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I see the advancements in php and I think I could go back by now but I know that 90% of comapnies recruit you to fix some wordpress 4/php 5 bugy and custom plug

by fHr 3y ago

I see the advancements in php and I think I could go back by now but I know that 90% of comapnies recruit you to fix some wordpress 4/php 5 bugy and custom plugin infested site that should just be made from scratch but because there is no money and "just quickly fix it in 1 workday" gives me php ptsd once again.

hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago
PHP is probably like Excel, in that is is really helpful from a raw productivity standpoint to be good at it, but you really don't want other people to know that you're good at it.
- bemusedthrow75 3y ago
  Mmm. It really depends on whether you have the scope to start your projects and stay in control.
- mschuster91 3y ago
  IME, that also makes PHP worth it for shell scripts. It's miles better than the common baseline that's bash/perl... but once word gets out, people will ask you to rewrite their 30 kLOC sh monstrum into something readable...
- naranha 3y ago
  idk, when I want productivity I go with nodejs these days. lodash for some quick data crunching and pg or mariadb for db access using promises simply beats native php functions. with express you can spawn a http server in under 10 lines, while with php you need to setup apache/nginx or docker. at some point in the past PHP was the most productive tool for some quick & dirty coding, but not anymore for me.
  - withinboredom 3y ago
    I recommend checking out FrankenPHP, where you can spin up a production php server with a single cli command, or compile your php into a self-executable binary. I’m a contributor over there.
bemusedthrow75 3y ago
This is absolutely a problem. It's now a powerful, fast, flexible platform with a load of amazing libraries and tools -- graphql, webhooks, databases, all sorts. There's an amazing level of recent PHP support out there you can host on. And then there are the terrible applications, written from inadequate specs, in a hurry, by people who just aren't developers. And they are embedded, and people want them fixed. You have to have a knack for, and some enjoyment from, that work. The worst I have encountered is a Wordpress site built by some people who did not know Wordpress could do several important things, so they'd subverted the loop, ignored where they could hook, and embedded wordpress outside the loop to do stuff, which was a nightmare. The second worst was, it must be said, a Laravel app, but that problem wasn't the PHP so much (though it had been written in a hurry with an awful lot of duplication that we could have refactored out), it was the unreliable assumptions made about MySQL default result ordering. Which is actually the secondary problem here: people who make bad PHP decisions usually make bad SQL, email and HTTP decisions too. If building your own thing from scratch, or starting a new project, etc., PHP is a blast now, actually. But the very old things... not so much.
- zerocrates 3y ago
  Yes, back in the "old days" of PHP you could ignore ordering and grouping on MySQL and it would pretty reliably give you back things in a stable "order of insertion" order where there was ambiguity. Of course that was never guaranteed and subsequent optimizations and changes have really removed that ability to ignore order in many situations. Plus, MySQL also changed to actually check if you're doing GROUP BY properly by default. MySQL was always a big part of the PHP story so it's fitting they've followed similar arcs of improvement and growing pains over the years.
cardanome 3y ago
Not my experience. You will see some legacy code but that is to be expected in any coding job. Wordpress is kind of it's own ecosystem. I have been a PHP dev for years and never touched any Wordpress code. Most jobs recruit for specific frameworks like symfony or laravel.

by fHr 3y ago

hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago

PHP is probably like Excel, in that is is really helpful from a raw productivity standpoint to be good at it, but you really don't want other people to know that you're good at it.

bemusedthrow75 3y ago
Mmm. It really depends on whether you have the scope to start your projects and stay in control.
mschuster91 3y ago
IME, that also makes PHP worth it for shell scripts. It's miles better than the common baseline that's bash/perl... but once word gets out, people will ask you to rewrite their 30 kLOC sh monstrum into something readable...
naranha 3y ago
idk, when I want productivity I go with nodejs these days. lodash for some quick data crunching and pg or mariadb for db access using promises simply beats native php functions. with express you can spawn a http server in under 10 lines, while with php you need to setup apache/nginx or docker. at some point in the past PHP was the most productive tool for some quick & dirty coding, but not anymore for me.
- withinboredom 3y ago
  I recommend checking out FrankenPHP, where you can spin up a production php server with a single cli command, or compile your php into a self-executable binary. I’m a contributor over there.

bemusedthrow75 3y ago

This is absolutely a problem. It's now a powerful, fast, flexible platform with a load of amazing libraries and tools -- graphql, webhooks, databases, all sorts. There's an amazing level of recent PHP support out there you can host on. And then there are the terrible applications, written from inadequate specs, in a hurry, by people who just aren't developers. And they are embedded, and people want them fixed. You have to have a knack for, and some enjoyment from, that work. The worst I have encountered is a Wordpress site built by some people who did not know Wordpress could do several important things, so they'd subverted the loop, ignored where they could hook, and embedded wordpress outside the loop to do stuff, which was a nightmare. The second worst was, it must be said, a Laravel app, but that problem wasn't the PHP so much (though it had been written in a hurry with an awful lot of duplication that we could have refactored out), it was the unreliable assumptions made about MySQL default result ordering. Which is actually the secondary problem here: people who make bad PHP decisions usually make bad SQL, email and HTTP decisions too. If building your own thing from scratch, or starting a new project, etc., PHP is a blast now, actually. But the very old things... not so much.

zerocrates 3y ago
Yes, back in the "old days" of PHP you could ignore ordering and grouping on MySQL and it would pretty reliably give you back things in a stable "order of insertion" order where there was ambiguity. Of course that was never guaranteed and subsequent optimizations and changes have really removed that ability to ignore order in many situations. Plus, MySQL also changed to actually check if you're doing GROUP BY properly by default. MySQL was always a big part of the PHP story so it's fitting they've followed similar arcs of improvement and growing pains over the years.

cardanome 3y ago

Not my experience. You will see some legacy code but that is to be expected in any coding job. Wordpress is kind of it's own ecosystem. I have been a PHP dev for years and never touched any Wordpress code. Most jobs recruit for specific frameworks like symfony or laravel.