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I don't care about the negativity around PHP (often from JS developers, which has its own quirks and pitfalls). PHP is a language that gets stuff done, and if

by osrec 5y ago

I don't care about the negativity around PHP (often from JS developers, which has its own quirks and pitfalls). PHP is a language that gets stuff done, and if you're a good PHP developer, you can put together some beautiful code with a language that many people consider ugly. I'm sticking with PHP for the foreseeable future. As far as my use cases are concerned, it's a brilliant tool for the job.

brightball 5y ago
The first half of my career was heavy PHP and it helped make me into who I am today. I’ve barely touched it in the last 10 years, but the people who give PHP a hard time are largely misguided. Last time I wrote about this it got some circulation so I’ll repost here. https://www.brightball.com/articles/no-such-thing-as-real-programming https://www.brightball.com/articles/no-such-thing-as-real-pr...
- throwaway894345 5y ago
  PHP was my first language, but back in 2008 it was a real mess. Not only was performance based, but there wasn’t a package system if I recall correctly and everything was just in the standard library prelude namespace. The names were also really poorly standardized and optimized for keystrokes rather than readability. Security issues were abundant across the ecosystem, and everything ran slowly. Most importantly though, everything in the ecosystem intended for it to be used as a templating language like Jinja—little bits of PHP sprinkled amid a sea of HTML tags. I remember learning Java and Python and feeling so blown away because they weren’t doing this strange inside-out template programming—they would define webserver handlers and generally decouple the application logic from the HTML. I’m staunchly of the opinion that 2008 PHP was a hot mess, but also that not long before it was the easiest path toward a functional web application. I’m sure a lot has changed in the intervening years, especially considering Facebook’s heavy investment, but nevertheless I understand why it was so heavily criticized by people who used it back then.
  - TrispusAttucks 5y ago
    That was indeed a rough time for the language. A big part of that, I think, was the setbacks around the [1] PHP 6 debacle. [1] https://ma.ttias.be/php6-missing-version-number/ https://ma.ttias.be/php6-missing-version-number/

by osrec 5y ago

brightball 5y ago

The first half of my career was heavy PHP and it helped make me into who I am today. I’ve barely touched it in the last 10 years, but the people who give PHP a hard time are largely misguided. Last time I wrote about this it got some circulation so I’ll repost here. https://www.brightball.com/articles/no-such-thing-as-real-programming https://www.brightball.com/articles/no-such-thing-as-real-pr...

throwaway894345 5y ago
PHP was my first language, but back in 2008 it was a real mess. Not only was performance based, but there wasn’t a package system if I recall correctly and everything was just in the standard library prelude namespace. The names were also really poorly standardized and optimized for keystrokes rather than readability. Security issues were abundant across the ecosystem, and everything ran slowly. Most importantly though, everything in the ecosystem intended for it to be used as a templating language like Jinja—little bits of PHP sprinkled amid a sea of HTML tags. I remember learning Java and Python and feeling so blown away because they weren’t doing this strange inside-out template programming—they would define webserver handlers and generally decouple the application logic from the HTML. I’m staunchly of the opinion that 2008 PHP was a hot mess, but also that not long before it was the easiest path toward a functional web application. I’m sure a lot has changed in the intervening years, especially considering Facebook’s heavy investment, but nevertheless I understand why it was so heavily criticized by people who used it back then.
- TrispusAttucks 5y ago
  That was indeed a rough time for the language. A big part of that, I think, was the setbacks around the [1] PHP 6 debacle. [1] https://ma.ttias.be/php6-missing-version-number/ https://ma.ttias.be/php6-missing-version-number/