7 ms·

What tools? What server language today except PHP (and its forks) is actually designed for the web and works as the web was intended?

• rbanffy 5y ago
  > What server language today except PHP (and its forks) is actually designed for the web and works as the web was intended? I'd say Rails is a very nice DSL for building web applications that's written as an extension of Ruby. We have two dimensions here, one for how easily a language allows you to build a website, and how expressive, consistent and error-proof a language is. It's easy to build a simple website with PHP (as it was with ASP and JSP, or even Cold Fusion). I actually like that approach, that maps running scripts to state transitions. But I also like the consistency and expressiveness of Python, Java, Scala, or C# (which I have used). As languages, they are "nicer" (and that's completely subjective) than PHP, and that niceness more than compensates for being unable to write code inside templates.
  • 369548684892826 5y ago
    Razor lets you write C# inside templates.
  • sgjohnson 5y ago
    Nobody in their right mind has put actual logic inside templates when doing PHP for a while now. PHP has supported strict typing for a while now, making it also fairly consistend and error-proof. There is nothing at all wrong with PHP and it's rapidly moving in the right direction.
• onion2k 5y ago
  What server language today except PHP (and its forks) is actually designed for the web and works as the web was intended? The implication of the question is that there's something designed into PHP that makes it better for working with web things. Why does the language need to be designed to work with the web? That part of any language can be filled out with a framework quite easily, and arguably that means it's much easier to change how the language is used. That seems to be the case with every major PHP application anyway - most use Laravel or Cake or Symphony or something. Just as most Ruby web projects use Rails, and most backend JS projects use Express, and Rust web projects use Poem, and so on. I don't think there's a good reason to design a language specifically for web projects. If that's how PHP works these days (I haven't used PHP in a decade or so), I'd suggest that might be a bad thing. It's very rigid, and if the language gets anything wrong that compromises the design of every project that uses it. Languages should provide simple primitives that frameworks and libraries build on.
  • capableweb 5y ago
    > I don't think there's a good reason to design a language specifically for web projects. If that's how PHP works these days (I haven't used PHP in a decade or so), I'd suggest that might be a bad thing. It's very rigid, and if the language gets anything wrong that compromises the design of every project that uses it. Languages should provide simple primitives that frameworks and libraries build on. That has always been the goal of PHP, to be a web framework in itself (and now we have frameworks on top of that framework). It's trivial to read POST data as understanding POST requests are built-in into the language. With Rust or JavaScript you either will pull down a external library to handle that for you, or write a ton of code to make it easier for yourself. With PHP, it's literally one-line of code. It is not as rigid as you might believe, as we have frameworks on top of the native PHP framework already. That's not to say PHP is without compromises, it's not suitable for a bunch of different projects (you wouldn't write mobile/desktop apps with it for example). But if you have a simple CRUD application that just needs to output some HTML data and persist stuff to a MariaDB/MySQL database without wanting to pull down a bunch of 3rd-party dependencies, PHP will make that effortless compared to basically any other language. I think the popularity of PHP for web development speaks for itself, it basically conquered that segment of development when it first appeared, and is still more-or-less king, even with its warts. As a last word, I like that languages specializes in different things, not every language has to be a general-use language, and I hope we see more of that in the future. Darklang specializes in building backend APIs for example, others specializes in being for UIs and so on. As every language more or less looks like C today, there is plenty of room for innovation in programming language design (and no, not talking about TypeScript which is basically just C# that compiles to JavaScript, but more different languages).
    • berkes 5y ago
      > That has always been the goal of PHP, to be a web framework in itself This is untrue. PHP was a templating language and form-handler first and foremost[1]. It took a long time for it to move out of that (I'd argue up to 5.6) and become an actual programming language rather than a template language on steroids. Edit: we still have to move out of template mode in every file by adding a <?php at the top of our files - and don't ever add a whitespace char before that, or else. So, essentially, we now have web-frameworks built in a templating language. With, ironically, template languages written in that templating language. Nice, if you like recursion though. [1] Early PHP was not intended to be a new programming language, and grew organically, with Lerdorf noting in retrospect: "I don't know how to stop it, there was never any intent to write a programming language - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PHP#Early_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PHP#Early_history