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> This may sound a little foreign to all you folks coming from a non-Unix background, but PHP doesn't cost anything. You can use it for commercial and/or non-co

> This may sound a little foreign to all you folks coming from a non-Unix background, but PHP doesn't cost anything. You can use it for commercial and/or non-commercial use all you want. You can give it to your friends, print it out and hang it on your wall or eat it for lunch. Welcome to the world of Open Source software! Smile, be happy, the world is good. For the full legalese, see the official license. What a nice, whimsical message.

verelo 5y ago
It’s funny. For all the hate php gets these days, it was a pretty big part of the web getting to where it’s at today. I was super pleased when php 7 came out, this project isn’t going anywhere just yet.
- darig 5y ago
  It was??? It always will be.
- osrec 5y ago
  PHP deliberately has a low barrier to entry, and as a result there is a lot of poor quality code out there, written by beginners. People like to use this fact to suggest that the entire language is bad, which it most certainly is not. I've seen lots great, well structured and performant PHP code - the quality depends on the programmer, as it does for any other language.
  - tinus_hn 5y ago
    Back in the days it had terrible defaults that made it very difficult not to write insecure code and it was lacking so much it was really hard to write good, structured code.
    - osrec 5y ago
      Back in the day perhaps, but not today. PHP has come a really long way.
  - edoceo 5y ago
    It's not the wand, it's the wizard.
    - zdragnar 5y ago
      If you recall the cartoon of programming languages as weapons, PHP was a sword without a hilt, which was quite fitting. Despite the low barrier to entry, there were "features" that were / are distinctly dangerous, and should not have been exposed to beginners (the comments section in the official documentation os a perfect example of this).
  - 542458 5y ago
    As somebody who loves PHP, some PHP mockery is deserved. The standard function naming and argument ordering is inconsistent and stupid. It throws errors written in Hebrew. There were fundamental decisions made that harmed web security for years. Unicode wasn’t in PHP for a long time. Getting decent performance and/or scaling was/is a major challenge. The comparison tables are questionable at best. Etc. The language is bad, but... you can still write great code in a bad language. And you don’t need a good language, or even good code to build a great website. Facebook has made more money with questionable PHP code than any site built with elegant pearl webscripts that I know of. Wikipedia is PHP. So was Digg (RIP). Your users don’t give a darn how good your language or code is so long as it usually works. So tl;dr, PHP sucks, but I love PHP.
    - nkozyra 5y ago
      > Getting decent performance and/or scaling was/is a major challenge. The rest of what you say I agree with, but the language was never a performance bottleneck over other scripting languages. It certainly scaled better than ruby or perl or python apps with the same logic. The fact that each request was fundamentally stateless and ephemeral helped this if you needed to distribute your app and made development faster as well. Back to V5 it outperformed its competition in benchmarks
      - cutler 5y ago
        Paradoxically, PHP's stateless architecture is also what makes it dog-slow with large frameworks such as Laravel. Now you have to load the whole framework with every request.
        aetherspawn 5y ago
        Sort of, but you don't need to parse it. Anyone using PHP in serious prod uses something like memcached/opcache to skip parsing, which speeds up TTFB typically by about 200x.
        fogihujy 5y ago
simlevesque 5y ago
I never say this, but this resonates with me.
oscargrouch 5y ago
I guess you are lacking some context. Back in the day, you could: * Be bold enough to use Linux or FreeBSD and use CGI or Perl as the only free version * Use ASP but pay license fees for Windows NT, ISS and SQL Server * Use ColdFusion which was kind of trendy but was pretty expensive. When PHP arrived it was so refreshing. I used to make my stuff in Apache+PHP, MySQL and Linux and it was magical what you could do with very few lines of code. The worse part was to manually get the sources of the dependencies one by one, hit ./configure and make, so you can compile a php module for Apache In those days Microsoft was pretty strong, everything used to be closed source and payed and that's why for people who understand what it was back then, this does not sound like the splashy announcements of today. That's why every time you see Linus, Stallman or any person that was active in the open source movement, you should pay a beer to them. The world of technology owe a lot to them, specially the underdogs.
- carabiner 5y ago
  I remember my employer was paying Indian consultants a fortune to build a web app in ASP that didn't work. I told them I could do it in PHP in a week, but they didn't trust some "free program."
  - cutler 5y ago
    Ha, I can relate to that. Met a potential in the mid-2000s who lived down the road running a travel agency which was falling over due to bugs in its web app. He knew nothing about technology other than that his app needed to parse "an XML" to work properly. "Can you get the XMLs working?". As soon as he showed me a couple of files I realised it was a Classic ASP site written in VBScript running on some overpriced Windows host so I offered to rewrite it in PHP. No chance - in his mind "the XMLs" were glued to the original code.
    - oscargrouch 5y ago
      I didn't even remember this, OMG.. VBScript that used to ship with IE and could be used instead of Javascript. We are so lucky that Bill Gates missed how important internet would turn out to be..

verelo 5y ago

It’s funny. For all the hate php gets these days, it was a pretty big part of the web getting to where it’s at today. I was super pleased when php 7 came out, this project isn’t going anywhere just yet.

darig 5y ago
It was??? It always will be.
osrec 5y ago
PHP deliberately has a low barrier to entry, and as a result there is a lot of poor quality code out there, written by beginners. People like to use this fact to suggest that the entire language is bad, which it most certainly is not. I've seen lots great, well structured and performant PHP code - the quality depends on the programmer, as it does for any other language.
- tinus_hn 5y ago
  Back in the days it had terrible defaults that made it very difficult not to write insecure code and it was lacking so much it was really hard to write good, structured code.
  - osrec 5y ago
    Back in the day perhaps, but not today. PHP has come a really long way.
- edoceo 5y ago
  It's not the wand, it's the wizard.
  - zdragnar 5y ago
    If you recall the cartoon of programming languages as weapons, PHP was a sword without a hilt, which was quite fitting. Despite the low barrier to entry, there were "features" that were / are distinctly dangerous, and should not have been exposed to beginners (the comments section in the official documentation os a perfect example of this).
- 542458 5y ago
  As somebody who loves PHP, some PHP mockery is deserved. The standard function naming and argument ordering is inconsistent and stupid. It throws errors written in Hebrew. There were fundamental decisions made that harmed web security for years. Unicode wasn’t in PHP for a long time. Getting decent performance and/or scaling was/is a major challenge. The comparison tables are questionable at best. Etc. The language is bad, but... you can still write great code in a bad language. And you don’t need a good language, or even good code to build a great website. Facebook has made more money with questionable PHP code than any site built with elegant pearl webscripts that I know of. Wikipedia is PHP. So was Digg (RIP). Your users don’t give a darn how good your language or code is so long as it usually works. So tl;dr, PHP sucks, but I love PHP.
  - nkozyra 5y ago
    > Getting decent performance and/or scaling was/is a major challenge. The rest of what you say I agree with, but the language was never a performance bottleneck over other scripting languages. It certainly scaled better than ruby or perl or python apps with the same logic. The fact that each request was fundamentally stateless and ephemeral helped this if you needed to distribute your app and made development faster as well. Back to V5 it outperformed its competition in benchmarks
    - cutler 5y ago
      Paradoxically, PHP's stateless architecture is also what makes it dog-slow with large frameworks such as Laravel. Now you have to load the whole framework with every request.
      - aetherspawn 5y ago
        Sort of, but you don't need to parse it. Anyone using PHP in serious prod uses something like memcached/opcache to skip parsing, which speeds up TTFB typically by about 200x.
        fogihujy 5y ago

simlevesque 5y ago

I never say this, but this resonates with me.

oscargrouch 5y ago

I guess you are lacking some context. Back in the day, you could: * Be bold enough to use Linux or FreeBSD and use CGI or Perl as the only free version * Use ASP but pay license fees for Windows NT, ISS and SQL Server * Use ColdFusion which was kind of trendy but was pretty expensive. When PHP arrived it was so refreshing. I used to make my stuff in Apache+PHP, MySQL and Linux and it was magical what you could do with very few lines of code. The worse part was to manually get the sources of the dependencies one by one, hit ./configure and make, so you can compile a php module for Apache In those days Microsoft was pretty strong, everything used to be closed source and payed and that's why for people who understand what it was back then, this does not sound like the splashy announcements of today. That's why every time you see Linus, Stallman or any person that was active in the open source movement, you should pay a beer to them. The world of technology owe a lot to them, specially the underdogs.

carabiner 5y ago
I remember my employer was paying Indian consultants a fortune to build a web app in ASP that didn't work. I told them I could do it in PHP in a week, but they didn't trust some "free program."
- cutler 5y ago
  Ha, I can relate to that. Met a potential in the mid-2000s who lived down the road running a travel agency which was falling over due to bugs in its web app. He knew nothing about technology other than that his app needed to parse "an XML" to work properly. "Can you get the XMLs working?". As soon as he showed me a couple of files I realised it was a Classic ASP site written in VBScript running on some overpriced Windows host so I offered to rewrite it in PHP. No chance - in his mind "the XMLs" were glued to the original code.
  - oscargrouch 5y ago
    I didn't even remember this, OMG.. VBScript that used to ship with IE and could be used instead of Javascript. We are so lucky that Bill Gates missed how important internet would turn out to be..