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The thing that I think PHP developers hate most about the Fractal of Bad Design article is hearing it from full-stack JS developers. They really do not have the

The thing that I think PHP developers hate most about the Fractal of Bad Design article is hearing it from full-stack JS developers. They really do not have the moral high ground. PHP has improved since in a way that is rarely considered when reposting it, but JS has some deep language horrors of its own still, and many novel JS horrors like NPM have emerged largely since the Fractal article was published. As the King sang, so eloquently: o/~ clean up your own backyard o/~

crabmusket 3y ago
As someone who writes PHP and JS professionally every day, I think they're leagues apart.* Sure, people love to look down on JS, but its fundamentals are much stronger than PHP's. PHP is no longer a terrible language- recent editions have made leaps and bounds on language features, and the ecosystem around Symfony is great. But on a weekly or monthly basis I run into something that makes me want to head-desk. JS's recent(ish) language improvements like `let` and ESM have been much more fundamentally significant than PHP's IMO, where we're still stuck with bad scoping and Java-brained class autoloading. *Not leagues apart in terms of productivity. I can certainly get a lot done with PHP. I mean leagues apart at their foundation, the basic concepts at work in the language. Most of that can be ignored until it rears up to harass you. Here's a great example of something similar to an issue that bit me last month: https://stackoverflow.com/q/3307409 https://stackoverflow.com/q/3307409
- rafark 3y ago
  > As someone who writes PHP and JS professionally every day, I think they're leagues apart. As someone who’s written a lot of php and JavaScript, I think the same thing but in the opposite way. JavaScript just can’t compare when it comes to designing a complex OO system.
- asddubs 3y ago
  I actually think the opposite is the case. let is nice, but javascript has no typing whatsoever. The PHP type system isn't perfect (with a lack of generics being the biggest pain point), but in javascript you just have to annotate and pray (or use typescript and compile it back to javascript, hoping people interface with your code correctly). And PHP has a dedicated string concatenation operator, which has helped it avoid horrors like '2' + 2 = 22 that javascript has to offer. Javascript will just straight up let you add properties to any object on purpose or by accident, which is useful for polyfills but also fucking horrible for bug avoidance and an invitation for less restrained individuals to make true abominations.
  - crabmusket 3y ago
    All of those things I see as productivity issues, not language fundamentals. TypeScript solves types in JS for me the way Laravel solves superglobals in PHP. Adding properties to an object is fine IMO. Arbitrary properties and prototypes are, to me, a much cleaner system than PHP's somewhat confused mix of array, object and class. The lower you go in JS the more unity of concepts there is, whereas the lower you go in PHP the more hacks you discover. All of the above said, I would prefer a string concatenation operator to overloading +. JS template literals mostly solve that for me in practise. And what I really actually want is an equivalent of Haskell's <> or mconcat, which concatenates anything monoidal - strings, lists, etc.

crabmusket 3y ago

As someone who writes PHP and JS professionally every day, I think they're leagues apart.* Sure, people love to look down on JS, but its fundamentals are much stronger than PHP's. PHP is no longer a terrible language- recent editions have made leaps and bounds on language features, and the ecosystem around Symfony is great. But on a weekly or monthly basis I run into something that makes me want to head-desk. JS's recent(ish) language improvements like `let` and ESM have been much more fundamentally significant than PHP's IMO, where we're still stuck with bad scoping and Java-brained class autoloading. *Not leagues apart in terms of productivity. I can certainly get a lot done with PHP. I mean leagues apart at their foundation, the basic concepts at work in the language. Most of that can be ignored until it rears up to harass you. Here's a great example of something similar to an issue that bit me last month: https://stackoverflow.com/q/3307409 https://stackoverflow.com/q/3307409

rafark 3y ago
> As someone who writes PHP and JS professionally every day, I think they're leagues apart. As someone who’s written a lot of php and JavaScript, I think the same thing but in the opposite way. JavaScript just can’t compare when it comes to designing a complex OO system.
asddubs 3y ago
I actually think the opposite is the case. let is nice, but javascript has no typing whatsoever. The PHP type system isn't perfect (with a lack of generics being the biggest pain point), but in javascript you just have to annotate and pray (or use typescript and compile it back to javascript, hoping people interface with your code correctly). And PHP has a dedicated string concatenation operator, which has helped it avoid horrors like '2' + 2 = 22 that javascript has to offer. Javascript will just straight up let you add properties to any object on purpose or by accident, which is useful for polyfills but also fucking horrible for bug avoidance and an invitation for less restrained individuals to make true abominations.
- crabmusket 3y ago
  All of those things I see as productivity issues, not language fundamentals. TypeScript solves types in JS for me the way Laravel solves superglobals in PHP. Adding properties to an object is fine IMO. Arbitrary properties and prototypes are, to me, a much cleaner system than PHP's somewhat confused mix of array, object and class. The lower you go in JS the more unity of concepts there is, whereas the lower you go in PHP the more hacks you discover. All of the above said, I would prefer a string concatenation operator to overloading +. JS template literals mostly solve that for me in practise. And what I really actually want is an equivalent of Haskell's <> or mconcat, which concatenates anything monoidal - strings, lists, etc.