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As a fullstack developer who has worked many, many years in the javascript hellhole, I mean ecosystem, as well as the python ecosystem and .NET; coming back to

by keyle 3y ago

As a fullstack developer who has worked many, many years in the javascript hellhole, I mean ecosystem, as well as the python ecosystem and .NET; coming back to PHP the last 2 years, working essentially in Laravel and the like - I couldn't approve more of this message. Seriously, PHP is the grand father that will drive you to class and you'll never be late, the car will never smell and everything will always just be fine. It's fast, it's typed (now), it's reliable. Laravel is pretty darn rock solid. I've used a LOT of frameworks. Most of them fall on their ass in either the documentation or performance scope. Laravel is beasty, reasonably well documented, handles hundreds of thousands of users without a scratch. Plays well with Redis and MariaDB or anything really. Just ignore the fugly standard library inconsistencies of (old) PHP, every language has their toilet corner... Oh and it's free. All of it. PHP, Laravel. And its hosting has always been the cheapest. You don't need a particular OS or certain cloud providers. When I consider the solutions of flask and microservices I've left behind, the many node processes running with pm2, the complexity of .NET solutions... PHP just works, and it's easy to make reliable... And if it's slow, it's because I'm doing dumb stuff, not because of dark corner edge case I happened to be tripping into. It's single threaded first, queue jobs for anything slower. That simple facts make it so much easier to reason about things, and keeps the fullstack linear, transactional and easy to reason about, 2 years into it. PHP is not the best language in the world. I prefer Swift and even Go for many reasons, but it's an easy, simple, straightforward language. It's the BMX of the languages.

pkphilip 3y ago
Absolutely. The developer experience with PHP is so far ahead of the Javascript "ecosystem" that it is ridiculous!
EGreg 3y ago
For a framework that is radically different but also PHP-native (since PHP 5), would you like to spend an hour playing with https://github.com/Qbix/Platform https://github.com/Qbix/Platform ? If you do, please share your experience in a comment. I’d love to hear it. I architected this framework over the last decade :)
- pkphilip 3y ago
  Very interesting. I am shocked that this is the first time I am hearing of your framework. Any chance you can make the app setup work using composure instead of cloning from the git repo? It may increase visibility to your project. But in any case, great job with the platform!
  - EGreg 3y ago
    Will look into it. You likely meant composer?
- KRAKRISMOTT 3y ago
  The way your landing page is laid out isn't doing you any favors. If you are going to build a rapid application development platform, look at Retool for inspiration in terms of designs and copywriting. Cut the token stuff, otherwise you will lose customers or self select for crypto bros. The license you chose will turn off most professional development shops and the ones using the platform would be based in places like eastern Europe where the license will be ignored entirely. Your landing page design is fifteen years out of date, this is the sort of design used to bamboozle small trades shops and non tech companies in places like the midwest and the US south, you will have a hard time attracting the sort of web engineers that will help make it go viral. Again, it depends what sort of customers you are trying to sell to, but if you intend to make a profit, the usually advice would be to offer a cloud offering like WordPress. Selling web frameworks rarely work out unless your product is a specialized database. Your copywriting gives off strong old school enterprise sales vibes with a dash cryptomania. You are not going to get much organic product led growth among the US under 40 crowd here. I suggest taking a look at https://payloadcms.com/ https://payloadcms.com/ and study their design, execution, and copywriting.
  - EGreg 3y ago
    You seem to know what you’re talking about. I checked out payloadcms though, that site is pretty terrible…
    - 3y ago
nstart 3y ago
There's javascript in the back. And there's javascript in the front. Curious what you use for application development on the frontend and if you have some recommendations for that? Thanks in advance!
- keyle 3y ago
  Most of the stuff we do now we do with "Laravel Livewire". It's quite brilliant really, even for modals etc. "look ma, no javascript!". Of course it does JS for you, you just don't see it. That's my favourite kind of Javascript - someone else's problem. Livewire is a mid-way between front-end backend, it's a progressive back-end with long polling like NextJS I suppose. From your end though, it takes care of all the security of running your own API, and correctness. You basically have dynamic front-end from the backend. If you want a full SPA or you need an application that is very responsive without network requests, I recommend VueJS - Livewire recommends AlpineJS, but of course you might be a React guy, that's fine, and use Laravel as a regular API. You can even use GraphQL if you want to die of a young age, have some weird kinky thing going or you have something to prove... Unless you're Facebook of course you probably don't need GraphQL.
  - kaba0 3y ago
    > it's a progressive back-end with long polling like NextJS I suppose It’s kind of funny that this is the new best thing, when this is almost the same model JSF did decades ago.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - robertlagrant 3y ago
      It just had so many other issues with its ergonomics that this nice innovation was lost in the weeds a bit.
      - kaba0 3y ago
leke 3y ago
For those who are not familiar with the PHP ecosystem, any currently maintained framework is also fine. I myself use F3 for small personal projects. Totally agree about the single thread thinking is enough for most things. It of course depends on what you build. For example, I would use some language that runs on Beam for a chat platform.
makeitdouble 3y ago
> it's typed (now) To note, you'll need strict mode for type hints to be useful. https://www.php.net/manual/en/language.types.declarations.php https://www.php.net/manual/en/language.types.declarations.ph... The fun part is, instead of going for a generic strict mode system we would have expected, PHP went pragmatic: as most application won't be 100% strict typed, you need to declare it file by file, the icing on the cake being that the restriction applies on the caller of the functions, not the function itself. It makes for complicated situations, where for instance you can make an utility class that is 100% typed and follows strict typing, but if the caller of your class isn't, none of it will matter and types will be fuzzily coerced anyway.
- muglug 3y ago
  > To note, you'll need strict mode for type hints to be useful This is not really true — those type hints can be read by static analysis tools, preventing you from many of the issues that would also be caught in strict mode at runtime.
  - jwdunne 3y ago
    You’re right. Psalm has been a god send on the project I’m working on. Unfortunately, it’s taking far too long for Laravel to catch up so parts of its API are a black hole for types. Especially things like request input, which returns a union of string and array as opposed to using a conditional return type. You end up with assertion soup every time you touch Laravel so over time the project uses less and less of it. A well-typed framework and set of libraries would be very nice.
    - muglug 3y ago
      > Psalm has been a god send on the project I’m working on. Thanks!
  - dgb23 3y ago
    The type system isn’t expressive enough for these tools to catch anything but the most basic errors. In PHP, typing is for function signature documentation.
safety1st 3y ago
This 100%. It's actually a bit of a red flag to me these days if a developer turns up their nose at PHP. The language has matured a lot and building stuff with it is simple, cheap, straightforward and fast. If someone's still hating on PHP in 2023 it makes me wonder if they've been focused on more exotic technology because they were looking to pad their resume with more expensive skills, build science projects for their own amusement vs. what the business needed, etc. etc. Red flag. I've had these guys like this on my team and guess what, they built fancy over-engineered solutions to problems that no one had and then job hopped and left it for us to deal with. I can't speak for anyone else but I go into work every day for one purpose, and it's to ship shit which users use. I don't have room on my team for people who have other priorities. The amount of stuff you can get done with basically just PHP and Linux is amazing.
- 1123581321 3y ago
  I love PHP, but a red flag?! If they’re busy in the Ruby/Java/C#/Go worlds (all get-it-done environments) then I’d just assume they don’t read many Hacker News praises for PHP. It’s easy to have not encountered it since the bad old days unless you work on a team that uses Laravel for some things. I do understand hiring someone who has that tradesman programming ethic and is comfortable with Linux, but that’s more requiring certain positive traits.
  - vonseel 3y ago
    Exactly how I feel reading this thread, I had no idea PHP has changed so much.
  - safety1st 3y ago
    Yeah, that's fair. Now that you mention it, 90% of these guys where I get that red flag instinct I described are Javascript devs or wannabe Javascript devs. It's as if the JS ecosystem has driven an entire generation of developers insane
    - 1123581321 3y ago
      I'm in complete agreement there; I've seen a number of those. I like to ask simple questions about what they like about programming to catch some of those issues and look for a certain amount of self-understanding.
acherion 3y ago
> Laravel is [...] reasonably well documented Hard disagree. Sorry, I don't have a computer science degree, why does their documentation make that assumption. I find their docs very hard to grok. PHP.net docs are no-frills no-fuss, straight to the point. Other frameworks are documented very well too, CakePHP comes to mind (at least, when I was using it last in v2 and v3). I can't say I've read the absolute latest version of their v10 docs, but when I was neck deep in 5.8 I found I had to switch to older versions of the documentation to read up on some of the most basic of Laravel features. eg. What's the syntax of using Form in Blade templates? I had to go back to v4.x docs to read up on it, Blade templating hardly got a mention in v5.x documentation, despite it being critical component in a Laravel application. If there was a bug in a project and I had management breathing a fire down at me because it's breaking the site / losing sales / stopping monthly reports from going out, I shouldn't need to decode computer science terms, or look through previous versions of documentation to find the solution. This is why, in my opinion, Laravel documentation sucks hard.
- Elte 3y ago
  The documentation reads like a tutorial, which is fine the first time you read it, and really annoying the next 99 times when you're just trying to find something. My biggest gripe though is that the majority of classes / methods aren't locally documented with comments, or only minimally. If I don't understand how a certain parameter behaves (or even what a function does), I have to go online and search for examples, or look through the docs hoping that it's explained. And don't get me started on Facades, which are a code discovery dead end... All that being said, my overall experience of working with PHP / Laravel is quite pleasant, probably more so than other technologies I've worked with in recent years. Everything has its issues I suppose.
  - crabmusket 3y ago
    Yep, the tutorials/guides are really good, but as you say, the details aren't really covered. There are so many examples like "relationsToArray(): Get the model's relationships in array form."[1] Just an expanded version of the method name with no context or detail. [1]: https://laravel.com/api/10.x/Illuminate/Database/Eloquent/Model.html https://laravel.com/api/10.x/Illuminate/Database/Eloquent/Mo...
npsomaratna 3y ago
I've used maybe a couple of dozen programming languages over the years (yes, I'm that old). I see programming languages as tools—you want to pick the right tool for the right purpose. Whether a tool is right depends not just on the language itself, but also the ecosystem of libraries. Thanks to Laravel (along with Livewire and Alpine.js), and an ecosystem of libraries enabled by Composer, PHP is a great choice for web development. I'd not use it for, say, coding machine learning stuff though!
0xblinq 3y ago
I've always told my coworkers and friends that the programming language doesn't matter at all (despite I don't think there's anything wrong or worse than alternatives in modern PHP). What matters is the frameworks, libraries, ecosystem, editor support, available talent, culture around it, etc. And PHP (and the Laravel ecosystem) is rock solid in that area, the best by far. I'm a frontend dev at a pretty big company, but before this I worked on a Laravel + TurboLaravel (Hotwire, etc) and it's just incredible how easy and quick it was to build and maintain things.
kaba0 3y ago
Agree, though I would put Java in the same category as well (and actually prefer that). Great ecosystem, great frameworks for every conceivable business case, excellent performance, tooling.
devjab 3y ago
PHP has been a great language for a while, essentially since the world of enterprise became web based instead of application based. I suspect it’s not seeing too much adoption because it wasn’t always great, partly because a lot of enterprise is married to Java (which is frankly also in a decent state) and because JavaScript (with types) and Python lets your teams do a single language while also doing a react client or a lot of BI/ML. Most mature programming languages are nice to work with these days though. At least in my opinion. About the only one I dislike is C#, and that is mostly because whenever I need to use C# I need to use it with a combination of libraries (Odata, Entity Framework, Asp.versioning) as an example which simply don’t work together unless you overwrite/extend half of them. Because for most use cases C# is as excellent as all the rest. But PHP was essentially build for the modern use case of everything being web-based and it’s weird to see the reputation it still has. Then again, django is also an excellent tool for most modern work that doesn’t see the adoption it should. I’m so sick and tired of having to deal with things like umbraco failing at things that have been a fundamental part of django for longer than some of the people reading this post have been alive. :p But I guess its all those things that keep me well paid. So maybe I shouldn’t be too angry about it.
Demoloto 3y ago
Have a look at quarkus. Thanks to JVM you have really good out of the box debugging features including hot code replacement and profiling. You can use kotlin which is a really really good language in comparison to PHP. There is no need in my opinion to write real applications with PHP.
- abujazar 3y ago
  In my experience Laravel teams are WAY more productive than Quarkus teams though.
liendolucas 3y ago
> It's fast, it's typed (now), it's reliable. Fast, the most overrated feature that we developers endlessly look for. How fast? How much are you winning, milliseconds, nanoseconds, picoseconds? It's extremely likely that if something is slow is because you're doing something wrong regardless the language and/or framework. It's reliable PHP? Well, so are Python, Ruby, Go and other friends, right? > Laravel is pretty darn rock solid. Again, so are: Rails, Flask, Django and many other matured frameworks out there that have been baked for years now. Unless you pick some toy framework project written in a weekend I'd say there are plenty of rock solid options out there. > Just ignore the fugly standard library inconsistencies of (old) PHP... I'll just prefer to pick a language that narrows/discards that dark side as much as possible. Very long time ago I couldn't finish reading a page whose author painstakingly detailed every single inconsistent feature of PHP (literally it could have taken a whole day to read). After that horrifying testament I said myself to ever get my feet wet with PHP. Now in a team with PHP you will need to agree which "inconsistencies" should be left out either by adding some tool to automatically watch for that or educating onboarding members of your team. > Oh and it's free. All of it. PHP, Laravel. Aren't the other friends out there also free? All of them? > When I consider the solutions of flask and microservices... Flask AND microservices are two completely different things. You can have a full fledged monolithic Flask application or go with the microservices rabbit hole with ANY technology and/or programming language that you want. So PHP, well... Nah. At least not for me. There are plenty of interesting languages and technologies out there to be learnt and PHP for me is definitely not one of them. One question aside out of ignorance. How do people debug in PHP? Many many many years ago I worked for an extremely short time for a company that were heavily using Laravel. I didn't know how to debug a PHP program at a time. People told me to simply do "prints" to the rendered template. If I remember correctly I also tried to find some tutorial or howto on debugging with PHP only to be unsuccessful. I'd be interested to know because with Python is just a joke to do that. Install ipython and ipdb. Then set `import ipdb;ipdb.set_trace()` and you are done, you get the full fledged mighty console where you can see everything you need to track down an issue. Up today I haven't got the opportunity to testify someone using a similar capability with PHP but hey I might be wrong and something of the like is out there.
- a_subsystem 3y ago
creamyhorror 3y ago
Is C#/.NET overly complex? I'm used to Laravel and have been exploring C#/.NET, which while a bit complicated is nice for the static typing. I've been hearing that for web apps the Laravel ecosystem is still simpler and more batteries-included than the equivalent ASP.NET. IME, Laravel's "easy deployment" story is heavily linked to the paid service Forge, and installing dependencies during deployment is a bit slow plus takes a /lot/ of memory (we're using old Composer and Laravel versions though). What's your take?
shp0ngle 3y ago
PHP has types now??
- ceejayoz 3y ago
  Yes. Since 2015.
mschuster91 3y ago
> Just ignore the fugly standard library inconsistencies of (old) PHP, every language has their toilet corner... Personally, I do like the way the standard library is - almost all cases of where people whine about it being inconsistent, it is a consequence of the PHP standard library and many of its extensions being extremely thin wrappers around libc and C/C++ libraries in general. That, in turn, makes it often possible to just take straight C library example code, copy it into a PHP file, add a $ in front of all variables, and have it magically work. (IMHO, it's no surprise that the whiners tend to be younger programmers who have grown up with Java in their university education - us older "neckbeards" are so used to the C world that its conventions are second nature for us)
- a_subsystem 3y ago
  >> That, in turn, makes it often possible to just take straight C library example code, copy it into a PHP file, add a $ in front of all variables, and have it magically work. * head explodes awesome I know what I'm doing this afternoon!
  - mschuster91 3y ago
    Writing PHP bindings is pretty easy as well (once you manage to sort out build tooling, but that's a mess anywhere in C). Have fun :)
topicseed 3y ago
The NPM/JS/TS hellhole is real. Moved on from it a couple of years ago, and today I switch between Go and PHP (WP custom stuff). Obviously Go and PHP are two very different languages but they bring me peace in ways JS never did. Especially when reopening older projects.
- mattgreenrocks 3y ago
  It's goofy to me how many devs think the art of writing software necessitates continually updating dependencies to have things not break. You're running in place! You could be working on something new that generates value, or adding features to what you have in that time.
  - topicseed 3y ago
    To me, dependency management is a part of software maintenance and it's not always just 'running in place'. Updates bring security patches (sometimes not publicly explained or disclosed), performance improvements, and new features that could enhance the value generated by the said software.
    - taskforcegemini 3y ago
      you only point out positives, but the negatives are usually felt a lot more intensively
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
jjice 3y ago
I agree that PHP is a fine language these days, if using modern features and techniques. I've seen plenty of recently written PHP that looks like it was written in 1997. That said, PHP does have complexity to running like node does with pm2, Apache or Nginx in front. Is it as bad, depends on the person, but it does suck IMO.
z3t4 3y ago
> It's single threaded You could make it single threaded. But the standard is multi threaded, and if you have more then 100 users will be have to deal with locks. That said, locks/threads are still easier to manage then async code.
throwaway2990 3y ago
> Oh and it's free. All of it. PHP, Laravel. And its hosting has always been the cheapest. You don't need a particular OS or certain cloud providers. Unless you’re getting shared hosting, then it’s true for most things now. You don’t need a specific OS or cloud provider for .NET, Java, Go, Rust… etc > When I consider the solutions of flask and microservices I've left behind, the many node processes running with pm2, the complexity of .NET solutions... PHP just works, and it's easy to make reliable... And if it's slow, it's because I'm doing dumb stuff, not because of dark corner edge case I happened to be tripping into. .NET isn’t anymore complex than a PHP app. Unless you write many layers of abstractions. And nothing stops you from doing the same thing in PHP.
unsupp0rted 3y ago
The main reason I don't use PHP is because the browser doesn't. Sooner or later I end up having to write Javascript and lots* of it. Therefore I use it across the board. *where "lots" = logic that needs to exist on both client and server side
Thorentis 3y ago
All those arguments would apply to Python and Django in my opinion.
Alifatisk 3y ago
> It's the BMX of the languages. How should I interpret this? The language is cool? Can perform cool tricks?
- deltarholamda 3y ago
  If you want to ride a bike, you can ride the bike. If you want to do tricks, you can do tricks. PHP makes simple stuff easy and difficult stuff possible. (But you're not going to win the Tour de France on a BMX bike.) Nowadays, a lot of other things also do this, but PHP was the first to really "get" this. I understand it's not for everybody, and for certain things, other languages are certainly better. But there's precious little that you can't do with PHP, since it's been around for so long and has been growing with the Web from pretty much the very beginning.
- mxuribe 3y ago
  And...the language can be taken to a high school prom - like any BMX bike can be: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPVJzi7Ta9w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPVJzi7Ta9w Sorry, could not resist! lol :-D
user3939382 3y ago
Most things wrong with PHP that I really care about are currently being resolved in Psalm which undoubtedly will eventually (might be 10-15 years who knows) be rolled into the language.
yazan94 3y ago
I know NodeJS well but have never used PHP, but I can attest that using PM2 is a pain and node_modules deps issues can be a hair-pulling event. But the package.json scripts provide a simple and built-in way to run basic build tasks. There's always an ~~app~~package for that, no matter what "that" is. There are also tons of tutorials, examples, and snippets for everything you want to do to get up and running quickly. TBH I really enjoy working with Typescript, it really brings sanity to JS (as long as you are consistent with it) and Express is dead simple and just makes sense. Would you mind sharing your insights into why one should go with modern PHP+Laravel instead of NodeJS+Express+Typescript? what does the PHP equivalent of pm2 load-balancing look like and how does it compare?
no_wizard 3y ago
Symfony is better for scaling apps, I have found. I know Laravel is built on top of Symfony, but Symfony scales out of the box much better, Laravel is still the framework of bespoke one off projects in my experience (used it for years). It does not excel at maintainability of large apps. API Platform is really good for scaling CRUD endpoints too (its a Symfony project, or at least tightly Symfony adjacent) Of course, this is my experience (albeit over many years) however I wanted to just throw out a worthy alternative people really should look at.
willio58 3y ago
I hold a center position on this. I think PHP is great for a lot of things (especially these days). I even agree about Swift. Love that lang. But for web, I personally prefer Typescript frontend and backend combos. It's amazing to be able to write everything in one language. I largely tune out the arguments and new flashy frameworks, but I get why people call the JS ecosystem a hellhole. There are a lot of options out there. That being said, when your team is competent and balances functionality with new shiny stuff, it can be a real treat to have access to npm for frontend and backend.

by keyle 3y ago

pkphilip 3y ago

Absolutely. The developer experience with PHP is so far ahead of the Javascript "ecosystem" that it is ridiculous!

EGreg 3y ago

For a framework that is radically different but also PHP-native (since PHP 5), would you like to spend an hour playing with https://github.com/Qbix/Platform https://github.com/Qbix/Platform ? If you do, please share your experience in a comment. I’d love to hear it. I architected this framework over the last decade :)

pkphilip 3y ago
Very interesting. I am shocked that this is the first time I am hearing of your framework. Any chance you can make the app setup work using composure instead of cloning from the git repo? It may increase visibility to your project. But in any case, great job with the platform!
- EGreg 3y ago
  Will look into it. You likely meant composer?
KRAKRISMOTT 3y ago
The way your landing page is laid out isn't doing you any favors. If you are going to build a rapid application development platform, look at Retool for inspiration in terms of designs and copywriting. Cut the token stuff, otherwise you will lose customers or self select for crypto bros. The license you chose will turn off most professional development shops and the ones using the platform would be based in places like eastern Europe where the license will be ignored entirely. Your landing page design is fifteen years out of date, this is the sort of design used to bamboozle small trades shops and non tech companies in places like the midwest and the US south, you will have a hard time attracting the sort of web engineers that will help make it go viral. Again, it depends what sort of customers you are trying to sell to, but if you intend to make a profit, the usually advice would be to offer a cloud offering like WordPress. Selling web frameworks rarely work out unless your product is a specialized database. Your copywriting gives off strong old school enterprise sales vibes with a dash cryptomania. You are not going to get much organic product led growth among the US under 40 crowd here. I suggest taking a look at https://payloadcms.com/ https://payloadcms.com/ and study their design, execution, and copywriting.
- EGreg 3y ago
  You seem to know what you’re talking about. I checked out payloadcms though, that site is pretty terrible…
  - 3y ago

nstart 3y ago

There's javascript in the back. And there's javascript in the front. Curious what you use for application development on the frontend and if you have some recommendations for that? Thanks in advance!

keyle 3y ago
Most of the stuff we do now we do with "Laravel Livewire". It's quite brilliant really, even for modals etc. "look ma, no javascript!". Of course it does JS for you, you just don't see it. That's my favourite kind of Javascript - someone else's problem. Livewire is a mid-way between front-end backend, it's a progressive back-end with long polling like NextJS I suppose. From your end though, it takes care of all the security of running your own API, and correctness. You basically have dynamic front-end from the backend. If you want a full SPA or you need an application that is very responsive without network requests, I recommend VueJS - Livewire recommends AlpineJS, but of course you might be a React guy, that's fine, and use Laravel as a regular API. You can even use GraphQL if you want to die of a young age, have some weird kinky thing going or you have something to prove... Unless you're Facebook of course you probably don't need GraphQL.
- kaba0 3y ago
  > it's a progressive back-end with long polling like NextJS I suppose It’s kind of funny that this is the new best thing, when this is almost the same model JSF did decades ago.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - robertlagrant 3y ago
    It just had so many other issues with its ergonomics that this nice innovation was lost in the weeds a bit.
    - kaba0 3y ago

leke 3y ago

For those who are not familiar with the PHP ecosystem, any currently maintained framework is also fine. I myself use F3 for small personal projects. Totally agree about the single thread thinking is enough for most things. It of course depends on what you build. For example, I would use some language that runs on Beam for a chat platform.

makeitdouble 3y ago

> it's typed (now) To note, you'll need strict mode for type hints to be useful. https://www.php.net/manual/en/language.types.declarations.php https://www.php.net/manual/en/language.types.declarations.ph... The fun part is, instead of going for a generic strict mode system we would have expected, PHP went pragmatic: as most application won't be 100% strict typed, you need to declare it file by file, the icing on the cake being that the restriction applies on the caller of the functions, not the function itself. It makes for complicated situations, where for instance you can make an utility class that is 100% typed and follows strict typing, but if the caller of your class isn't, none of it will matter and types will be fuzzily coerced anyway.

muglug 3y ago
> To note, you'll need strict mode for type hints to be useful This is not really true — those type hints can be read by static analysis tools, preventing you from many of the issues that would also be caught in strict mode at runtime.
- jwdunne 3y ago
  You’re right. Psalm has been a god send on the project I’m working on. Unfortunately, it’s taking far too long for Laravel to catch up so parts of its API are a black hole for types. Especially things like request input, which returns a union of string and array as opposed to using a conditional return type. You end up with assertion soup every time you touch Laravel so over time the project uses less and less of it. A well-typed framework and set of libraries would be very nice.
  - muglug 3y ago
    > Psalm has been a god send on the project I’m working on. Thanks!
- dgb23 3y ago
  The type system isn’t expressive enough for these tools to catch anything but the most basic errors. In PHP, typing is for function signature documentation.

safety1st 3y ago

This 100%. It's actually a bit of a red flag to me these days if a developer turns up their nose at PHP. The language has matured a lot and building stuff with it is simple, cheap, straightforward and fast. If someone's still hating on PHP in 2023 it makes me wonder if they've been focused on more exotic technology because they were looking to pad their resume with more expensive skills, build science projects for their own amusement vs. what the business needed, etc. etc. Red flag. I've had these guys like this on my team and guess what, they built fancy over-engineered solutions to problems that no one had and then job hopped and left it for us to deal with. I can't speak for anyone else but I go into work every day for one purpose, and it's to ship shit which users use. I don't have room on my team for people who have other priorities. The amount of stuff you can get done with basically just PHP and Linux is amazing.

1123581321 3y ago
I love PHP, but a red flag?! If they’re busy in the Ruby/Java/C#/Go worlds (all get-it-done environments) then I’d just assume they don’t read many Hacker News praises for PHP. It’s easy to have not encountered it since the bad old days unless you work on a team that uses Laravel for some things. I do understand hiring someone who has that tradesman programming ethic and is comfortable with Linux, but that’s more requiring certain positive traits.
- vonseel 3y ago
  Exactly how I feel reading this thread, I had no idea PHP has changed so much.
- safety1st 3y ago
  Yeah, that's fair. Now that you mention it, 90% of these guys where I get that red flag instinct I described are Javascript devs or wannabe Javascript devs. It's as if the JS ecosystem has driven an entire generation of developers insane
  - 1123581321 3y ago
    I'm in complete agreement there; I've seen a number of those. I like to ask simple questions about what they like about programming to catch some of those issues and look for a certain amount of self-understanding.

acherion 3y ago

> Laravel is [...] reasonably well documented Hard disagree. Sorry, I don't have a computer science degree, why does their documentation make that assumption. I find their docs very hard to grok. PHP.net docs are no-frills no-fuss, straight to the point. Other frameworks are documented very well too, CakePHP comes to mind (at least, when I was using it last in v2 and v3). I can't say I've read the absolute latest version of their v10 docs, but when I was neck deep in 5.8 I found I had to switch to older versions of the documentation to read up on some of the most basic of Laravel features. eg. What's the syntax of using Form in Blade templates? I had to go back to v4.x docs to read up on it, Blade templating hardly got a mention in v5.x documentation, despite it being critical component in a Laravel application. If there was a bug in a project and I had management breathing a fire down at me because it's breaking the site / losing sales / stopping monthly reports from going out, I shouldn't need to decode computer science terms, or look through previous versions of documentation to find the solution. This is why, in my opinion, Laravel documentation sucks hard.

Elte 3y ago
The documentation reads like a tutorial, which is fine the first time you read it, and really annoying the next 99 times when you're just trying to find something. My biggest gripe though is that the majority of classes / methods aren't locally documented with comments, or only minimally. If I don't understand how a certain parameter behaves (or even what a function does), I have to go online and search for examples, or look through the docs hoping that it's explained. And don't get me started on Facades, which are a code discovery dead end... All that being said, my overall experience of working with PHP / Laravel is quite pleasant, probably more so than other technologies I've worked with in recent years. Everything has its issues I suppose.
- crabmusket 3y ago
  Yep, the tutorials/guides are really good, but as you say, the details aren't really covered. There are so many examples like "relationsToArray(): Get the model's relationships in array form."[1] Just an expanded version of the method name with no context or detail. [1]: https://laravel.com/api/10.x/Illuminate/Database/Eloquent/Model.html https://laravel.com/api/10.x/Illuminate/Database/Eloquent/Mo...

npsomaratna 3y ago

I've used maybe a couple of dozen programming languages over the years (yes, I'm that old). I see programming languages as tools—you want to pick the right tool for the right purpose. Whether a tool is right depends not just on the language itself, but also the ecosystem of libraries. Thanks to Laravel (along with Livewire and Alpine.js), and an ecosystem of libraries enabled by Composer, PHP is a great choice for web development. I'd not use it for, say, coding machine learning stuff though!

0xblinq 3y ago

I've always told my coworkers and friends that the programming language doesn't matter at all (despite I don't think there's anything wrong or worse than alternatives in modern PHP). What matters is the frameworks, libraries, ecosystem, editor support, available talent, culture around it, etc. And PHP (and the Laravel ecosystem) is rock solid in that area, the best by far. I'm a frontend dev at a pretty big company, but before this I worked on a Laravel + TurboLaravel (Hotwire, etc) and it's just incredible how easy and quick it was to build and maintain things.

kaba0 3y ago

Agree, though I would put Java in the same category as well (and actually prefer that). Great ecosystem, great frameworks for every conceivable business case, excellent performance, tooling.

devjab 3y ago

PHP has been a great language for a while, essentially since the world of enterprise became web based instead of application based. I suspect it’s not seeing too much adoption because it wasn’t always great, partly because a lot of enterprise is married to Java (which is frankly also in a decent state) and because JavaScript (with types) and Python lets your teams do a single language while also doing a react client or a lot of BI/ML. Most mature programming languages are nice to work with these days though. At least in my opinion. About the only one I dislike is C#, and that is mostly because whenever I need to use C# I need to use it with a combination of libraries (Odata, Entity Framework, Asp.versioning) as an example which simply don’t work together unless you overwrite/extend half of them. Because for most use cases C# is as excellent as all the rest. But PHP was essentially build for the modern use case of everything being web-based and it’s weird to see the reputation it still has. Then again, django is also an excellent tool for most modern work that doesn’t see the adoption it should. I’m so sick and tired of having to deal with things like umbraco failing at things that have been a fundamental part of django for longer than some of the people reading this post have been alive. :p But I guess its all those things that keep me well paid. So maybe I shouldn’t be too angry about it.

Demoloto 3y ago

Have a look at quarkus. Thanks to JVM you have really good out of the box debugging features including hot code replacement and profiling. You can use kotlin which is a really really good language in comparison to PHP. There is no need in my opinion to write real applications with PHP.

abujazar 3y ago
In my experience Laravel teams are WAY more productive than Quarkus teams though.

liendolucas 3y ago

> It's fast, it's typed (now), it's reliable. Fast, the most overrated feature that we developers endlessly look for. How fast? How much are you winning, milliseconds, nanoseconds, picoseconds? It's extremely likely that if something is slow is because you're doing something wrong regardless the language and/or framework. It's reliable PHP? Well, so are Python, Ruby, Go and other friends, right? > Laravel is pretty darn rock solid. Again, so are: Rails, Flask, Django and many other matured frameworks out there that have been baked for years now. Unless you pick some toy framework project written in a weekend I'd say there are plenty of rock solid options out there. > Just ignore the fugly standard library inconsistencies of (old) PHP... I'll just prefer to pick a language that narrows/discards that dark side as much as possible. Very long time ago I couldn't finish reading a page whose author painstakingly detailed every single inconsistent feature of PHP (literally it could have taken a whole day to read). After that horrifying testament I said myself to ever get my feet wet with PHP. Now in a team with PHP you will need to agree which "inconsistencies" should be left out either by adding some tool to automatically watch for that or educating onboarding members of your team. > Oh and it's free. All of it. PHP, Laravel. Aren't the other friends out there also free? All of them? > When I consider the solutions of flask and microservices... Flask AND microservices are two completely different things. You can have a full fledged monolithic Flask application or go with the microservices rabbit hole with ANY technology and/or programming language that you want. So PHP, well... Nah. At least not for me. There are plenty of interesting languages and technologies out there to be learnt and PHP for me is definitely not one of them. One question aside out of ignorance. How do people debug in PHP? Many many many years ago I worked for an extremely short time for a company that were heavily using Laravel. I didn't know how to debug a PHP program at a time. People told me to simply do "prints" to the rendered template. If I remember correctly I also tried to find some tutorial or howto on debugging with PHP only to be unsuccessful. I'd be interested to know because with Python is just a joke to do that. Install ipython and ipdb. Then set `import ipdb;ipdb.set_trace()` and you are done, you get the full fledged mighty console where you can see everything you need to track down an issue. Up today I haven't got the opportunity to testify someone using a similar capability with PHP but hey I might be wrong and something of the like is out there.

a_subsystem 3y ago

creamyhorror 3y ago

Is C#/.NET overly complex? I'm used to Laravel and have been exploring C#/.NET, which while a bit complicated is nice for the static typing. I've been hearing that for web apps the Laravel ecosystem is still simpler and more batteries-included than the equivalent ASP.NET. IME, Laravel's "easy deployment" story is heavily linked to the paid service Forge, and installing dependencies during deployment is a bit slow plus takes a /lot/ of memory (we're using old Composer and Laravel versions though). What's your take?

shp0ngle 3y ago

PHP has types now??

ceejayoz 3y ago
Yes. Since 2015.

mschuster91 3y ago

> Just ignore the fugly standard library inconsistencies of (old) PHP, every language has their toilet corner... Personally, I do like the way the standard library is - almost all cases of where people whine about it being inconsistent, it is a consequence of the PHP standard library and many of its extensions being extremely thin wrappers around libc and C/C++ libraries in general. That, in turn, makes it often possible to just take straight C library example code, copy it into a PHP file, add a $ in front of all variables, and have it magically work. (IMHO, it's no surprise that the whiners tend to be younger programmers who have grown up with Java in their university education - us older "neckbeards" are so used to the C world that its conventions are second nature for us)

a_subsystem 3y ago
>> That, in turn, makes it often possible to just take straight C library example code, copy it into a PHP file, add a $ in front of all variables, and have it magically work. * head explodes awesome I know what I'm doing this afternoon!
- mschuster91 3y ago
  Writing PHP bindings is pretty easy as well (once you manage to sort out build tooling, but that's a mess anywhere in C). Have fun :)

topicseed 3y ago

The NPM/JS/TS hellhole is real. Moved on from it a couple of years ago, and today I switch between Go and PHP (WP custom stuff). Obviously Go and PHP are two very different languages but they bring me peace in ways JS never did. Especially when reopening older projects.

mattgreenrocks 3y ago
It's goofy to me how many devs think the art of writing software necessitates continually updating dependencies to have things not break. You're running in place! You could be working on something new that generates value, or adding features to what you have in that time.
- topicseed 3y ago
  To me, dependency management is a part of software maintenance and it's not always just 'running in place'. Updates bring security patches (sometimes not publicly explained or disclosed), performance improvements, and new features that could enhance the value generated by the said software.
  - taskforcegemini 3y ago
    you only point out positives, but the negatives are usually felt a lot more intensively

deleted 3y ago

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jjice 3y ago

I agree that PHP is a fine language these days, if using modern features and techniques. I've seen plenty of recently written PHP that looks like it was written in 1997. That said, PHP does have complexity to running like node does with pm2, Apache or Nginx in front. Is it as bad, depends on the person, but it does suck IMO.

z3t4 3y ago

> It's single threaded You could make it single threaded. But the standard is multi threaded, and if you have more then 100 users will be have to deal with locks. That said, locks/threads are still easier to manage then async code.

throwaway2990 3y ago

> Oh and it's free. All of it. PHP, Laravel. And its hosting has always been the cheapest. You don't need a particular OS or certain cloud providers. Unless you’re getting shared hosting, then it’s true for most things now. You don’t need a specific OS or cloud provider for .NET, Java, Go, Rust… etc > When I consider the solutions of flask and microservices I've left behind, the many node processes running with pm2, the complexity of .NET solutions... PHP just works, and it's easy to make reliable... And if it's slow, it's because I'm doing dumb stuff, not because of dark corner edge case I happened to be tripping into. .NET isn’t anymore complex than a PHP app. Unless you write many layers of abstractions. And nothing stops you from doing the same thing in PHP.

unsupp0rted 3y ago

The main reason I don't use PHP is because the browser doesn't. Sooner or later I end up having to write Javascript and lots* of it. Therefore I use it across the board. *where "lots" = logic that needs to exist on both client and server side

Thorentis 3y ago

All those arguments would apply to Python and Django in my opinion.

Alifatisk 3y ago

> It's the BMX of the languages. How should I interpret this? The language is cool? Can perform cool tricks?

deltarholamda 3y ago
If you want to ride a bike, you can ride the bike. If you want to do tricks, you can do tricks. PHP makes simple stuff easy and difficult stuff possible. (But you're not going to win the Tour de France on a BMX bike.) Nowadays, a lot of other things also do this, but PHP was the first to really "get" this. I understand it's not for everybody, and for certain things, other languages are certainly better. But there's precious little that you can't do with PHP, since it's been around for so long and has been growing with the Web from pretty much the very beginning.
mxuribe 3y ago
And...the language can be taken to a high school prom - like any BMX bike can be: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPVJzi7Ta9w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPVJzi7Ta9w Sorry, could not resist! lol :-D

user3939382 3y ago

Most things wrong with PHP that I really care about are currently being resolved in Psalm which undoubtedly will eventually (might be 10-15 years who knows) be rolled into the language.

yazan94 3y ago

I know NodeJS well but have never used PHP, but I can attest that using PM2 is a pain and node_modules deps issues can be a hair-pulling event. But the package.json scripts provide a simple and built-in way to run basic build tasks. There's always an ~~app~~package for that, no matter what "that" is. There are also tons of tutorials, examples, and snippets for everything you want to do to get up and running quickly. TBH I really enjoy working with Typescript, it really brings sanity to JS (as long as you are consistent with it) and Express is dead simple and just makes sense. Would you mind sharing your insights into why one should go with modern PHP+Laravel instead of NodeJS+Express+Typescript? what does the PHP equivalent of pm2 load-balancing look like and how does it compare?

no_wizard 3y ago

Symfony is better for scaling apps, I have found. I know Laravel is built on top of Symfony, but Symfony scales out of the box much better, Laravel is still the framework of bespoke one off projects in my experience (used it for years). It does not excel at maintainability of large apps. API Platform is really good for scaling CRUD endpoints too (its a Symfony project, or at least tightly Symfony adjacent) Of course, this is my experience (albeit over many years) however I wanted to just throw out a worthy alternative people really should look at.

willio58 3y ago

I hold a center position on this. I think PHP is great for a lot of things (especially these days). I even agree about Swift. Love that lang. But for web, I personally prefer Typescript frontend and backend combos. It's amazing to be able to write everything in one language. I largely tune out the arguments and new flashy frameworks, but I get why people call the JS ecosystem a hellhole. There are a lot of options out there. That being said, when your team is competent and balances functionality with new shiny stuff, it can be a real treat to have access to npm for frontend and backend.