4 ms·

Glad to see PHP still chugging along after all these years. It's the language I started with as a freelancer more than a decade ago and I still remember having

by cbg0 2y ago

Glad to see PHP still chugging along after all these years. It's the language I started with as a freelancer more than a decade ago and I still remember having books on my desk learning the proper way to do things, as you had to work around all the unsafe things the language would let you do and which unfortunately led to it getting a bad rep.

ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
One of the issues with creating a language that is easy to use (PHP, BASIC, and many modern languages), is that people who aren't good at programming, will use it. With predictable results. The difference between languages like PHP and more modern languages, is that the more modern languages have more airbags, for the bad code. It's still bad code, but it won't do as much damage. PHP is likely to be around for a long time: https://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/programming_language/ms/y https://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/programmin...
- inerte 2y ago
  > With predictable results. People building and creating awesome new things? Increase in happiness and empowerment? More efficient processes and increase in productivity? New businesses being born? Wealth and value being added to society?
  - ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
    > More efficient processes and increase in productivity I'd have to see the numbers on those ones. But I am not a "gatekeeper" type, maybe you are confusing me for one. I'm a high school dropout with a GED, and have been staring up people's noses, all my life. I just believe that any job we do, should be a good job. Build on a sand foundation, and you'd better not go too high, or Bad Things Happen.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - 9dev 2y ago
      I agree that it’s especially sad then to see someone with your background taking that position then. While we’re busy discussing inelegant abstraction patterns in code, a bunch of founders have written the foundations of a successful startup with horrible code, creating work for better programmers (but worse founders) in the process. A good friend of mine has founded such a company, and boy, I loathe his code. But at the end of the day, he’s incredibly good at getting something out of the door now, which is working. A language that makes this possible, while still scaling to fully type-safe and optimized bytecode with a JIT compiler if needed is a good one.
      - ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
        So you know someone that is an expert at building sand foundations, and selling them? That’s a good thing, and something to emulate? For a lot of folks (especially hereabouts), “makes money” is the only valid metric. That’s not my experience or personal PoV. I’ve been shipping (as opposed to “writing”) code, for over 30 years. Pretty much everything I’ve written, has made it out the door (although not always to subsequent success). I’m fairly familiar with what it takes to ship. I agree that it’s a relatively uncommon skillset, but I’ve also learned to ship stuff with a future. One of the projects I developed, took ten years to come into its own, and it had to stay solid for all that time, until the right team could take it over. The fact that the code is well-written, well-supported, and well-documented, is the main reason that it finally took off. I don’t like PHP, and one reason, has been alluded in other comments. It’s a sand foundation. Over the years, it has been massively backfilled, and is now pretty damn robust, but the sand foundation is still visible. But it is a useful tool, if wielded correctly. If used incorrectly, though, that’s another story, and there’s a lot of bad PHP out there. I have heard a quote, attributed to Stroustrop, that goes “With C, you can shoot yourself in the foot. With C++, you can blow your whole leg off.” I’m skeptical he’s the one that said it, but it’s a truism. I have a friend that is an arborist (tree guy). He’s really experienced, and really good at it, and makes great money. Watching him use chainsaws, though, is kinda terrifying. For one thing, every one of his saws has the safety guard removed, and he’ll go monkeying up a tree, with three running chainsaws, hanging off him. He uses them like you’d use a fork at the dinner table, and can take down a huge locust tree, in an hour or so, alone. He makes it look easy, but I’m not so idiotic, as to think I could emulate him. We have a running joke, every time he sees me, he holds up his hand, showing that he still has all his fingers, because I told him that he would end up chopping off a finger or two. There now exists a huge base of very good PHP programmers. It took quite a while to coalesce, but it’s here. I don’t claim to be one of them, but I have used the language to ship some fairly ambitious stuff, for the last quarter century or so, so I can wrangle it reasonably well.
- grey-area 2y ago
  This varies by domain of course, but on the web (PHP's domain), the language in greatest use nowadays by professional programmers is....Javascript.
  - omnimus 2y ago
    Because its hard requirement. Its not the case at all on backend.
    - grey-area 2y ago
      No, I’m talking about voluntary use of frameworks like react to create websites. The front end can have very little js and still be fully functional (like this website for example).
- 7bit 2y ago
  What a condescending point of view.
  - owenpalmer 2y ago
    I don't think OP was trying to be condescending. Even if they were, they're still right. A lot of modern languages are designed with bad programmers in mind.
    - ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
      Wasn't trying to be, but it's my experience that people will deliberately assume the very worst intentions, behind whatever I write, so it's a losing proposition, trying to be circumspect. I am, however, pretty against selling crap. If people pay for my work, or even if they don't (most work I do, these days, is free), they have the right to expect that I did good work. I do run into quite a few folks that write crap, know they write crap, but don't care, and expect people to pay top dollar for their crap. If that's a "condescending" attitude, then guilty as charged.
      - rty32 2y ago
        To be honest, it's a pattern I see under every PHP thread: (Neutral) PHP news -> PHP bad -> PHP not bad Even if people didn't actually say "PHP bad"
        ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
        I use PHP for my backend work. I am not an outstanding PHProgrammer, because, quite frankly, I don't like the language, but I'm good enough to write fairly robust, secure, and performant backends. I just hold my nose, write my backend, then get back to my frontend, as soon as possible.
    - munk-a 2y ago
      One thing I'd like to highlight though is that there were mountains of terrible advice out there around PHP from novices who had figured out a way to make things work - around the time of PHP 5.3 the community ran an ambitious initiative to crawl through sites like Stack Overflow and replace bad answers with correct ones. The community realized how dangerous it was for novices and how much all the bad advice was hurting the reputation of the language and they took decisive action to fix it. Separately, IMO, languages should always be designed with bad programmers in mind - good programmers are going to figure out the right way to do things in any language but bad programmers are going to fire off every foot gun they can find. PHP has made efforts to remove or de-emphasize foot guns and it has evolved into a much safer tool to give someone.
- lesuorac 2y ago
  I dunno, we just about got rid of the whole "cosmic rays" discussions for computers and finally are getting realistic about the bugs that occur in computers are from bad C code and bad hardware. Neither of those things are easy to use and they have done probably more damage than crappy php code does.
- dctoedt 2y ago
  > more airbags, for the bad code Great metaphor. I might steal it for some model contract terms I'm doing (for an expanded version of my contract-drafting course materials). I'd been thinking of "guardrails," but "airbags" is far better.
- afiori 2y ago
  My understanding is that PHP was sort of started by people that did not plan for it like a "serious" programming language, but rather as a tool for specific applications. So it developed features and functionalities as needed with a very pragmatic focus [0][1] [0] the most clear example to me is that since functions are not values and cannot be assigned to variables the way to store a function in a variable is to simply assign its name as a string so $callable = "array_map" works. Or that the way to create a pointer to a method is to create a 2 element array of the object and the method name. I like this example because the way method pointers work in JavaScript is objectively worse as the "this" is easily lost. Some languages are built on CS principles and PL theory, others like Bash or PHP are just built to get shit done. I am glad that recent versions are fixing some of the oversight of this approach while keeping the pragmatic culture [1] I am not sure of how true it is, but some claim that some of the standard functions have irregular names because the interpreter used the name length as hash key
  - scq 2y ago
    [1] is true. Here it is straight from PHP's creator: https://news-web.php.net/php.internals/70691 https://news-web.php.net/php.internals/70691
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

by cbg0 2y ago

ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago

One of the issues with creating a language that is easy to use (PHP, BASIC, and many modern languages), is that people who aren't good at programming, will use it. With predictable results. The difference between languages like PHP and more modern languages, is that the more modern languages have more airbags, for the bad code. It's still bad code, but it won't do as much damage. PHP is likely to be around for a long time: https://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/programming_language/ms/y https://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/programmin...

inerte 2y ago
> With predictable results. People building and creating awesome new things? Increase in happiness and empowerment? More efficient processes and increase in productivity? New businesses being born? Wealth and value being added to society?
- ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
  > More efficient processes and increase in productivity I'd have to see the numbers on those ones. But I am not a "gatekeeper" type, maybe you are confusing me for one. I'm a high school dropout with a GED, and have been staring up people's noses, all my life. I just believe that any job we do, should be a good job. Build on a sand foundation, and you'd better not go too high, or Bad Things Happen.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - 9dev 2y ago
    I agree that it’s especially sad then to see someone with your background taking that position then. While we’re busy discussing inelegant abstraction patterns in code, a bunch of founders have written the foundations of a successful startup with horrible code, creating work for better programmers (but worse founders) in the process. A good friend of mine has founded such a company, and boy, I loathe his code. But at the end of the day, he’s incredibly good at getting something out of the door now, which is working. A language that makes this possible, while still scaling to fully type-safe and optimized bytecode with a JIT compiler if needed is a good one.
    - ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
      So you know someone that is an expert at building sand foundations, and selling them? That’s a good thing, and something to emulate? For a lot of folks (especially hereabouts), “makes money” is the only valid metric. That’s not my experience or personal PoV. I’ve been shipping (as opposed to “writing”) code, for over 30 years. Pretty much everything I’ve written, has made it out the door (although not always to subsequent success). I’m fairly familiar with what it takes to ship. I agree that it’s a relatively uncommon skillset, but I’ve also learned to ship stuff with a future. One of the projects I developed, took ten years to come into its own, and it had to stay solid for all that time, until the right team could take it over. The fact that the code is well-written, well-supported, and well-documented, is the main reason that it finally took off. I don’t like PHP, and one reason, has been alluded in other comments. It’s a sand foundation. Over the years, it has been massively backfilled, and is now pretty damn robust, but the sand foundation is still visible. But it is a useful tool, if wielded correctly. If used incorrectly, though, that’s another story, and there’s a lot of bad PHP out there. I have heard a quote, attributed to Stroustrop, that goes “With C, you can shoot yourself in the foot. With C++, you can blow your whole leg off.” I’m skeptical he’s the one that said it, but it’s a truism. I have a friend that is an arborist (tree guy). He’s really experienced, and really good at it, and makes great money. Watching him use chainsaws, though, is kinda terrifying. For one thing, every one of his saws has the safety guard removed, and he’ll go monkeying up a tree, with three running chainsaws, hanging off him. He uses them like you’d use a fork at the dinner table, and can take down a huge locust tree, in an hour or so, alone. He makes it look easy, but I’m not so idiotic, as to think I could emulate him. We have a running joke, every time he sees me, he holds up his hand, showing that he still has all his fingers, because I told him that he would end up chopping off a finger or two. There now exists a huge base of very good PHP programmers. It took quite a while to coalesce, but it’s here. I don’t claim to be one of them, but I have used the language to ship some fairly ambitious stuff, for the last quarter century or so, so I can wrangle it reasonably well.
grey-area 2y ago
This varies by domain of course, but on the web (PHP's domain), the language in greatest use nowadays by professional programmers is....Javascript.
- omnimus 2y ago
  Because its hard requirement. Its not the case at all on backend.
  - grey-area 2y ago
    No, I’m talking about voluntary use of frameworks like react to create websites. The front end can have very little js and still be fully functional (like this website for example).
7bit 2y ago
What a condescending point of view.
- owenpalmer 2y ago
  I don't think OP was trying to be condescending. Even if they were, they're still right. A lot of modern languages are designed with bad programmers in mind.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
    Wasn't trying to be, but it's my experience that people will deliberately assume the very worst intentions, behind whatever I write, so it's a losing proposition, trying to be circumspect. I am, however, pretty against selling crap. If people pay for my work, or even if they don't (most work I do, these days, is free), they have the right to expect that I did good work. I do run into quite a few folks that write crap, know they write crap, but don't care, and expect people to pay top dollar for their crap. If that's a "condescending" attitude, then guilty as charged.
    - rty32 2y ago
      To be honest, it's a pattern I see under every PHP thread: (Neutral) PHP news -> PHP bad -> PHP not bad Even if people didn't actually say "PHP bad"
      - ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
        I use PHP for my backend work. I am not an outstanding PHProgrammer, because, quite frankly, I don't like the language, but I'm good enough to write fairly robust, secure, and performant backends. I just hold my nose, write my backend, then get back to my frontend, as soon as possible.
  - munk-a 2y ago
    One thing I'd like to highlight though is that there were mountains of terrible advice out there around PHP from novices who had figured out a way to make things work - around the time of PHP 5.3 the community ran an ambitious initiative to crawl through sites like Stack Overflow and replace bad answers with correct ones. The community realized how dangerous it was for novices and how much all the bad advice was hurting the reputation of the language and they took decisive action to fix it. Separately, IMO, languages should always be designed with bad programmers in mind - good programmers are going to figure out the right way to do things in any language but bad programmers are going to fire off every foot gun they can find. PHP has made efforts to remove or de-emphasize foot guns and it has evolved into a much safer tool to give someone.
lesuorac 2y ago
I dunno, we just about got rid of the whole "cosmic rays" discussions for computers and finally are getting realistic about the bugs that occur in computers are from bad C code and bad hardware. Neither of those things are easy to use and they have done probably more damage than crappy php code does.
dctoedt 2y ago
> more airbags, for the bad code Great metaphor. I might steal it for some model contract terms I'm doing (for an expanded version of my contract-drafting course materials). I'd been thinking of "guardrails," but "airbags" is far better.
afiori 2y ago
My understanding is that PHP was sort of started by people that did not plan for it like a "serious" programming language, but rather as a tool for specific applications. So it developed features and functionalities as needed with a very pragmatic focus [0][1] [0] the most clear example to me is that since functions are not values and cannot be assigned to variables the way to store a function in a variable is to simply assign its name as a string so $callable = "array_map" works. Or that the way to create a pointer to a method is to create a 2 element array of the object and the method name. I like this example because the way method pointers work in JavaScript is objectively worse as the "this" is easily lost. Some languages are built on CS principles and PL theory, others like Bash or PHP are just built to get shit done. I am glad that recent versions are fixing some of the oversight of this approach while keeping the pragmatic culture [1] I am not sure of how true it is, but some claim that some of the standard functions have irregular names because the interpreter used the name length as hash key
- scq 2y ago
  [1] is true. Here it is straight from PHP's creator: https://news-web.php.net/php.internals/70691 https://news-web.php.net/php.internals/70691

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]