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I started my career with PHP. Created my own apps, created client websites etc. Full of footguns, but I didn't know any better. Once I learned more languages, I

I started my career with PHP. Created my own apps, created client websites etc. Full of footguns, but I didn't know any better. Once I learned more languages, I never used PHP again. I actually started to feel like I'd been fooled into using PHP. Now the small PHP community keeps trying to justify their language choice with articles like these and comments like the ones on this submission. They claim it's a no brainer to use Laravel for new apps, because it has a big ecosystem and good ergonomics, and pretend that this description somehow does not apply to hundreds of other frameworks. They claim that the article A Fractal of Bad Design (which was really cathartic to me when it came out) is out of date, but when I look, all the old footguns are still there, all the problems with the standard library are still there and stdout still writes directly to the browser. The foundations are rotten. Go ahead and use it, I don't care, but stop trying to convince me to use it. And now the downvotes begin. PHP devs hate dissent it seems.

lordgroff 4y ago
Small PHP community, now I've heard everything.
- awestroke 4y ago
  It feels large to you because you are in it. Other language communities feel small to you because you are not in them.
  - lordgroff 4y ago
    PHP is far from my primary language, but in no universe is the language that powers so so much of the internet "small".
    - awestroke 4y ago
      Website traffic to servers running the language is not necessarily correlated with the size of the community
      - impalallama 4y ago
        whats your metric for a large community? internet traffic? github projects? number public repos? number of packages? by every metric i can think of php is has a large community, not as large as java or python but still large. how twisted does your dislike of a language have to be for you to not even acknowledge that a lot of people use it
        liveoneggs 4y ago
        github stars and volume of left-pad clone repos
  - geerlingguy 4y ago
    PHP is still above Go, Rust, Ruby, and Perl in at least the TIOBE index: https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/ https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/ Are those all small communities too?
    - awesomeMilou 4y ago
      > The ratings are based on the number of skilled engineers world-wide, courses and third party vendors https://i.stack.imgur.com/Jteqd.png https://i.stack.imgur.com/Jteqd.png I'm sure theres also still tons of skilled engineers for Perl around. Or Fortran. Definetely Java. But the TIOBE index looks more like taking inventory of existing skill throughout the industry and less like it tracks disruptive trends.
phphphphp 4y ago
I don't wish to be the bearer of bad news, but nobody is trying to convince you to use it: nobody cares what you're using for software development... and you're working with out of date information if you think that A Fractal of Bad Design is relevant any more. PHP has evolved a great deal over the last decade, as have the people using it and as has the ecosystem. Personally, as my username might hint, I've been using PHP for a long time, and, as I've commented on HN before, I would not choose PHP if I was building an engineering organisation from the ground up, and I do not use PHP professionally at the moment, but I absolutely choose to use PHP for my own projects and can enthusiastically say it's a great language in 2023. If you're not willing to try out modern PHP, that's fine, but ranting and raving about PHP based on your experience more than a decade ago is not relevant any more, given this is a post about the improvements made in the last decade. Many people with experience beyond PHP think PHP is a great language today.
- awestroke 4y ago
  Quoting myself: > They claim that the article A Fractal of Bad Design (which was really cathartic to me when it came out) is out of date, but when I look, all the old footguns are still there, all the problems with the standard library are still there and stdout still writes directly to the browser.
  - phphphphp 4y ago
    You can quote yourself ad nauseam but that does not turn your incorrect statement into a correct statement. If you spent any amount of time looking at a modern PHP codebase, you'd discover that the type of code people write today is radically different to the type of code you'd have seen at the time A Fractal of Bad Design was written. There are still aspects of modern PHP that stand to be improved, absolutely, but that's true of all languages.
    - awestroke 4y ago
      Your argument is basically: "Yes, yes, the footguns are still there front and center, but we added more guns that don't shoot you on the foot." If I was using PHP, I'd be livid that the cruft is never removed. Just deprecate and remove it
polyamid23 4y ago
Out of curiosity, what language are you using for backend now? Not a fan of PHP like most of professional PHP devs, I guess but the utility of Laravel for example is unbeatable IMO.
skrowl 4y ago
PHP devs hate to admit that the only reason PHP is still relevant at all today is because of WordPress. If WordPress moved to a modern language tomorrow, PHP would cease to exist afterwards.
- kugelblitz 4y ago
  I've worked professionally with PHP as freelancer the last 10 years. I almost only use Symfony and Laravel. But there's also Typo3, Spryker, Magento, Drupal, Shopware, Sylius. I won't touch Wordpress. I worked with it about 15 years ago for a few years, but didn't touch it afterwards.
- meigwilym 4y ago
  WP is way behind modern PHP. From the article > Right now, WordPress only has beta support for PHP 8.0. Now, to be clear: PHP 8.0 was released in 2020, and is now end of life, three years later — and WordPress doesn't yet support it…
- ehnto 4y ago
  WordPress would cease as well I think. There are dozens of alternatives better than WordPress, if upgrading it meant a complete tooling change I think many would take the opportunity to replatform to something else. The only thing WP really has over them is it's expansive plugin library, and buy in from clients. But it's not really up to devs. I don't think many devs believe it's the best system, but it is desired by clients very often.
  - unity1001 4y ago
    > The only thing WP really has over them is it's expansive plugin librar The expansive plugin library that WP has is due to its ease of use, stability and the extent it goes to acommodate users, developers and businesses at the same time. Its no small factor, its no small feat.
    - ehnto 4y ago
      I do agree, which is why I think WordPress would go away pretty quickly of they ever invalidate their legacy of plugins through a major change.
yucky 4y ago
> PHP devs hate dissent it seems. Perhaps, but do they hate dissent as much as non-PHP devs hate PHP? Language wars are silly.
thephpcommunity 4y ago
"the small PHP community" .... what?
berkle4455 4y ago
So don’t use it? Literally nobody wants you anywhere near the PHP community.
jensensbutton 4y ago
> And now the downvotes begin. PHP devs hate dissent it seems. I mean, write stupid comments win stupid prizes? > Now the small PHP community keeps trying to justify their language choice with articles like these How would you expect people to react when you frame it like that. I assume you're one of those people that think you have good opinions, but wonder why others don't want to hang around and hear them.
ehnto 4y ago
So dramatic. No one cares what you use, and I suspect you could just not read articles about PHP and voila your problems would go away. Choose your own destiny! You have to ask yourself why such a large proportion of work gets done in two objectively bad languages, PHP and Javascript. They dominate the space. I think it tells us that it's not actually that important to have a 100% perfect language, when it comes to building stuff.
- awesomeMilou 4y ago
  tbf, TypeScript has taken over a huge part of the JS ecosystem, and while doing so has fixed lots of common "meme" gripes with the language. It has also introduced new issues, but alas, the web is typesafe. Learning PHP though is exactly as the article describes. I had to do it in college and even using a modern version of PHP, the language felt as if it had been written by 3 first semester students under pressure to meet a deadline. > You have to ask yourself why such a large proportion of work gets done in two objectively bad languages I did ask myself that, and I came to the same conclusion as the author of "Fractals of bad design": The majority of work gets done by amateurs and amateurs, per definition, don't know any better.
0xblinq 4y ago
Found the haskell programmer

lordgroff 4y ago

Small PHP community, now I've heard everything.

awestroke 4y ago
It feels large to you because you are in it. Other language communities feel small to you because you are not in them.
- lordgroff 4y ago
  PHP is far from my primary language, but in no universe is the language that powers so so much of the internet "small".
  - awestroke 4y ago
    Website traffic to servers running the language is not necessarily correlated with the size of the community
    - impalallama 4y ago
      whats your metric for a large community? internet traffic? github projects? number public repos? number of packages? by every metric i can think of php is has a large community, not as large as java or python but still large. how twisted does your dislike of a language have to be for you to not even acknowledge that a lot of people use it
      - liveoneggs 4y ago
        github stars and volume of left-pad clone repos
- geerlingguy 4y ago
  PHP is still above Go, Rust, Ruby, and Perl in at least the TIOBE index: https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/ https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/ Are those all small communities too?
  - awesomeMilou 4y ago
    > The ratings are based on the number of skilled engineers world-wide, courses and third party vendors https://i.stack.imgur.com/Jteqd.png https://i.stack.imgur.com/Jteqd.png I'm sure theres also still tons of skilled engineers for Perl around. Or Fortran. Definetely Java. But the TIOBE index looks more like taking inventory of existing skill throughout the industry and less like it tracks disruptive trends.

phphphphp 4y ago

I don't wish to be the bearer of bad news, but nobody is trying to convince you to use it: nobody cares what you're using for software development... and you're working with out of date information if you think that A Fractal of Bad Design is relevant any more. PHP has evolved a great deal over the last decade, as have the people using it and as has the ecosystem. Personally, as my username might hint, I've been using PHP for a long time, and, as I've commented on HN before, I would not choose PHP if I was building an engineering organisation from the ground up, and I do not use PHP professionally at the moment, but I absolutely choose to use PHP for my own projects and can enthusiastically say it's a great language in 2023. If you're not willing to try out modern PHP, that's fine, but ranting and raving about PHP based on your experience more than a decade ago is not relevant any more, given this is a post about the improvements made in the last decade. Many people with experience beyond PHP think PHP is a great language today.

awestroke 4y ago
Quoting myself: > They claim that the article A Fractal of Bad Design (which was really cathartic to me when it came out) is out of date, but when I look, all the old footguns are still there, all the problems with the standard library are still there and stdout still writes directly to the browser.
- phphphphp 4y ago
  You can quote yourself ad nauseam but that does not turn your incorrect statement into a correct statement. If you spent any amount of time looking at a modern PHP codebase, you'd discover that the type of code people write today is radically different to the type of code you'd have seen at the time A Fractal of Bad Design was written. There are still aspects of modern PHP that stand to be improved, absolutely, but that's true of all languages.
  - awestroke 4y ago
    Your argument is basically: "Yes, yes, the footguns are still there front and center, but we added more guns that don't shoot you on the foot." If I was using PHP, I'd be livid that the cruft is never removed. Just deprecate and remove it

polyamid23 4y ago

Out of curiosity, what language are you using for backend now? Not a fan of PHP like most of professional PHP devs, I guess but the utility of Laravel for example is unbeatable IMO.

skrowl 4y ago

PHP devs hate to admit that the only reason PHP is still relevant at all today is because of WordPress. If WordPress moved to a modern language tomorrow, PHP would cease to exist afterwards.

kugelblitz 4y ago
I've worked professionally with PHP as freelancer the last 10 years. I almost only use Symfony and Laravel. But there's also Typo3, Spryker, Magento, Drupal, Shopware, Sylius. I won't touch Wordpress. I worked with it about 15 years ago for a few years, but didn't touch it afterwards.
meigwilym 4y ago
WP is way behind modern PHP. From the article > Right now, WordPress only has beta support for PHP 8.0. Now, to be clear: PHP 8.0 was released in 2020, and is now end of life, three years later — and WordPress doesn't yet support it…
ehnto 4y ago
WordPress would cease as well I think. There are dozens of alternatives better than WordPress, if upgrading it meant a complete tooling change I think many would take the opportunity to replatform to something else. The only thing WP really has over them is it's expansive plugin library, and buy in from clients. But it's not really up to devs. I don't think many devs believe it's the best system, but it is desired by clients very often.
- unity1001 4y ago
  > The only thing WP really has over them is it's expansive plugin librar The expansive plugin library that WP has is due to its ease of use, stability and the extent it goes to acommodate users, developers and businesses at the same time. Its no small factor, its no small feat.
  - ehnto 4y ago
    I do agree, which is why I think WordPress would go away pretty quickly of they ever invalidate their legacy of plugins through a major change.

yucky 4y ago

> PHP devs hate dissent it seems. Perhaps, but do they hate dissent as much as non-PHP devs hate PHP? Language wars are silly.

thephpcommunity 4y ago

"the small PHP community" .... what?

berkle4455 4y ago

So don’t use it? Literally nobody wants you anywhere near the PHP community.

jensensbutton 4y ago

> And now the downvotes begin. PHP devs hate dissent it seems. I mean, write stupid comments win stupid prizes? > Now the small PHP community keeps trying to justify their language choice with articles like these How would you expect people to react when you frame it like that. I assume you're one of those people that think you have good opinions, but wonder why others don't want to hang around and hear them.

ehnto 4y ago

So dramatic. No one cares what you use, and I suspect you could just not read articles about PHP and voila your problems would go away. Choose your own destiny! You have to ask yourself why such a large proportion of work gets done in two objectively bad languages, PHP and Javascript. They dominate the space. I think it tells us that it's not actually that important to have a 100% perfect language, when it comes to building stuff.

awesomeMilou 4y ago
tbf, TypeScript has taken over a huge part of the JS ecosystem, and while doing so has fixed lots of common "meme" gripes with the language. It has also introduced new issues, but alas, the web is typesafe. Learning PHP though is exactly as the article describes. I had to do it in college and even using a modern version of PHP, the language felt as if it had been written by 3 first semester students under pressure to meet a deadline. > You have to ask yourself why such a large proportion of work gets done in two objectively bad languages I did ask myself that, and I came to the same conclusion as the author of "Fractals of bad design": The majority of work gets done by amateurs and amateurs, per definition, don't know any better.

0xblinq 4y ago

Found the haskell programmer