10 ms·

It basically did for simple web programming what visual basic did for Windows desktop toys: allowed you to throw some UI together (drag & drop components in the

It basically did for simple web programming what visual basic did for Windows desktop toys: allowed you to throw some UI together (drag & drop components in the VB case, any old HTML with links or forms for PHP) then start stringing bit of code in haphazardly to link it together. No need to learn a more complex compiler or other build tools, worry about configuring CGI or other web server tech (unless running PHP yourself), ... Great for prototyping, or just to encourage new programmers (as they can see results almost immediately). Though PHP was essentially thrown together initially so had a massively inconsistent standard library, had some insanely unsafe defaults for a few major versions, and other issues that it is very valid to complain about. It was also closely associated with mysql which at the time played very fast and loose with data integrity (2008-02-31? - perfectly valid date to store! Foreign keys? Let the business layer worry about rules like that! Transactional integrity? Again, sort that elsewhere!) in the name of ease & claims of performance - the two shared bits of each others reputation.

sam_lowry_ 5y ago
>Foreign keys? Let the business layer worry about rules like that! Rails made this approach viable at the time.
- showerst 5y ago
  > Rails made this approach viable at the time. Rails didn't get big until 2006, eight years later than this time period =).
- waheoo 5y ago
  I still don't like using foreign keys. They just make things harder to work with for very little gain. Wait for the crows.
  - withinboredom 5y ago
    Because of sharding, we can’t use them at work. I haven’t thought of foreign keys in years…
  - iforgotpassword 5y ago
    Care to elaborate? It felt like the best thing ever when switching to InnoDB.
    - waheoo 5y ago
      Elaborate on what? They're an opinion that data integrity is dependent on foreign keys containing pointers at existing data. In systems where actual row deletion doesn't actually happen its kind of a pointless kick to the nuts. Now I have to create things in a specific order for no reason other than foreign keys say so. When you're using uuids for reference keys you're not beholden to what order you insert you can have these things span databases or have separate systems do the insert. For a naive example, maybe I have an order A, and two orderliness A1, A2, why do I have to create A before I create A1 and A2. Why can't I loadbalance those three operations to different systems that insert at different timings. Eventually they all line up, and my system is resilient enough to be ok with that. With foreign keys you're just beholden to some feigned idea about data integrity but it's mostly bullshit. The other common situation is when you need to backup tables and restore them elsewhere in whatever order you want, foreign keys just get in the way.
      - dspillett 5y ago
        I see your point for decentralised systems, "eventual consistency" is an unavoidable evil in many cases there at least if you don't want a performance hole caused by distributed transaction requirements. But otherwise, I disagree strongly. > feigned idea about data integrity but it's mostly bullshit I call BS on your call of BS. > The other common situation is... If that is common in your production environments, then I never want to work with your production environments. > foreign keys just get in the way. Disable them, do the jiggery-pokery, and then replace them. Again, but not in production systems. If FKs are an inconvenience day-to-day then you have something seriously wrong somewhere. They are protection against bugs and other unpredictables causing corruption of data that other code later relied upon being correct.
Cullinet 5y ago
If someone proposed a conspiracy theory for why the rapid application development tools of the middle 1990s became extinct in reaction to plotting by corporate interests in perpetuating the value of consulting services and the high salaries of CS graduates, I would buy the hardback edition immediately. VB, Visual Age, Delhi, Genera on Tru64, RDB and RMS and DEC TM giving you schema less (noSQL to taste) wan -clustered ACID time series transactions programmable in BASIC, COBOL, FORTRAN C and DCL on any two of three architectures (VAX, Alpha and Itanium - currently available for running unchanged on x64 VMs) and the OS/2 subsystem bundled (plus the first free beer transaction manager NT provided working with CICS, a feature that I truly believed was capable of giving Microsoft the corporate game by itself) which provided a VBA front end to legacy systems alongside local OS/2 tools running atop the kernel thru W2K.. the day I in place upgraded my overloaded think pad in a hotel room in Köln, and I realised when Slashdot loaded in Netscape 7 that Microsoft couldn't get any respect for anything even as impressive as W2K truly was – Edit : large part cut for brevity I really should have composed what I just said, much better than I have done -/so I have cut the bulk from my first too enthusiastic version / I mean to describe how much you can get running with just BASIC language skills and, at least atop of VMS, and buying the right licenses, that answer is "anything almost anything that you can imagine from a power station to a stock exchange ". Stack Overflow and POF running tiny amounts of hardware under Windows Server aren't rare cases of the potential for leveraging commercial tools. If VMS is more palatable than Windows (and certainly I will not compare the two for TCO) and the Intel architecture pricing for RDB holds up I totally believe that SAAS on VMS can be a viable alternative platform capable of making a minor industry of positions for the experienced programming talent for whom ageing has become a invisible barrier to retirement or even employment and if that's possible, then there's right there the environment wherein a generation of younger engineering minds can both take respite from rat race technology change and learn from direct experience to write the reliable systems for replacing what I fear is a current batch of the most fragile infrastructure building in modern history. edit : incidentally, I think the entry level salaries the FAANG group is paying is a coincidentally perfect match for the price for a consultant from IBM or whoever and I don't think this is a accident by any means, only it didn't seem to work out how the old big firms would have wanted things.. edit, again, mea - my conspiracy being IBM et.al killed the good development tools in hope for being able to bill for consultation only they didn't count on the ability for big tech competitors to dismantle entirely other industries to feed paying salaries at the level of consulting rates and monopolizing the talent in that way.
marianov 5y ago
It also launched many information security careers :)
chasil 5y ago
Every Oracle Pro*C application that I could find, I have rewritten as #/bin/php -f. Good riddance to bad rubbish. I also just trashed an extremely repugnant PDF template processor, first with fpdf.org, then with tcpdf.org - far from perfect, but improvement a thousand fold. Exaggerate, you say? Can I interest you in COBOL on my VAX (I'm not kidding)? Or perhaps (is this is too new-fangled) assembler under EXEC-8 on OS2200? I do like the PHP solutions very much, and yes, I work in a museum.
tannhaeuser 5y ago
Injecting strings from user input into generated HTML? Sure, to hell with checking if it contains script tags and/or onclick= attributes, or perform any kind of escaping alltogether for that matter.
- bruce343434 5y ago
  this is the programmer's fault and responsibility
  - tannhaeuser 5y ago
    Not for a programming language calling itself portable Hypertext processor, no. In fact, it's bordering on criminally negligent.
    - GuB-42 5y ago
      PHP have htmlspecialchars() and parameterized queries since 2000.
      - tannhaeuser 5y ago
        1. XSS != SQL injection 2. Adding a bunch of bogus escaping routines isn't an excuse for an incredibly poorly conceived off language, or continuing using it in production in the presence of superior solutions. In fact, I'd go so far as to say if you're selling PHP solutions/consulting in this century for apps managing ecommerce or any other kind of PII, you should demand your customer signs a liability waiver. If you can even disclaim liability for gross negligence in your jurisdiction, that is.
        bruce343434 5y ago
        What should php do then? What's the alternative language that handles this better?
        5y ago

sam_lowry_ 5y ago

>Foreign keys? Let the business layer worry about rules like that! Rails made this approach viable at the time.

showerst 5y ago
> Rails made this approach viable at the time. Rails didn't get big until 2006, eight years later than this time period =).
waheoo 5y ago
I still don't like using foreign keys. They just make things harder to work with for very little gain. Wait for the crows.
- withinboredom 5y ago
  Because of sharding, we can’t use them at work. I haven’t thought of foreign keys in years…
- iforgotpassword 5y ago
  Care to elaborate? It felt like the best thing ever when switching to InnoDB.
  - waheoo 5y ago
    Elaborate on what? They're an opinion that data integrity is dependent on foreign keys containing pointers at existing data. In systems where actual row deletion doesn't actually happen its kind of a pointless kick to the nuts. Now I have to create things in a specific order for no reason other than foreign keys say so. When you're using uuids for reference keys you're not beholden to what order you insert you can have these things span databases or have separate systems do the insert. For a naive example, maybe I have an order A, and two orderliness A1, A2, why do I have to create A before I create A1 and A2. Why can't I loadbalance those three operations to different systems that insert at different timings. Eventually they all line up, and my system is resilient enough to be ok with that. With foreign keys you're just beholden to some feigned idea about data integrity but it's mostly bullshit. The other common situation is when you need to backup tables and restore them elsewhere in whatever order you want, foreign keys just get in the way.
    - dspillett 5y ago
      I see your point for decentralised systems, "eventual consistency" is an unavoidable evil in many cases there at least if you don't want a performance hole caused by distributed transaction requirements. But otherwise, I disagree strongly. > feigned idea about data integrity but it's mostly bullshit I call BS on your call of BS. > The other common situation is... If that is common in your production environments, then I never want to work with your production environments. > foreign keys just get in the way. Disable them, do the jiggery-pokery, and then replace them. Again, but not in production systems. If FKs are an inconvenience day-to-day then you have something seriously wrong somewhere. They are protection against bugs and other unpredictables causing corruption of data that other code later relied upon being correct.

Cullinet 5y ago

If someone proposed a conspiracy theory for why the rapid application development tools of the middle 1990s became extinct in reaction to plotting by corporate interests in perpetuating the value of consulting services and the high salaries of CS graduates, I would buy the hardback edition immediately. VB, Visual Age, Delhi, Genera on Tru64, RDB and RMS and DEC TM giving you schema less (noSQL to taste) wan -clustered ACID time series transactions programmable in BASIC, COBOL, FORTRAN C and DCL on any two of three architectures (VAX, Alpha and Itanium - currently available for running unchanged on x64 VMs) and the OS/2 subsystem bundled (plus the first free beer transaction manager NT provided working with CICS, a feature that I truly believed was capable of giving Microsoft the corporate game by itself) which provided a VBA front end to legacy systems alongside local OS/2 tools running atop the kernel thru W2K.. the day I in place upgraded my overloaded think pad in a hotel room in Köln, and I realised when Slashdot loaded in Netscape 7 that Microsoft couldn't get any respect for anything even as impressive as W2K truly was – Edit : large part cut for brevity I really should have composed what I just said, much better than I have done -/so I have cut the bulk from my first too enthusiastic version / I mean to describe how much you can get running with just BASIC language skills and, at least atop of VMS, and buying the right licenses, that answer is "anything almost anything that you can imagine from a power station to a stock exchange ". Stack Overflow and POF running tiny amounts of hardware under Windows Server aren't rare cases of the potential for leveraging commercial tools. If VMS is more palatable than Windows (and certainly I will not compare the two for TCO) and the Intel architecture pricing for RDB holds up I totally believe that SAAS on VMS can be a viable alternative platform capable of making a minor industry of positions for the experienced programming talent for whom ageing has become a invisible barrier to retirement or even employment and if that's possible, then there's right there the environment wherein a generation of younger engineering minds can both take respite from rat race technology change and learn from direct experience to write the reliable systems for replacing what I fear is a current batch of the most fragile infrastructure building in modern history. edit : incidentally, I think the entry level salaries the FAANG group is paying is a coincidentally perfect match for the price for a consultant from IBM or whoever and I don't think this is a accident by any means, only it didn't seem to work out how the old big firms would have wanted things.. edit, again, mea - my conspiracy being IBM et.al killed the good development tools in hope for being able to bill for consultation only they didn't count on the ability for big tech competitors to dismantle entirely other industries to feed paying salaries at the level of consulting rates and monopolizing the talent in that way.

marianov 5y ago

It also launched many information security careers :)

chasil 5y ago

Every Oracle Pro*C application that I could find, I have rewritten as #/bin/php -f. Good riddance to bad rubbish. I also just trashed an extremely repugnant PDF template processor, first with fpdf.org, then with tcpdf.org - far from perfect, but improvement a thousand fold. Exaggerate, you say? Can I interest you in COBOL on my VAX (I'm not kidding)? Or perhaps (is this is too new-fangled) assembler under EXEC-8 on OS2200? I do like the PHP solutions very much, and yes, I work in a museum.

tannhaeuser 5y ago

Injecting strings from user input into generated HTML? Sure, to hell with checking if it contains script tags and/or onclick= attributes, or perform any kind of escaping alltogether for that matter.

bruce343434 5y ago
this is the programmer's fault and responsibility
- tannhaeuser 5y ago
  Not for a programming language calling itself portable Hypertext processor, no. In fact, it's bordering on criminally negligent.
  - GuB-42 5y ago
    PHP have htmlspecialchars() and parameterized queries since 2000.
    - tannhaeuser 5y ago
      1. XSS != SQL injection 2. Adding a bunch of bogus escaping routines isn't an excuse for an incredibly poorly conceived off language, or continuing using it in production in the presence of superior solutions. In fact, I'd go so far as to say if you're selling PHP solutions/consulting in this century for apps managing ecommerce or any other kind of PII, you should demand your customer signs a liability waiver. If you can even disclaim liability for gross negligence in your jurisdiction, that is.
      - bruce343434 5y ago
        What should php do then? What's the alternative language that handles this better?
        5y ago