6 ms·

It's such a perfect match for the HTTP protocol. You drop a file on a server and you're good to go. My toy VPS is full of useful scripts that I use on a daily b

It's such a perfect match for the HTTP protocol. You drop a file on a server and you're good to go. My toy VPS is full of useful scripts that I use on a daily basis. Most of them are literally one big file with all of the code, no external dependencies. Caddy proxy the request into PHP-FPM and send back the response, no bullshit. Of course this is not what we see at production-grade software, but I really enjoy the fact that the language was designed with the HTTP protocol in mind. It's really unique in this sense.

tsukurimashou 3y ago
yes, and the fact that you can just put inline HTML outside of PHP tags is so useful and convenient
- zer00eyz 3y ago
  LOL The fact that I can't tell if this comment is sarcasm or snark or serious says a lot. PHP mixed with HTML was one of the "bad ideas" that hurt PHP. It was a bad practice that got out of hand. Now why no one bats an eye at node/react doing this very thing and calling it JSX is beyond me but...
  - mschuster91 3y ago
    > PHP mixed with HTML was one of the "bad ideas" that hurt PHP. It was a bad practice that got out of hand. So what, JSPs are just the same. In the end what matters is the speed to Get Things Done, and there's utterly nothing competing with PHP, closely followed by Tomcat+JSP as you can use the insane amount of interfaces with just about everything that the Java world has.
  - FriedrichN 3y ago
    Why is it a "bad idea"? I'm genuinely curious. It works great, it's fast and you don't have to learn a new templating language or dialect every 2-3 years. Or try to figure out how to do trivial things like loops in loops. I don't quite get the use of templating engines in PHP because PHP is a templating engine itself.
    - zer00eyz 3y ago
      A few reasons: 1. It's a loaded foot gun. PHP was notorious for 1000 line files with HTML and SQL all mixed together. (I speak from personal experiences on this) 2. Templating languages are "portable" (In theory). Have a mixed env of PHP and Java... there were templating languages that would work for both teams, it took a step out of scalability.... XML and XSLT were the promise land on this one, but we fucked all that up. Portability is a big deal. We're still slinging CSV files for a good reason.
      - FriedrichN 3y ago
        1. I've seen enough terrible things in my time, but you can make a mess in any language using any number of frameworks. And it's been a hot minute since I've seen one of those 1000+ line PHP+SQL+HTML+JS+CSS monstrosities in any serious environment. Improper use of templating engines or trying to use templating engines that aren't up to the task can give you headaches just as well. Sadly no amount of frameworks or templating engines can stop a bad programmer from writing bad code, in the end we're craftsmen who need to learn how to use our tools. 2. This could be a valid use case, but a rather rare one. XML+XSLT is something that sounds fantastic on paper, but as anyone who actually worked with it knows it ranges from a big disappointment to an absolute nightmare.
        rezonant 3y ago
        > Sadly no amount of frameworks or templating engines can stop a bad programmer from writing bad code, It's not a matter of whether the code is bad or not, but how bad. The entire point of frameworks is to add guard rails to help you stay disciplined and avoid cutting corners on separation of concerns. Using PHP as a template language tempts developers to violate SOC every day.
        FriedrichN 3y ago
        If you need guard rails to keep you from performing database manipulations in your views you have other problems to worry about. And if anything people are cutting corners on SOC in the M and C part of MVC, not the V part. Also I don't see how using a loop or conditional in PHP is any different from using one in a templating engine, aside from the overhead of the engine and added annoyance of debugging another language in your project.
  - bemusedthrow75 3y ago
    > Now why no one bats an eye at node/react doing this very thing and calling it JSX is beyond me but... Indeed.
  - pintxo 3y ago
    It did make total sense at the time. Consider we are talking a time where you had static html. It is obviously good to be able to automate generating web pages based on say the state of a database. As this gives you up-to-date pages without someone having to manually build them. And if that - automatically build web-pages from a database - is your goal and your current state of the art is static pages, then creating a language you can interject into your static pages, to build the page dynamically is a no brainer.
    - rezonant 3y ago
      In defense of the PHP community, things like Symfony attempt to create some sanity when it comes to separation of concerns. Unfortunately, when people talk about PHP they inevitably talk about raw, framework less PHP and act like it's as sensible as something structured and disciplined like Ruby on Rails or ASP.NET MVC.
  - rezonant 3y ago
    > Now why no one bats an eye at node/react doing this very thing and calling it JSX is beyond me but... Hey don't drag Node into this, you aren't forced to do any of that. React to me feels like SPA developers discovering the idea of PHP and thinking they invented it. This shouldn't be surprising, since React came from Facebook, and Facebook historically is a PHP shop. Mixing your business logic and presentation is a bad idea, but it's very attractive when you don't have the informative scars You might say, doesn't Facebook have the scars to avoid designing React? Well, when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. PS: I would suspect the down voting is just the "LOL", otherwise it's a fair comment.
    - zer00eyz 3y ago
      > You might say, doesn't Facebook have the scars to avoid designing React? Well, when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. This is accurate, and I never thought of it that way. > PS: I would suspect the down voting is just the "LOL", otherwise it's a fair comment. I did laugh out loud because I did not know WHAT to make of the comment. As someone who buttered my bread on PHP when everyone hated it, it was a sign of how times have changed!
  - mrkeen 3y ago
    > PHP mixed with HTML was one of the "bad ideas" that hurt PHP. It was a bad practice that got out of hand. PHP receives its share of criticism, and HTML lives on relatively unscathed. So if mixing PHP/HTML is a problem, you'd probably throw out the PHP and keep the HTML. Also, isn't this use case PHP's origin? A dev wanted some programmable HTML?
  - flir 3y ago
    You're getting downvotes, but that genuinely puzzled me the first time I saw JSX. ("This looks a lot like 'include("form.php")' in old-school PHP. What am I missing?") Turns out I wasn't missing much. I've mentally pegged it as an example of "the pendulum swings" - thin client vs thick client, centre vs edge, tight coupling vs loose coupling, etc.
    - rezonant 3y ago
      Discerning developers avoid PHP for the reasons you mention, and yet it powers a frightening percentage of the Web. React is popular for the same reason as PHP. I can only hope the industry corrects for this soon, because I challenge you to find a startup building raw PHP in 2024, yet nearly all of them build with React.
  - Shish2k 3y ago
    > react doing this very thing and calling it JSX In PHP, “HTML" is string concatenation; in React, “HTML" is an HTML-flavoured bit of syntax sugar over HTML-generating functions (and you are still welcome to call the functions yourself, if you want your HTML-generation code to avoid looking like HTML). Aside from looking kind-of similar if you squint, I’d say the differences and pros and cons are fairly significant (For example the IMO worst thing about the PHP approach, the ease of shooting yourself in the foot with XSS holes, is a non-issue in JSX).
    - withinboredom 3y ago
      I built the Swytch Framework to exactly hit these spots. As far as I know, it’s the only templating system out there with contextual escaping (you write html, it parses the html using a streaming parser, escapes output, then writes it out). I use it exactly for rapid dev of stupid ideas. I’m not sure if I’d use it in a production environment because it is quite slow.
  - foul 3y ago
    > PHP mixed with HTML was one of the "bad ideas" that hurt PHP. It was a bad practice that got out of hand. If you think of PHP as prototype-only, mixing tags and HTML is very convenient, like it is with the other thousand templating tools. And obviously it's more a problem of XSS through badly sanitized inputs more than the mix in itself, blah blah blah It's PHP in production a bad practice that got out of hand.
  - crabmusket 3y ago
    > Now why no one bats an eye at node/react doing this very thing and calling it JSX is beyond me but... Because it's not "this very thing". HTML around PHP is output directly to stdout. JSX is just syntax for literals.
jdpedrie 3y ago
On the other hand, vanilla PHP effectively "hides" HTTP from the programmer. I taught myself PHP in middle school and high school as my first programming experience, and had no concept of a thing called "HTTP" for a very very long time. I knew the pieces of it that PHP gave me. I knew what $_POST, $_GET, $_SERVER, $_HEADER, set/getcookie(), were and how to manipulate them, and I knew the rules (setting a header after "echo" made it complain), but I didn't understand how that all hung together as a thing outside PHP called HTTP. When I did learn about HTTP, it was very easy, since I already knew it without knowing I knew it, so maybe that's in favor of your point, but there's much to be said for the actual understanding that I didn't have at first. When I started interviewing people for PHP entry-level jobs, asking about HTTP was one of the ways I gauged how well applicants understood their work at a conceptual level.
- fideloper 3y ago
  This mirrors my experience exactly - it took me an embarrassingly long time to learn about http and what it means to be stateless. It also took learning other languages to understand how PHP is so unique in how tied to HTTP it is (rebuilding its entire universe every request). (these learnings happened when moving beyond the PHP-based CMS style of development - agency style work on my case - to make more custom software).
  - jimbokun 3y ago
    I imagine it took you awhile to understand what “stateless“ meant, because you weren’t exposed to the default state-fullness of most other languages, so didn’t realize stateless wasn’t the default.
    - fideloper 3y ago
      Yeah, that's for sure true.

tsukurimashou 3y ago

yes, and the fact that you can just put inline HTML outside of PHP tags is so useful and convenient

zer00eyz 3y ago
LOL The fact that I can't tell if this comment is sarcasm or snark or serious says a lot. PHP mixed with HTML was one of the "bad ideas" that hurt PHP. It was a bad practice that got out of hand. Now why no one bats an eye at node/react doing this very thing and calling it JSX is beyond me but...
- mschuster91 3y ago
  > PHP mixed with HTML was one of the "bad ideas" that hurt PHP. It was a bad practice that got out of hand. So what, JSPs are just the same. In the end what matters is the speed to Get Things Done, and there's utterly nothing competing with PHP, closely followed by Tomcat+JSP as you can use the insane amount of interfaces with just about everything that the Java world has.
- FriedrichN 3y ago
  Why is it a "bad idea"? I'm genuinely curious. It works great, it's fast and you don't have to learn a new templating language or dialect every 2-3 years. Or try to figure out how to do trivial things like loops in loops. I don't quite get the use of templating engines in PHP because PHP is a templating engine itself.
  - zer00eyz 3y ago
    A few reasons: 1. It's a loaded foot gun. PHP was notorious for 1000 line files with HTML and SQL all mixed together. (I speak from personal experiences on this) 2. Templating languages are "portable" (In theory). Have a mixed env of PHP and Java... there were templating languages that would work for both teams, it took a step out of scalability.... XML and XSLT were the promise land on this one, but we fucked all that up. Portability is a big deal. We're still slinging CSV files for a good reason.
    - FriedrichN 3y ago
      1. I've seen enough terrible things in my time, but you can make a mess in any language using any number of frameworks. And it's been a hot minute since I've seen one of those 1000+ line PHP+SQL+HTML+JS+CSS monstrosities in any serious environment. Improper use of templating engines or trying to use templating engines that aren't up to the task can give you headaches just as well. Sadly no amount of frameworks or templating engines can stop a bad programmer from writing bad code, in the end we're craftsmen who need to learn how to use our tools. 2. This could be a valid use case, but a rather rare one. XML+XSLT is something that sounds fantastic on paper, but as anyone who actually worked with it knows it ranges from a big disappointment to an absolute nightmare.
      - rezonant 3y ago
        > Sadly no amount of frameworks or templating engines can stop a bad programmer from writing bad code, It's not a matter of whether the code is bad or not, but how bad. The entire point of frameworks is to add guard rails to help you stay disciplined and avoid cutting corners on separation of concerns. Using PHP as a template language tempts developers to violate SOC every day.
        FriedrichN 3y ago
        If you need guard rails to keep you from performing database manipulations in your views you have other problems to worry about. And if anything people are cutting corners on SOC in the M and C part of MVC, not the V part. Also I don't see how using a loop or conditional in PHP is any different from using one in a templating engine, aside from the overhead of the engine and added annoyance of debugging another language in your project.
- bemusedthrow75 3y ago
  > Now why no one bats an eye at node/react doing this very thing and calling it JSX is beyond me but... Indeed.
- pintxo 3y ago
  It did make total sense at the time. Consider we are talking a time where you had static html. It is obviously good to be able to automate generating web pages based on say the state of a database. As this gives you up-to-date pages without someone having to manually build them. And if that - automatically build web-pages from a database - is your goal and your current state of the art is static pages, then creating a language you can interject into your static pages, to build the page dynamically is a no brainer.
  - rezonant 3y ago
    In defense of the PHP community, things like Symfony attempt to create some sanity when it comes to separation of concerns. Unfortunately, when people talk about PHP they inevitably talk about raw, framework less PHP and act like it's as sensible as something structured and disciplined like Ruby on Rails or ASP.NET MVC.
- rezonant 3y ago
  > Now why no one bats an eye at node/react doing this very thing and calling it JSX is beyond me but... Hey don't drag Node into this, you aren't forced to do any of that. React to me feels like SPA developers discovering the idea of PHP and thinking they invented it. This shouldn't be surprising, since React came from Facebook, and Facebook historically is a PHP shop. Mixing your business logic and presentation is a bad idea, but it's very attractive when you don't have the informative scars You might say, doesn't Facebook have the scars to avoid designing React? Well, when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. PS: I would suspect the down voting is just the "LOL", otherwise it's a fair comment.
  - zer00eyz 3y ago
    > You might say, doesn't Facebook have the scars to avoid designing React? Well, when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. This is accurate, and I never thought of it that way. > PS: I would suspect the down voting is just the "LOL", otherwise it's a fair comment. I did laugh out loud because I did not know WHAT to make of the comment. As someone who buttered my bread on PHP when everyone hated it, it was a sign of how times have changed!
- mrkeen 3y ago
  > PHP mixed with HTML was one of the "bad ideas" that hurt PHP. It was a bad practice that got out of hand. PHP receives its share of criticism, and HTML lives on relatively unscathed. So if mixing PHP/HTML is a problem, you'd probably throw out the PHP and keep the HTML. Also, isn't this use case PHP's origin? A dev wanted some programmable HTML?
- flir 3y ago
  You're getting downvotes, but that genuinely puzzled me the first time I saw JSX. ("This looks a lot like 'include("form.php")' in old-school PHP. What am I missing?") Turns out I wasn't missing much. I've mentally pegged it as an example of "the pendulum swings" - thin client vs thick client, centre vs edge, tight coupling vs loose coupling, etc.
  - rezonant 3y ago
    Discerning developers avoid PHP for the reasons you mention, and yet it powers a frightening percentage of the Web. React is popular for the same reason as PHP. I can only hope the industry corrects for this soon, because I challenge you to find a startup building raw PHP in 2024, yet nearly all of them build with React.
- Shish2k 3y ago
  > react doing this very thing and calling it JSX In PHP, “HTML" is string concatenation; in React, “HTML" is an HTML-flavoured bit of syntax sugar over HTML-generating functions (and you are still welcome to call the functions yourself, if you want your HTML-generation code to avoid looking like HTML). Aside from looking kind-of similar if you squint, I’d say the differences and pros and cons are fairly significant (For example the IMO worst thing about the PHP approach, the ease of shooting yourself in the foot with XSS holes, is a non-issue in JSX).
  - withinboredom 3y ago
    I built the Swytch Framework to exactly hit these spots. As far as I know, it’s the only templating system out there with contextual escaping (you write html, it parses the html using a streaming parser, escapes output, then writes it out). I use it exactly for rapid dev of stupid ideas. I’m not sure if I’d use it in a production environment because it is quite slow.
- foul 3y ago
  > PHP mixed with HTML was one of the "bad ideas" that hurt PHP. It was a bad practice that got out of hand. If you think of PHP as prototype-only, mixing tags and HTML is very convenient, like it is with the other thousand templating tools. And obviously it's more a problem of XSS through badly sanitized inputs more than the mix in itself, blah blah blah It's PHP in production a bad practice that got out of hand.
- crabmusket 3y ago
  > Now why no one bats an eye at node/react doing this very thing and calling it JSX is beyond me but... Because it's not "this very thing". HTML around PHP is output directly to stdout. JSX is just syntax for literals.

jdpedrie 3y ago

On the other hand, vanilla PHP effectively "hides" HTTP from the programmer. I taught myself PHP in middle school and high school as my first programming experience, and had no concept of a thing called "HTTP" for a very very long time. I knew the pieces of it that PHP gave me. I knew what $_POST, $_GET, $_SERVER, $_HEADER, set/getcookie(), were and how to manipulate them, and I knew the rules (setting a header after "echo" made it complain), but I didn't understand how that all hung together as a thing outside PHP called HTTP. When I did learn about HTTP, it was very easy, since I already knew it without knowing I knew it, so maybe that's in favor of your point, but there's much to be said for the actual understanding that I didn't have at first. When I started interviewing people for PHP entry-level jobs, asking about HTTP was one of the ways I gauged how well applicants understood their work at a conceptual level.

fideloper 3y ago
This mirrors my experience exactly - it took me an embarrassingly long time to learn about http and what it means to be stateless. It also took learning other languages to understand how PHP is so unique in how tied to HTTP it is (rebuilding its entire universe every request). (these learnings happened when moving beyond the PHP-based CMS style of development - agency style work on my case - to make more custom software).
- jimbokun 3y ago
  I imagine it took you awhile to understand what “stateless“ meant, because you weren’t exposed to the default state-fullness of most other languages, so didn’t realize stateless wasn’t the default.
  - fideloper 3y ago
    Yeah, that's for sure true.