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I learned to use php when I was like 14. I’m 27 now and still derive such joy when making my own little projects that will never see the light of day. I try to

by vdo 5y ago

I learned to use php when I was like 14. I’m 27 now and still derive such joy when making my own little projects that will never see the light of day. I try to be humble as far as just being a php trash coder, but I don’t feel too ashamed honestly, as it is the most mainstream thing really. I will always be grateful to php for being accessible and yeah, I guess easy. I don’t know why php is the only one I really stuck with exactly, but it is weirdly dear to me. Nearly half my life I’ve never gone too far past being a lowly php coder, and not a great one at that, but I still like what I can make at the end of the day. It’s a side creative thing for me. Laravel was a revelation for me over the last few years, it just makes some things make sense that never did for me as a self-taught hobbyist.

fvavsc 5y ago
PHP was my first love. It still is. Professionally I have moved on to other languages. But whenever I have an urge to create something for personal use, PHP is always the most productive way to get it done. With Laravel, I can even make it look polished and put it on the web. PHP is such a joy that I am really thinking about switching back to it for my day job.
hparadiz 5y ago
I started at 16 and I'm 34. Went from working on gaming websites to running giant ERP backends for mobile apps, web apps, and api users in high throughput environments. All I need to get to work is VSCode and some linux VM or container. PHP has an obnoxious amount of depth. You can become an expert on just ORMs or just SSO or just Collections or just routing and still be learning something new everyday. I am actually "self tought". Whatever that means.
- irrational 5y ago
  > I am actually "self tought". Whatever that means. What does that mean? I know what taught means, but tought? No idea.
  - I_complete_me 5y ago
    A charitable interpretation would be that he meant "self-taught". It's not that difficult.
jabbany 5y ago
I started doing my first web development with PHP (4 & later 5) around the same time! Actually ended up learning a lot about how the entire LAMP stack worked + a lot of tricks and theory behind how to make things secure (PHP had very few safeguards back then). I'm still reaping the benefits of a lot of this knowledge to this day. I have moved on to other languages like JS and Python since ~2012. Looking at the article, I feel like modern PHP is almost a completely different beast compared to when I used it back then >_<
kodemager 5y ago
In a world where everything is fast becoming a JavaScript front end with “some” backend and with the improvements PHP has seen in recent years I don’t see why you’d consider yourself a “lowly” php developer. I’m mainly a C# guy myself as far as the backend goes, but I don’t view PHP as being bad in 2022. I think people who do are stuck in the past to be perfectly honest. It’s sort of like disliking JavaScript because it really sucked the soul out of you before typescript eventually made it nice to work with. But being mad at any programming language is sort of silly isn’t it? If it works it works.
- y4mi 5y ago
  > why you’d consider yourself a “lowly” php developer. PHP has always been considered as a somehow bad language in all corporations I've worked at to date. The same applies to other script languages such as python, ruby or nodejs - but PHP was the most undervalued of them all. It's kinda strange because the language is really performant and relatively easy to use. Maybe that's exactly why the big brain architects don't like it. They do tend to love things correlated with pointless complexity after all
  - ragnese 5y ago
    Let me preface this by saying that I pass zero judgment to any people who use PHP by choice or otherwise, and that I don't assume I'm "better" or smarter than anyone else for their programming tool choice. But, if you genuinely want to know why some of us hate on PHP, I can tell you the reasons that I would never choose PHP for a production backend (now, I do think PHP is a fantastic scripting/sysadmin language- better than Python for sure, but I don't know Perl well enough to judge against that). PHP is single-threaded. I feel like that's a pretty decent reason all by itself to not want to use it in an enterprise environment. PHP is not really async, either. Yes, there are are run-loop libraries, and some libraries even claim to be async all by themselves, but these solutions are awkward and cumbersome and easy to use incorrectly. PHP's array data type is ridiculously bad. In every conceivable way. If you want to use it as a contiguous, linear, collection, then it's slow and bug-prone (e.g., using array_filter, but forgetting to wrap it in array_values). If you want to use it as a dictionary, then it will sneakily convert your keys into numbers which doesn't matter until it does (like when trying to operate over filenames in a directory and someone named a file "1". Then you try to do some operation that expects a string and your code explodes several hours into its operation... Ask me how I know). PHP's iterators and other, more professional-grade, data structures are not as "first class" as plain-old array, so nobody uses them. IIRC (it's been a while), you theoretically need to enable them in your php.ini and/or install them at the OS level, which kind of kills the whole "PHP is so easy to deploy! Just FTP a file and you're done!"-thing. I prefer static typing to dynamic typing. PHP's static typing is weak (as in not strict enough) and not expressive enough for me (no generics, no sum types, no extending classes/types). PHP does not allow for custom equality definitions. Also, since everything is references, I believe you can blow the stack if you try to check that two objects are equal that reference each other. The architecture of every HTTP request getting a fresh instance of PHP is actually pretty nice. And a ton of work has been put into the language/runtime to make sure it's stupid-fast at ramping up and parsing the request data. HOWEVER, as soon as you slap one of these popular frameworks (Laravel, Symfony, etc) on top, you've basically ruined it and made it slow, with all of the extra framework initialization junk. I remember seeing engineering effort go into "compiling" Symfony code to make it load quickly (I don't remember how Laravel works). But think about that for a second- we're going to choose an interpreted language that can't cache any state beyond a single request, and we're going to add a COMPILE STEP to it?! So that we can work against the init-process-teardown cycle that it's designed for? Are we really sure we actually wanted to use PHP? I used to have more specific complaints about strings and the numeric types, etc, but it's been a little while since I've had to write any PHP (I haven't used version 8, but I was using 7.4, I think, so I'm still fairly immune to the "You only remember PHP before it became awesome in 7+." criticism). I'm more than sure that any regular PHP dev has no problem dismissing all of my complaints. Just like when I went to the doctor and told him my elbow hurts when I bend my arm. He told me to stop bending my arm! Problem solved. ;)
midrus 5y ago
I'm one of those web devs that tries everything under the sun, and I also happen to have worked for a lot of companies (more than a dozen already, I'm on my 40s). Laravel is such a *joy*. I've never had this feeling of using something so easy and productive. I've been recently building a side project with LiveWire and oh-my-god. I really wish I had discovered it before. From the templating system (you get components out of the box! no more "includes" if you don't want to) to the validations, to the queues system... everything is so well integrated and so easy to use. For the last decade I've worked mostly with Django and SPAs, I'm not going back to that any time soon. Django templates are extremely limited for nowadays requirements, and SPAs are 1000x more complex to build and maintain so in my opinion they're not worth the price/effort. I think Livewire, Hotwire, Unpoly, Htmx, etc are what 90% of web apps need.
- psychoslave 5y ago
  Did also plaid with Ruby on Rails, or even Sinatra, and how would your rank the dev XP compared to Laravel?
  - midrus 5y ago
    I did use Rails for several months while helping a friend with his business/sideproject/startup kick-off and despite I really liked it, I much prefer Laravel + Livewire and PHP (https://tallstack.dev/ https://tallstack.dev/) over Rails + Hotwire + Ruby, but it's up to personal preferences: - I prefer things to be more explicit than implicit and lean more towards configuration over convention. - I lean more towards having types/typing information than not having it - PHP is way, way, way more used than Ruby - Performance (just talking about development environment performance) is a lot better in PHP (no server restarts, etc) - Availability of third party libraries is a lot stronger on the PHP side, probably due to it being more popular - Tooling and editor support. This is a big one for me, and I've found out things to work a lot better with VSCode for PHP than for Ruby. Probably related to it being both, more popular and more explicit. - Overall, Laravel feels even more complete than Rails and just fits better my brain. But, I think Rails is still great, and I would use it over building a microservices mesh of Go servers on kubernetes with React frontends, etc, etc.
distantsounds 5y ago
yup, same. started at like 16 and just never found a replacement for writing web apps that was as easy to pick up with lots of built in power. the documentation has always been _extremely_ helpful too, shout outs to the php.net team for making it so easy to learn.
progmetaldev 5y ago
In my experience, a lot of the hate that PHP gets is unjustified. I can only speak from personal experience, but most people I know that complain about PHP were just burnt out from dealing with other developers' code. Having such a low barrier to entry created many novice and hobbyist PHP developers to hit the market, and start producing terrible code due to not fully understanding software development practices. I know I never had an issue with PHP, and could get work done very quickly, but once I had to start working through other's spaghetti code it burnt me out and I moved on to other languages with a bit higher barrier to entry.

by vdo 5y ago

fvavsc 5y ago

PHP was my first love. It still is. Professionally I have moved on to other languages. But whenever I have an urge to create something for personal use, PHP is always the most productive way to get it done. With Laravel, I can even make it look polished and put it on the web. PHP is such a joy that I am really thinking about switching back to it for my day job.

hparadiz 5y ago

I started at 16 and I'm 34. Went from working on gaming websites to running giant ERP backends for mobile apps, web apps, and api users in high throughput environments. All I need to get to work is VSCode and some linux VM or container. PHP has an obnoxious amount of depth. You can become an expert on just ORMs or just SSO or just Collections or just routing and still be learning something new everyday. I am actually "self tought". Whatever that means.

irrational 5y ago
> I am actually "self tought". Whatever that means. What does that mean? I know what taught means, but tought? No idea.
- I_complete_me 5y ago
  A charitable interpretation would be that he meant "self-taught". It's not that difficult.

jabbany 5y ago

I started doing my first web development with PHP (4 & later 5) around the same time! Actually ended up learning a lot about how the entire LAMP stack worked + a lot of tricks and theory behind how to make things secure (PHP had very few safeguards back then). I'm still reaping the benefits of a lot of this knowledge to this day. I have moved on to other languages like JS and Python since ~2012. Looking at the article, I feel like modern PHP is almost a completely different beast compared to when I used it back then >_<

kodemager 5y ago

In a world where everything is fast becoming a JavaScript front end with “some” backend and with the improvements PHP has seen in recent years I don’t see why you’d consider yourself a “lowly” php developer. I’m mainly a C# guy myself as far as the backend goes, but I don’t view PHP as being bad in 2022. I think people who do are stuck in the past to be perfectly honest. It’s sort of like disliking JavaScript because it really sucked the soul out of you before typescript eventually made it nice to work with. But being mad at any programming language is sort of silly isn’t it? If it works it works.

y4mi 5y ago
> why you’d consider yourself a “lowly” php developer. PHP has always been considered as a somehow bad language in all corporations I've worked at to date. The same applies to other script languages such as python, ruby or nodejs - but PHP was the most undervalued of them all. It's kinda strange because the language is really performant and relatively easy to use. Maybe that's exactly why the big brain architects don't like it. They do tend to love things correlated with pointless complexity after all
- ragnese 5y ago
  Let me preface this by saying that I pass zero judgment to any people who use PHP by choice or otherwise, and that I don't assume I'm "better" or smarter than anyone else for their programming tool choice. But, if you genuinely want to know why some of us hate on PHP, I can tell you the reasons that I would never choose PHP for a production backend (now, I do think PHP is a fantastic scripting/sysadmin language- better than Python for sure, but I don't know Perl well enough to judge against that). PHP is single-threaded. I feel like that's a pretty decent reason all by itself to not want to use it in an enterprise environment. PHP is not really async, either. Yes, there are are run-loop libraries, and some libraries even claim to be async all by themselves, but these solutions are awkward and cumbersome and easy to use incorrectly. PHP's array data type is ridiculously bad. In every conceivable way. If you want to use it as a contiguous, linear, collection, then it's slow and bug-prone (e.g., using array_filter, but forgetting to wrap it in array_values). If you want to use it as a dictionary, then it will sneakily convert your keys into numbers which doesn't matter until it does (like when trying to operate over filenames in a directory and someone named a file "1". Then you try to do some operation that expects a string and your code explodes several hours into its operation... Ask me how I know). PHP's iterators and other, more professional-grade, data structures are not as "first class" as plain-old array, so nobody uses them. IIRC (it's been a while), you theoretically need to enable them in your php.ini and/or install them at the OS level, which kind of kills the whole "PHP is so easy to deploy! Just FTP a file and you're done!"-thing. I prefer static typing to dynamic typing. PHP's static typing is weak (as in not strict enough) and not expressive enough for me (no generics, no sum types, no extending classes/types). PHP does not allow for custom equality definitions. Also, since everything is references, I believe you can blow the stack if you try to check that two objects are equal that reference each other. The architecture of every HTTP request getting a fresh instance of PHP is actually pretty nice. And a ton of work has been put into the language/runtime to make sure it's stupid-fast at ramping up and parsing the request data. HOWEVER, as soon as you slap one of these popular frameworks (Laravel, Symfony, etc) on top, you've basically ruined it and made it slow, with all of the extra framework initialization junk. I remember seeing engineering effort go into "compiling" Symfony code to make it load quickly (I don't remember how Laravel works). But think about that for a second- we're going to choose an interpreted language that can't cache any state beyond a single request, and we're going to add a COMPILE STEP to it?! So that we can work against the init-process-teardown cycle that it's designed for? Are we really sure we actually wanted to use PHP? I used to have more specific complaints about strings and the numeric types, etc, but it's been a little while since I've had to write any PHP (I haven't used version 8, but I was using 7.4, I think, so I'm still fairly immune to the "You only remember PHP before it became awesome in 7+." criticism). I'm more than sure that any regular PHP dev has no problem dismissing all of my complaints. Just like when I went to the doctor and told him my elbow hurts when I bend my arm. He told me to stop bending my arm! Problem solved. ;)

midrus 5y ago

I'm one of those web devs that tries everything under the sun, and I also happen to have worked for a lot of companies (more than a dozen already, I'm on my 40s). Laravel is such a *joy*. I've never had this feeling of using something so easy and productive. I've been recently building a side project with LiveWire and oh-my-god. I really wish I had discovered it before. From the templating system (you get components out of the box! no more "includes" if you don't want to) to the validations, to the queues system... everything is so well integrated and so easy to use. For the last decade I've worked mostly with Django and SPAs, I'm not going back to that any time soon. Django templates are extremely limited for nowadays requirements, and SPAs are 1000x more complex to build and maintain so in my opinion they're not worth the price/effort. I think Livewire, Hotwire, Unpoly, Htmx, etc are what 90% of web apps need.

psychoslave 5y ago
Did also plaid with Ruby on Rails, or even Sinatra, and how would your rank the dev XP compared to Laravel?
- midrus 5y ago
  I did use Rails for several months while helping a friend with his business/sideproject/startup kick-off and despite I really liked it, I much prefer Laravel + Livewire and PHP (https://tallstack.dev/ https://tallstack.dev/) over Rails + Hotwire + Ruby, but it's up to personal preferences: - I prefer things to be more explicit than implicit and lean more towards configuration over convention. - I lean more towards having types/typing information than not having it - PHP is way, way, way more used than Ruby - Performance (just talking about development environment performance) is a lot better in PHP (no server restarts, etc) - Availability of third party libraries is a lot stronger on the PHP side, probably due to it being more popular - Tooling and editor support. This is a big one for me, and I've found out things to work a lot better with VSCode for PHP than for Ruby. Probably related to it being both, more popular and more explicit. - Overall, Laravel feels even more complete than Rails and just fits better my brain. But, I think Rails is still great, and I would use it over building a microservices mesh of Go servers on kubernetes with React frontends, etc, etc.

distantsounds 5y ago

yup, same. started at like 16 and just never found a replacement for writing web apps that was as easy to pick up with lots of built in power. the documentation has always been _extremely_ helpful too, shout outs to the php.net team for making it so easy to learn.

progmetaldev 5y ago

In my experience, a lot of the hate that PHP gets is unjustified. I can only speak from personal experience, but most people I know that complain about PHP were just burnt out from dealing with other developers' code. Having such a low barrier to entry created many novice and hobbyist PHP developers to hit the market, and start producing terrible code due to not fully understanding software development practices. I know I never had an issue with PHP, and could get work done very quickly, but once I had to start working through other's spaghetti code it burnt me out and I moved on to other languages with a bit higher barrier to entry.