned. But is PHP the best tool for those, or is it just the one closest to the hand? You definitely can do surgery with a kitchen knife instead of a scalpel, but often the long-term result would be better if a more appropriate tool was used.
  - pdimitar 6y ago
deleted 6y ago
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huskyr 6y ago
As a language i enjoy Python and Javascript a lot more than PHP. Especially the major PHP frameworks and libraries tend to be too complicated and Java-esque for my liking. There are some nice simpler alternatives, but they tend to get abandoned in favour of the larger projects. But when looking at PHP in terms of deployment and making traditional SQL-based websites/API's it's unmatched. Just reading up on deploying Python code using uWSGI, or connecting to a SQL database gives me headaches, and the confusing package management and versioning system makes things even worse. Running Node feels unpredictable, with the server crashing because you forgot to catch an exception somewhere or having some weird state. With PHP it's just: write the code, copy the files to a server and stuff (usually) just works. That's why i keep using it. Not that pretty, but it always gets the job done.
rangoon626 6y ago
I'm admitting it. I LIKE PHP. It's fun and incredibly easy to work with. I have inherited messy code bases. I have inherited nice code bases. But getting it up and running is _never_ a problem that I have had.
postalrat 6y ago
Anyone here want to share their opinion's on Magento? The small time I spent with it left me with a feeling it was the most over engineering piece of software I've ever worked with. It's made to build a market for modules to buy and isn't made to run an e-commerce site. All written in PHP.
- lucideer 6y ago
  Yes, Magento is a really poorly written piece of software. I'm not sure what relevance that has to this article. I could name a lot more software written in PHP that is poor. Does that tell us anything about PHP itself? I don't think so.
- TylerE 6y ago
  Dumpster fire filled with toxic waste.
tyingq 6y ago
"First, state. Every web request starts from a completely blank slate. Its namespace and globals are uninitialized, except for the standard globals, functions and classes that provide primitive functionality and life support." It was somewhat amusing to see some of the same people that made fun of this later espouse the virtues of AWS Lambda.
tomxor 6y ago
I've ended up treating PHP like shell scripting, with that mind set it becomes much more bearable for writing new code in... much like bash, you don't dare write anything too complex, yet can appreciate it for being a well positioned language for the specific type of task (and I say that having written lots of quite long but well composed bash scripts). Unfortunately PHP is more capable as a language than shells while still having all those poorly thought out parts that will make you hate it if you try to exploit it to it's full capability. Of course this mind set doesn't help much for existing massive code bases where all of the application logic is written in PHP.
fmakunbound 6y ago
Why do engineering blogs have to share this stuff? Is it an attempt to hire?
- oblio 6y ago
  Yes.
hardwaregeek 6y ago
I don't doubt that PHP has some benefits. That said, the reasons cited in the blog post don't seem that unique to PHP. > By starting each request from a known state, we get a kind of organic fault isolation; if request t encounters a software defect and fails, this bug does not directly interfere with the execution of subsequent request t+1. Is there a modern web framework where a failed request can crash the entire server? I'm not sure this is a problem in other languages. > Second, concurrency. An individual web request runs in a single PHP thread. Huh, so maybe this could be an interesting concurrency model. But it's not that different than say, Node's promises. The only difference is Node's promises aren't tied to literally making a web request. The restarting the server problem also is not an issue. Almost every mature web stack I've seen has hot reloading. Yes, even in 2016. There are certainly reasons to use PHP, but the trap I see a lot of PHP proponents fall into is assuming that the benefits they see are somehow unique to PHP. Laravel fans love to cite packages, migrations, the ORM, etc. as reasons to use PHP. I certainly think all of these are great features but they're not unique to PHP.
- sophiebits 6y ago
  Most languages have global or module-level state that can leak between requests. Hack deliberately avoids this.
- pdimitar 6y ago
  > Second, concurrency. An individual web request runs in a single PHP thread. Erlang/Elixir (or any BEAM language) runs every request in a separate green thread which scales much better than OS threads since most of those green threads can be generously multiplexed on just 4-8 CPU cores due to 90% of the time being spent waiting on a database. One OS thread per request is such a... strange thing to brag about in 2020.
bastawhiz 6y ago
Besides the common gripes, the thing that ruined PHP for me was learning that empty("0") is true. I learned this the hard way when this edge case caused an incident and I spent half a week rewriting code to be...not that. PHP has some great properties, and if you're tolerant of its sharp edges, great. But up until recently (and perhaps still?) it's got many of its safeties turned off by default. When I left PHP, (insecure) mysql bindings still came included pretty much universally, but often not PDO. They have every amazing helper function under the sun at your fingertips (urlencode and htmlentities!) but also some tremendously dangerous ones (backticks! variable variables!). What's most striking to me is that Slack is 100% off of PHP now (onto Hack). There's something telling when neither the syntax nor the runtime nor the standard library are sufficient for the biggest users of a language. With recent versions of the core runtime finally getting fast, I wonder if they'll rip off the bandaid and break backwards compatibility to dull some of the larger sharp edges.
ThePadawan 6y ago
I get it. Old PHP was a joke, so people (including me) are biased against it. I would personally love to get beyond that bias. However, every single time I install any piece of software written in PHP, it's simply a nightmare (e.g. Matomo, rss-bridge). Unhelpful error messages, unexplained or undocumented features, all held together with metaphorical duct tape. I always have to dive into the source code to figure out things that a README or tutorial should be able to help me with. I can't recall ever doing that with tools written in any other language. Is it simply that PHP programmers care so little about their products?
- pdimitar 6y ago
  It's likely a combination of the sunk cost fallacy and loving the syntax and maybe the enablement for quick iteration (and all 3 aren't specific to PHP at all). I have the same opinion about Python btw. Just today I had to install a complex toolkit for flashing ROMs and you can guess that thing absolutely didn't work on the first try and I learned much more about "pip" than I ever wanted to.

139 points by ziodave 6y ago

asamarin 6y ago

Article written in 2016, mind you

zapt02 6y ago

A bit sad that despite Slack being (or being built) on top of PHP, there is still no official PHP SDK four years later.

say_it_as_it_is 6y ago

I thought Slack was running on Perl CGI..

deleted 6y ago

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apeace 6y ago

So the entire argument is that PHP is single threaded and each request starts with no state? Am I missing anything else? I’m trying so hard not to rant here, so I just wanted to confirm that those are the only positives he outlines about the language.

zug_zug 6y ago
IMO it's such a good thing about PHP that I think other stacks should follow that model (I assume ROR does). I think it's a superior model to the long-running application. Unless your company has 0 developers in it who make a memory leak, or make a fatal uncaught exception.
- fuzzy2 6y ago
  Hm. This is this and that is that. It is perfectly possible to write a stateless service hosted in a stateful process. In fact, the popular PHP-FPM way to host PHP does just that. If you want to take it to the extreme, there's always CGI, of course.
- pentium166 6y ago
  Ruby on Rails lives inside a long-running application server. In development, it has dynamic class loading and will reload on file changes, but in production an app can have a lengthy startup time. It does have the memory problem, but I have never seen the server crash outright as a result of an exception while handling a request.
glaucon 6y ago
You might have missed this bit - "Did Facebook, Wikipedia, WordPress, Etsy, Baidu, Box, and more recently Slack all succeed in spite of using PHP?"
- IshKebab 6y ago
  They didn't provide any real arguments that the answer is anything other than "yes". Plenty of languages have support for hot reloading, which means you can just edit, save, refresh exactly the same as in PHP, with the added benefit of not having to use PHP.
recursivedoubts 6y ago
FTA: "I claim that PHP’s simpler “think; edit; reload the page” cycle makes developers more productive. I agree wholeheartedly with this. I prefer statically-typed languages w/ a bit of local inference (I end up in java usually, but C# got it right) and I consistently see people in my world underestimate the edit/reload workflow. Even a small compilation step is enough to break flow and make development a chore, once you've worked that way. As a side note: java not allowing signature changes and requiring a whole server restart is absolutely awful. It didn't have to be this way: the DCEVM[1] was presented at the 2009 JVM Language Summit[2], by Thomas Wuerthinger. He patiently demonstrated and explained how his work allowed for hot swap of arbitrary class changes, while the Sun guys sitting in the audience told him that what he was demonstrating was impossible. We ended up using the DCEVM for a long time, but as of right now I'm back to restarting my server when I make breaking changes. It's a funny world. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ [1] - This is a modern fork of the project: https://dcevm.github.io/ https://dcevm.github.io/ [2] - http://wiki.jvmlangsummit.com/Hotswap http://wiki.jvmlangsummit.com/Hotswap
- apeace 6y ago
  It’s hard for me to relate, because I just don’t see “edit; reload” as being that important. I think the difference is I write tests. I usually code everything while writing/running tests. Then it always works the first time I run it, so there’s no need for “edit; reload”.
  - munk-a 6y ago
    I really like working in PHP but I'd actually agree that edit;reload is a virtue of the language (in the environment everyone normally assumes it's running in) that is losing value. This virtue was incredibly valuable to me when I was throwing a website together with ducttape and bubble gum and it was the only way (that I knew of) to be able to clearly and quickly see the results of my changes. With tests in the picture I think it loses a lot of that value - it still has some since nobody likes writing front-end tests but most of your code changes should be "proven" by some level of automated test coverage.
  - recursivedoubts 6y ago
coldtea 6y ago
>I’m trying so hard not to rant here Not that hard, there's a bias showing. First, those things you've mentioned are nothing to sneer at, are actual very good decisions (even if accidental) for a webserver-centric language. They enable even naive developers to achive good scalability and isolation, and make fast development/debug cycles trivial. Second, PHP has been improved by leaps and bounds from the days of 4, to the point of being a totally different language - all of the above points are already made in TFA. Most arguments against it are moot today, or only apply superficially to the standard library, not the language (order of arguments, and so on). Plus, it is speedy too, post 6, and especially post 7 (and there's a whole new JIT in 8). In any case, it has constant work on speed and memory reduction. And of course it has a huge ecosystem of libs, projects, and frameworks, including not available anywhere else projects like Wordpress. And the standard library (warts included) between JSON, DB drivers, LDAP support, SMTP, etc., is one of the most complete ones this side of Python, and perhaps even fitter than Python's for typical web development work. Plus the deployment model is one of the best. Copy your files to a directory. Done. Add a redirect instruction to your server if you want to make it more fancy... For third party libs, composer is up there with any major package dependency/install solution. And for the core libs, plugins, etc installation is handled perfectly by the standard package managers in all Linux distros (and probably Windows too), and is even easier with MAMP, WAMP, etc for local development. Trivial to dockerize too if that's your thing.
- throw_m239339 6y ago
  > PHP has been improved by leaps and bounds from the days of 4, to the point of being a totally different language. No, most of bad parts are still here, all the stdlib inconsistancies and co are still here. Just because add more functions to a language doesn't change the bad design decisions at its core. The weird mix between dynamic typing and Java style rigidity (without most of its benefits) didn't go away. What makes it a different language since PHP 5? more type guards? no, it's still a templating language.
  - munk-a 6y ago
    Those strange naming choices definitely still have a cost but a lot of effort has been invested in documentation and alternatives to lessen their cost. The mixed typing is... honestly, it's amazing. You really need to try it out for yourself in PHP7 or 8 - you can lean on really strict type checking in your application, go the old route or generally adhere to strict typing and relax that for entry points and library calls. Lastly, PHP has come down hard and actually introduced backwards compatibility in a few key places to address some of the biggest WATs, I've been pretty impressed by the balance of the language stewardship. It does definitely have warts, but there are warts on everything that people actually use in industry.

nickthemagicman 6y ago

PHP after 5 is great. I guess from PHP 7 on things changed pretty significantly. Combine it with Laravel and nginx, and you've got an enjoyable stack in my opinion.

iruoy 6y ago
Nginx is great, but I've used Apache and Caddy as well and they're both great too. Does anyone start a new php project without a framework these days? There are some great ones (Laravel, Symfony, PimCore, etc.).

ed25519FUUU 6y ago

> Slack uses PHP for most of its server-side application logic, which is an unusual choice these days. Why did we choose to build a new project in this language? Should you? We already know the painfully obvious answer to this question even if it's not listed in the "reasons": because the technology decision makers were comfortable with PHP and they wanted to use it.

mgkimsal 6y ago
is this terribly different from many other choices made by other companies? "Whew... we're all totally psyched with node, and all have experience with it, know how to solve problems with it... but we're going to commit to Django. We don't want to, but we're going to." Does that exchange ever happen? I've seen the opposite - almost every tech stack I've seen at small and medium sized companies was primarily the result of the few decision makers who had experiences (good or bad) with specific tech which influenced their decision to use X.

rabuse 6y ago

This seems to be an unpopular opinion in the tech world, but I honestly enjoy working with PHP. It's such a simple, robust language, and you can use it in many different ways, depending on what you're building (OOP, scripting, microservices, etc).

mgkimsal 6y ago
I'm with you. 10 years ago I was doing moderate 'shell scripting' type stuff in PHP - if I needed to scan a dir, parse some files, etc. PHP seems usually far more useful than trying to shoehorn the problem in to bash. And... writing shell scripts in Java ain't ever going to be a thing.
- pdimitar 6y ago
  For general scripting where bash is a poor fit PHP and Ruby remain pretty solid to this day and I like them for that. For web development though, not really. Elixir is much better there and I am saying this as a guy who had 8 years with Java and 6.5 years with Ruby on Rails (and consulted and helped 10+ PHP and JS projects in the meantime).
i_like_to_post 6y ago
It's a technology that mostly gets out of the way and allows you to get stuff done, even fairly quickly.
breck 6y ago
I think the design of PHP the environment is brilliant: no state, requesting a url just executes a file. So simple and solid. That being said, at some point in 2010-2015 timeline it became essential to master Javascript to do anything good on the web, and so it became a diversion of precious resources to continue to invest in PHP as well. Instead the progression has just been to recreate the PHP high level architecture in Javascript/nodejs. So we took the best parts of PHP and brought them to NodeJs land, and then you can cut your costs because you don't have to learn or invest in the full PHP stack.
- 6y ago

blibble 6y ago

how's PHP's websocket support? presumably if it's a thread per websocket then they're using something else to serve that?

TazeTSchnitzel 6y ago
There isn't direct support for WebSocket in PHP like there is for HTTP requests. But there are WebSocket servers written in PHP that work in a similar way to node.js.
meritt 6y ago
Swoole (module) is extremely performant in anything networking, including as a websocket server. There are other php-only options (amphp/websocket-server, ratchetphp/Ratchet) but if performance is your need, stick with swoole.
francislavoie 6y ago
Pretty great with https://github.com/ratchetphp/Ratchet https://github.com/ratchetphp/Ratchet tbh. But yeah, different runtime. Ratchet is built on top of ReactPHP which is an event-loop runtime (think nodejs). It's helpful to be able to reuse some domain code between the two if necessary, but IO cannot be done the same in ReactPHP because it needs to be async. Good news is ReactPHP has a ton of really great async libs (mysql, redis, etc.) https://reactphp.org/ https://reactphp.org/ As others have said, Swoole is also an option, it's more like Go (coroutine style). Personally, I think it's super cool, but not something I want to use, because the majority of the userbase is chinese and the docs and ecosystem suffer from the language barrier.
- meritt 6y ago
  fyi on swoole, this book [1] just came out (I cannot comment on the quality, haven't read yet) which hopefully will help bridge the English documentation gap. I've been using swoole for a couple of years and google-translating my way through the Chinese wiki and git issues/comments/etc. [1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0881B227S https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0881B227S

andreygrehov 6y ago

Given PHP 8 has been released, does Hack provide enough value to consider it as an alternative? My take on it is no, but I'm curious about other people's opinions.

mgkimsal 6y ago
only played around with it briefly a few years ago. my view is "probably not unless you've already used it, or have knowledge of some specific PHP issue you know you're going to need that Hack provides". I think 4-5 years ago, there was a point where Hack might have been able to grow out of niche status, but I think that time's passed, with the growing community around 'modern' PHP and the ecosystem provided via composer and frameworks.
munk-a 6y ago
It is good to keep in mind that this article is more than four years old. I would advise against Hack at this point since most of the good bits have been integrated into the main PHP release - typing is a lot more predictable and enforceable for instance.
- andreygrehov 6y ago
  Oh boi, my apologize, I missed the "Written 4 years ago" part. Good call. Thank you.

deleted 6y ago

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paxys 6y ago

The best language for a startup is one the founders know the best. Every other discussion will at best make a 1% difference.

munk-a 6y ago
Close I think - the best language to use is the one you will have the easiest time hiring good talent for. If you found a startup and all really love and are fluent in COBOL that's great but... good luck when it comes time to hire another employee.
- fiddlerwoaroof 6y ago
  This is strange to me because I’ve taken and succeeded at two positions now where I didn’t know the language going in.
  - munk-a 6y ago
    I just wanted to clarify that I specifically called out how easy it is to hire for. A lot of developers are pretty quick when it comes to adapting to a new language and there are virtues that lean in favor of a language being easy to pickup: sharing a paradigm with popular language, sharing conventions with popular languages and good documentation. I have yet to work a day job in Rust, but I've worked in Java, C++ and Go so I'd be quite confident applying to a Rust position as long as it wasn't specifically security focused... I would be less confident in how quickly I could pickup Prolog - I think my brain works well for the nuances of the language but I'm less certain.
    - fiddlerwoaroof 6y ago
      Yeah, this is why I’ve concentrated on learning different kinds of languages in my free time, rather than learning the latest thing: if I know Python, Ruby is relatively easy to learn but Haskell is more difficult. So, it’s worth my time to learn Haskell rather than Ruby.
- 6y ago

pqb 6y ago

Discussed previously: * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12703751 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12703751 * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15262981 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15262981 PS. Would you mind adding a [2016] in the title? It will show readers they probably need to take a historic context to understand the article correctly.

aussieguy1234 6y ago

This was written 4 years ago. Since then, PHP7 and PHP8 have incorporated many of the benefits of HHVM.

okareaman 6y ago
Thanks for pointing this out. I read this article as "PHP is bad, use Hack instead"

ransom1538 6y ago

Long live PHP. 15 years of PHP dev work. Games, mobile apps, health care, etc. I have been unemployed for 2 days in 15 years. PHP runs %80 of the internet. Talk to anyone at facebook that wears a suit on friday -- they code PHP (and it seems to scale for them). I think I will be 90 years old hacking on PHP.If you really don't like how the arguments are passed just use an IDE. Or get stuck with real problems like a transition from python2 to 3. (wtf)

deleted 6y ago
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sodapopcan 6y ago
"Use an IDE" is never an answer to shitty language design. Shitty language design is shitty language design. That said, I cut my teeth on PHP and still have a fondness for it. It's especially great being able to deploy small little backend-driven pages with rsync or sftp in a pinch. I just discovered other languages and environments I enjoyed working in much better.
- blunte 6y ago
  If there's room for Javascript, there's room for PHP. Both are sloppy, inferior languages, but both can do anything you need. And unfortunately, both have immense momentum from being first in the web game.
  - sodapopcan 6y ago
    Ha, I was going to make a comment along these lines. I didn't mention the languages I enjoy over PHP but I can assure you JavaScript ain't one of them. I don't hate JS but as a server-side language I would pick PHP over it any day.
  - aussieguy1234 6y ago
    It's worth pointing out back end JavaScript didn't really start to take off until the 0.x versions of NodeJS came out

hu3 6y ago

Do they still create new backend code mainly in PHP or have they also adopted other languages for new code?

Superfrag 6y ago

"For instance, 123 == “123foo” evaluates to true (see what it’s doing there?), but 0123 == “0123foo” is false (hmm)." Can anyone explain this to me? I know if a string starts with the number, PHP takes the number part and throws the rest, so "0123foo" should be 0123 for the comparison, so why is that false?

tsm 6y ago
Edit: I was wrong. 0123 is octal, not decimal [Incorrect original post: 0123 evaluates to the integer value 123]
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- mam2 6y ago
  So ?
  - bugfix 6y ago
    0123 (octal) != 123 (int)
- civilized 6y ago
  But the integer part of the string "0123foo" is also 123
- munk-a 6y ago
  Not quite - 0123 is the octal value 123 which happens to be 83 in decimal. Numbers starting with a 0 in PHP are assumed to be in octal but I this isn't the case for strings[1] - to add to confusion "123foo" == 123 => true but "0123foo" = 0123 => false. 1. https://3v4l.org/hAoL2 https://3v4l.org/hAoL2
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

latenightcoding 6y ago

Somewhat unrelated comment, but the fact that PHP got so good and most people are still not willing to give it a second chance goes to show how hard it is for a language to regain market share after people left for greener pastures.

pvg 6y ago
Forum share, maybe, but it's been and remains an extremely popular language.
- draw_down 6y ago
  Yes, it is a bit silly to paint it as some unloved, underrated diamond in the rough. It's hugely popular.
throw_m239339 6y ago
> Somewhat unrelated comment, but the fact that PHP got so good and most people are still not willing to give it a second chance goes to show how hard it is for a language to regain market share after people left for greener pastures. I guess some of the reasons why some devs would not chose PHP (horrid syntax, std lib mess, stupid error reporting system, language inconsistencies, the very existance of php.ini, overreliance on C extensions for speed ...), haven't changed. As companies move to single page applications backed by javascript and REST API, PHP CGI style classic execution model provides no advantage, when it comes to generating or serving web content.
- i_like_to_post 6y ago
  > As companies move to single page applications backed by javascript and REST API, PHP CGI style classic execution model provides no advantage, when it comes to generating or serving web content I lol'd. SPAs are a fad. Apps that rely heavily on REST API and browser rendering rank terribly on Google. Create a SPA and help your customers discover your competitor on the first page of Google.
  - 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

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okareaman 6y ago

I've used a lot of PHP in my life and now feel Go is better suited for my needs. My gut tells me Go libs are written by professionals, while there is a ton of PHP code written by amateurs to contend with. I'll know more once I get further into Go.

namanaggarwal 6y ago
That's an unfortunate comparison. Go came around 10 years back and has started to become mainstream fairly recently. PHP has been around for 25 years. So ofcourse the number of libraries you see in PHP are much more and hence much more "amateur" libraries. The professionals writing go code today are the same professionals who wrote PHP code few years back.

spacemanmatt 6y ago

How seriously am I supposed to take a language that executes after numerous syntax errors that should be fatal compile/runtime errors in every other language? It keeps on trucking no matter what "code" you give it.

deleted 6y ago
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haffla 6y ago

The argument that you don't have to restart the server after editing a file? I mean I've used a couple of web dev environments and I know for a fact that Rails, Django and Express all come with some sort of automatic reloading in development - provided by the framework itself or by a library. Quite sure there is a solution for most environments.

francislavoie 6y ago
You still need to contend with build and startup times with those setups though, even if a rebuild is triggered on file save. With PHP, there's no such thing as build or startup, because it's interpreted.
- pdimitar 6y ago
  An Elixir Phoenix's page live-reload never took more than one second even on a fairly weak i3 laptop for me. And on my desktop Mac it usually takes 0.2s. Not that big a deal at all.

kypro 6y ago

PHP was the first language I learnt and although I don't use it as much today I still think it's a great language for startups. Languages like Java, Node, C#, etc are great but unlike PHP you can't just drag and drop a .php file on a webserver, point your browser at it and go. Basic things required for web development like connecting to a MySQL database are made trivial in PHP. Code is executed synchronously in PHP and as mentioned in this article requests are stateless which makes the logic much easier to follow and debug than say Java where you have state or Node where you have callbacks and promises. PHP also gives you the flexibility to write procedural, OO, or even functional code. This flexibility is off putting to some, but it allows the language to be useful no matter what your skill level or preferences are. Another thing that's easy with PHP is debugging. You don't have to worry about compiling code or accidentally taking down your entire server (most of the time) if you encounter a critical error. If one of your PHP pages runs into an issue you can enable debugging with a line of code, make your fix then hit the refresh to see if it's working. I learnt to code writing PHP when I was 16 years old. Me and my friend had an idea for a startup but neither of knew how to program beyond a little bit of ActionScript. We were good with computers, but if we decided to use Java I'm certain the project would have never have gotten off the ground because of the steep learning curve. PHP allowed us to skill up with the language and enabled us to move fast despite not really knowing what we were doing. Writing PHP in the ICT room at lunch with my friend was some of the best memories I have of school... I doubt I'd be doing this today if it wasn't for how much fun I had learning and building stuff with PHP when I was younger.

pdimitar 6y ago
And this has led to countless SQL injection vulnerabilities some of which WordPress in particular is still fighting with (in community extensions, not in their core) to this day. "Trivial to connect to a database" isn't a selling point. It is a liability when put in the hands of inexperienced programmers.
- icedchai 6y ago
  People really need to be taught about prepared statements. I once worked on a code base (mainly PHP and Java, with a bit of Perl here and there) where someone had built their own SQL parameter escaping. It still didn't work some percentage of the time.

hashamali 6y ago

I hated PHP for the longest time (worked extensively with PHP5 and various homebrewed frameworks in the early 2010s), but I gotta admit, it's come a long way with PHP7+ and great frameworks like Laravel.

blunte 6y ago

It's like an ugly C. It's a perfectly reasonable choice for web development, just like a Chevy Caprice is a perfectly reasonable car for a taxi service (as evidenced by the thousands of them in NYC, still plodding along). You'd still rather ride in a Mercedes E430 taxi (long time European standard)... unless you had never experienced both, in which case you probably think the Caprice is just fine. And if you knew Ruby, Python, Java, C#, Kotlin, or better yet F#, Clojure, or Elixir, you'd most likely enjoy using one of them rather than PHP. There are three reasons to use PHP. 1. it works 2. it is well integrated with web servers 3. you can find some of the cheapest contract labor who know how to program in it (compared to other, less common/popular languages) Bonus 4. you need to extend Wordpress by writing a plugin or theme (and Wordpress is the Caprice of CMSs...)

Ayesh 6y ago
Eh, both take you from point A to point B if that's what you are looking for.
holoduke 6y ago
What a load of bolax. A language is nothing more than a hammer or a saw. PHP is just like the other languages you mentioned very mature. It's up to the developer to make good furniture. Entirely different skillset and not linked to a language. I have seen low level drivers for hardware written in PHP operating for over 15 years. I have seen JavaScript used in a medical device. You sound like that creepy negative 'you don't wanna hire' developer complaining about everything you have never worked with. A good developer generally appreciates most technologies.
- miskin 6y ago
  Nobody says it is not possible to use PHP in all the use cases you mentioned. But is PHP the best tool for those, or is it just the one closest to the hand? You definitely can do surgery with a kitchen knife instead of a scalpel, but often the long-term result would be better if a more appropriate tool was used.
- pdimitar 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

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huskyr 6y ago

As a language i enjoy Python and Javascript a lot more than PHP. Especially the major PHP frameworks and libraries tend to be too complicated and Java-esque for my liking. There are some nice simpler alternatives, but they tend to get abandoned in favour of the larger projects. But when looking at PHP in terms of deployment and making traditional SQL-based websites/API's it's unmatched. Just reading up on deploying Python code using uWSGI, or connecting to a SQL database gives me headaches, and the confusing package management and versioning system makes things even worse. Running Node feels unpredictable, with the server crashing because you forgot to catch an exception somewhere or having some weird state. With PHP it's just: write the code, copy the files to a server and stuff (usually) just works. That's why i keep using it. Not that pretty, but it always gets the job done.

rangoon626 6y ago

I'm admitting it. I LIKE PHP. It's fun and incredibly easy to work with. I have inherited messy code bases. I have inherited nice code bases. But getting it up and running is _never_ a problem that I have had.

postalrat 6y ago

Anyone here want to share their opinion's on Magento? The small time I spent with it left me with a feeling it was the most over engineering piece of software I've ever worked with. It's made to build a market for modules to buy and isn't made to run an e-commerce site. All written in PHP.

lucideer 6y ago
Yes, Magento is a really poorly written piece of software. I'm not sure what relevance that has to this article. I could name a lot more software written in PHP that is poor. Does that tell us anything about PHP itself? I don't think so.
TylerE 6y ago
Dumpster fire filled with toxic waste.

tyingq 6y ago

"First, state. Every web request starts from a completely blank slate. Its namespace and globals are uninitialized, except for the standard globals, functions and classes that provide primitive functionality and life support." It was somewhat amusing to see some of the same people that made fun of this later espouse the virtues of AWS Lambda.

tomxor 6y ago

I've ended up treating PHP like shell scripting, with that mind set it becomes much more bearable for writing new code in... much like bash, you don't dare write anything too complex, yet can appreciate it for being a well positioned language for the specific type of task (and I say that having written lots of quite long but well composed bash scripts). Unfortunately PHP is more capable as a language than shells while still having all those poorly thought out parts that will make you hate it if you try to exploit it to it's full capability. Of course this mind set doesn't help much for existing massive code bases where all of the application logic is written in PHP.

fmakunbound 6y ago

Why do engineering blogs have to share this stuff? Is it an attempt to hire?

oblio 6y ago
Yes.

hardwaregeek 6y ago

I don't doubt that PHP has some benefits. That said, the reasons cited in the blog post don't seem that unique to PHP. > By starting each request from a known state, we get a kind of organic fault isolation; if request t encounters a software defect and fails, this bug does not directly interfere with the execution of subsequent request t+1. Is there a modern web framework where a failed request can crash the entire server? I'm not sure this is a problem in other languages. > Second, concurrency. An individual web request runs in a single PHP thread. Huh, so maybe this could be an interesting concurrency model. But it's not that different than say, Node's promises. The only difference is Node's promises aren't tied to literally making a web request. The restarting the server problem also is not an issue. Almost every mature web stack I've seen has hot reloading. Yes, even in 2016. There are certainly reasons to use PHP, but the trap I see a lot of PHP proponents fall into is assuming that the benefits they see are somehow unique to PHP. Laravel fans love to cite packages, migrations, the ORM, etc. as reasons to use PHP. I certainly think all of these are great features but they're not unique to PHP.

sophiebits 6y ago
Most languages have global or module-level state that can leak between requests. Hack deliberately avoids this.
pdimitar 6y ago
> Second, concurrency. An individual web request runs in a single PHP thread. Erlang/Elixir (or any BEAM language) runs every request in a separate green thread which scales much better than OS threads since most of those green threads can be generously multiplexed on just 4-8 CPU cores due to 90% of the time being spent waiting on a database. One OS thread per request is such a... strange thing to brag about in 2020.

bastawhiz 6y ago

Besides the common gripes, the thing that ruined PHP for me was learning that empty("0") is true. I learned this the hard way when this edge case caused an incident and I spent half a week rewriting code to be...not that. PHP has some great properties, and if you're tolerant of its sharp edges, great. But up until recently (and perhaps still?) it's got many of its safeties turned off by default. When I left PHP, (insecure) mysql bindings still came included pretty much universally, but often not PDO. They have every amazing helper function under the sun at your fingertips (urlencode and htmlentities!) but also some tremendously dangerous ones (backticks! variable variables!). What's most striking to me is that Slack is 100% off of PHP now (onto Hack). There's something telling when neither the syntax nor the runtime nor the standard library are sufficient for the biggest users of a language. With recent versions of the core runtime finally getting fast, I wonder if they'll rip off the bandaid and break backwards compatibility to dull some of the larger sharp edges.

ThePadawan 6y ago

I get it. Old PHP was a joke, so people (including me) are biased against it. I would personally love to get beyond that bias. However, every single time I install any piece of software written in PHP, it's simply a nightmare (e.g. Matomo, rss-bridge). Unhelpful error messages, unexplained or undocumented features, all held together with metaphorical duct tape. I always have to dive into the source code to figure out things that a README or tutorial should be able to help me with. I can't recall ever doing that with tools written in any other language. Is it simply that PHP programmers care so little about their products?

pdimitar 6y ago
It's likely a combination of the sunk cost fallacy and loving the syntax and maybe the enablement for quick iteration (and all 3 aren't specific to PHP at all). I have the same opinion about Python btw. Just today I had to install a complex toolkit for flashing ROMs and you can guess that thing absolutely didn't work on the first try and I learned much more about "pip" than I ever wanted to.