4 ms·

It is kind of like PHP. Their views of PHP is still stuck at PHP 5. We have PHP 8.

nicman23 1y ago
the work that the people in PHP did for 7 is criminally underrated
continuational 1y ago
Programming languages are different. They usually can't be "repaired" once broken, because they need to maintain backwards compatibility.
- concerned_user 1y ago
  This is only true if people stick to a version of a language and don't upgrade. If you upgrade then, for example, you can't run all of your PHP 5 code in PHP 8, most of it you can but you will have to change the parts that are broken, which are the areas that are repaired in PHP 8. Same goes for other languages like C# or Python
- pjmlp 1y ago
  They are software products like anything else.
- nromiun 1y ago
  They don't "need" to maintain backwards compatibility. Several major languages have broken it by now.
- jeroenhd 1y ago
  Programming languages deprecate features in standard libraries all the time. As PHP did, causing many PHP 5.3 applications to fail catastrophically once the warnings added to PHP 5.4, 5.5, and 5.6 were turned into errors. Of course, maintained software rarely ever runs into this issue. The standard libraries were the lacking part in PHP. The language itself was never a serious problem.
xlii 1y ago
Maybe it is (mine is for sure) but that's a "bitten by the dog once" case. You got bitten and everyone around you assures you won't get bitten again, but the pain was real and you still have a scar from the event. Why bother or invest risking another bite if there are other places to be which had never bitten before. Over my career I hated technology 3 times. First was PHP, second was Python during Python 2/3 fiasco and third was CoffeeScript. Edit: till this day one of my favorite meme is titled "PHP: Training wheels without a bike"
- yjftsjthsd-h 1y ago
  A few years ago, I used BTRFS on a laptop. Single disk, no RAID of any kind, OpenSUSE (which favored BTRFS, so I expected it to be as well supported as could be had), nothing fancy. After losing the root filesystem twice, I decided that maybe I shouldn't trust BTRFS. Since then, I've been told that it's totally better now, that all the problems are with bad RAID setups, and it's safe and won't lose my data. Anyways, as I type this from a laptop running on ZFS, I remain somewhat cautious.
  - jiggawatts 1y ago
    > Since then, I've been told that it's totally better now I've read through some bug reports, and I assure you that BTRFS remains a horror show. Saying that comments from the dev team "don't inspire confidence" is putting it mildly. ZFS is the diametric opposite of this, where blog posts from the team working on it made me realise that they're moving the state of the art into new territory.
    - johnisgood 1y ago
      I really want to try bcachefs, I wonder if anyone has used it (with encryption, and if their encryption supports plausible deniability or not). BTW, is ZFS on Linux good now?
      - chasil 1y ago
        Bcachfs has been removed from Linux. https://forums.truenas.com/t/bcachefs-dropped-from-linux-6-17/47287 https://forums.truenas.com/t/bcachefs-dropped-from-linux-6-1... ZFS is an install option on Ubuntu. Running it taints the kernel.
Xenoamorphous 1y ago
It’s true of most languages that have been around for a while. E.g. people who don’t write Javascript think of it as it was pre-ES6, not to mention that many people don’t write JS directly and use Typescript instead. Same with Java, it’s somehow stuck in time in Java 6 in some people’s minds.
WJW 1y ago
It's with so many things! Some evergreens just from last week here on HN: - Rails is horribly slow! - Python is still stuck migrating to Python 3! - MySQL doesn't scale! - Haskell tooling sucks! - io_uring is insecure! - ... and dozens more just in the programming world. These are just off the top of my head. Probably hundreds more in the wider engineering world.
- dijit 1y ago
  MySQL would happily clobber your data silently for decades though. I think the situation is better now, but that was worthy criticism for a long time; like anything though, those that bought into it wholeheartedly couldn’t take the criticisms. I wonder if there’s a word for that, seems to be a common issue.
  - als0 1y ago
    > those that bought into it wholeheartedly couldn’t take the criticisms. "invested"
- hyghjiyhu 1y ago
  From my perspective python3 migration is very much complete. Package managers is the evergreen mess now.
nurettin 1y ago
Wow. My view is stuck at php 4. Didn't even know 5 existed. I only remember Facebook making a big deal of hhvm and php 7 and laravel being considered great but not as great as rails or django.
- johnisgood 1y ago
  It is worth checking out PHP for when you are building backend. I did not use Laravel because I had some issues with it (lack of flexibility in some cases) so I ended up creating my stuff from scratch. I am glad I did. It is well documented, modular, maintainable, not bloated, etc. I can give you the resources I have heavily used.
  - nurettin 1y ago
    You're very kind. Thanks for the recommendation. If for some reason I have to branch out, I will check php again.
    - johnisgood 1y ago
      Hey, I have not recommended anything yet (besides PHP). :D I like "PHP & MySQL: Novice to Ninja" quite a lot. I have used it more so than the other books, so I definitely recommend it. You can find the code archive (code from the book) here: https://github.com/spbooks/phpmysql7 https://github.com/spbooks/phpmysql7. FWIW I recommend these books (in no particular order): ├── Modern PHP Security (2020).pdf ├── PHP 8 - OOP.pdf ├── PHP 8 - Quick Scripting Reference (2021).pdf ├── PHP 8 Programming Tips, Tricks, and Best Practices (2021).pdf ├── PHP MySQL - Novice to Ninja.pdf ├── PHP and MySQL for Advanced Learning.pdf ├── PHP in Action (2007).pdf ├── Programming PHP (2020).pdf └── The Art of Modern PHP 8.pdf
dolmen 1y ago
It is kind of like Perl. Their views of Perl is still stuck at CGIs of the 90's. I still think that Perl was and is still a better language than PHP and Python. And people never had a serious look at raku because of the Perl heritage. But that ship has sailed.
- em-bee 1y ago
  huh? that would suggest that perl has changed so much since the 90s that those views would no longer be valid. CGIs in the 90s were written in perl 5, and perl hasn't evolved much since then. but perl was never a bad language. it had/has a quirky syntax. if you were coming from a lot of commandline work using sed, awk, tr, and many other tools to manipulate text in shell scripts, then perl made a lot of sense. and while raku may have been a great improvement, perls reputation was tied to its syntax. the readability and writeability of the code. and that's the one thing that raku did not change significantly. so unlike other examples i don't see how peoples views of perl could improve
  - johnisgood 1y ago
    I love Perl. Is Raku worth trying considering I love Perl for its performance, syntax, brevity, and so forth? Raku feels like a different language to me, and it seems not-so-serious, maybe because of the name and their mascot (which is unfair to the language).
    - em-bee 1y ago
      i haven't looked at it in detail, but if you like perl and you are looking for an interesting new language that has the spirit of perl, i'd say it is worth a try
  - topspin 1y ago
    > and perl hasn't evolved much since then Perl (5) has been evolving, quietly. The language has had many nice additions over the years. Some of it is backporting from 6.

the work that the people in PHP did for 7 is criminally underrated

Programming languages are different. They usually can't be "repaired" once broken, because they need to maintain backwards compatibility.

concerned_user 1y ago
This is only true if people stick to a version of a language and don't upgrade. If you upgrade then, for example, you can't run all of your PHP 5 code in PHP 8, most of it you can but you will have to change the parts that are broken, which are the areas that are repaired in PHP 8. Same goes for other languages like C# or Python
pjmlp 1y ago
They are software products like anything else.
nromiun 1y ago
They don't "need" to maintain backwards compatibility. Several major languages have broken it by now.
jeroenhd 1y ago
Programming languages deprecate features in standard libraries all the time. As PHP did, causing many PHP 5.3 applications to fail catastrophically once the warnings added to PHP 5.4, 5.5, and 5.6 were turned into errors. Of course, maintained software rarely ever runs into this issue. The standard libraries were the lacking part in PHP. The language itself was never a serious problem.

xlii 1y ago

Maybe it is (mine is for sure) but that's a "bitten by the dog once" case. You got bitten and everyone around you assures you won't get bitten again, but the pain was real and you still have a scar from the event. Why bother or invest risking another bite if there are other places to be which had never bitten before. Over my career I hated technology 3 times. First was PHP, second was Python during Python 2/3 fiasco and third was CoffeeScript. Edit: till this day one of my favorite meme is titled "PHP: Training wheels without a bike"

yjftsjthsd-h 1y ago
A few years ago, I used BTRFS on a laptop. Single disk, no RAID of any kind, OpenSUSE (which favored BTRFS, so I expected it to be as well supported as could be had), nothing fancy. After losing the root filesystem twice, I decided that maybe I shouldn't trust BTRFS. Since then, I've been told that it's totally better now, that all the problems are with bad RAID setups, and it's safe and won't lose my data. Anyways, as I type this from a laptop running on ZFS, I remain somewhat cautious.
- jiggawatts 1y ago
  > Since then, I've been told that it's totally better now I've read through some bug reports, and I assure you that BTRFS remains a horror show. Saying that comments from the dev team "don't inspire confidence" is putting it mildly. ZFS is the diametric opposite of this, where blog posts from the team working on it made me realise that they're moving the state of the art into new territory.
  - johnisgood 1y ago
    I really want to try bcachefs, I wonder if anyone has used it (with encryption, and if their encryption supports plausible deniability or not). BTW, is ZFS on Linux good now?
    - chasil 1y ago
      Bcachfs has been removed from Linux. https://forums.truenas.com/t/bcachefs-dropped-from-linux-6-17/47287 https://forums.truenas.com/t/bcachefs-dropped-from-linux-6-1... ZFS is an install option on Ubuntu. Running it taints the kernel.

Xenoamorphous 1y ago

It’s true of most languages that have been around for a while. E.g. people who don’t write Javascript think of it as it was pre-ES6, not to mention that many people don’t write JS directly and use Typescript instead. Same with Java, it’s somehow stuck in time in Java 6 in some people’s minds.

WJW 1y ago

It's with so many things! Some evergreens just from last week here on HN: - Rails is horribly slow! - Python is still stuck migrating to Python 3! - MySQL doesn't scale! - Haskell tooling sucks! - io_uring is insecure! - ... and dozens more just in the programming world. These are just off the top of my head. Probably hundreds more in the wider engineering world.

dijit 1y ago
MySQL would happily clobber your data silently for decades though. I think the situation is better now, but that was worthy criticism for a long time; like anything though, those that bought into it wholeheartedly couldn’t take the criticisms. I wonder if there’s a word for that, seems to be a common issue.
- als0 1y ago
  > those that bought into it wholeheartedly couldn’t take the criticisms. "invested"
hyghjiyhu 1y ago
From my perspective python3 migration is very much complete. Package managers is the evergreen mess now.

nurettin 1y ago

Wow. My view is stuck at php 4. Didn't even know 5 existed. I only remember Facebook making a big deal of hhvm and php 7 and laravel being considered great but not as great as rails or django.

johnisgood 1y ago
It is worth checking out PHP for when you are building backend. I did not use Laravel because I had some issues with it (lack of flexibility in some cases) so I ended up creating my stuff from scratch. I am glad I did. It is well documented, modular, maintainable, not bloated, etc. I can give you the resources I have heavily used.
- nurettin 1y ago
  You're very kind. Thanks for the recommendation. If for some reason I have to branch out, I will check php again.
  - johnisgood 1y ago
    Hey, I have not recommended anything yet (besides PHP). :D I like "PHP & MySQL: Novice to Ninja" quite a lot. I have used it more so than the other books, so I definitely recommend it. You can find the code archive (code from the book) here: https://github.com/spbooks/phpmysql7 https://github.com/spbooks/phpmysql7. FWIW I recommend these books (in no particular order): ├── Modern PHP Security (2020).pdf ├── PHP 8 - OOP.pdf ├── PHP 8 - Quick Scripting Reference (2021).pdf ├── PHP 8 Programming Tips, Tricks, and Best Practices (2021).pdf ├── PHP MySQL - Novice to Ninja.pdf ├── PHP and MySQL for Advanced Learning.pdf ├── PHP in Action (2007).pdf ├── Programming PHP (2020).pdf └── The Art of Modern PHP 8.pdf

dolmen 1y ago

It is kind of like Perl. Their views of Perl is still stuck at CGIs of the 90's. I still think that Perl was and is still a better language than PHP and Python. And people never had a serious look at raku because of the Perl heritage. But that ship has sailed.

em-bee 1y ago
huh? that would suggest that perl has changed so much since the 90s that those views would no longer be valid. CGIs in the 90s were written in perl 5, and perl hasn't evolved much since then. but perl was never a bad language. it had/has a quirky syntax. if you were coming from a lot of commandline work using sed, awk, tr, and many other tools to manipulate text in shell scripts, then perl made a lot of sense. and while raku may have been a great improvement, perls reputation was tied to its syntax. the readability and writeability of the code. and that's the one thing that raku did not change significantly. so unlike other examples i don't see how peoples views of perl could improve
- johnisgood 1y ago
  I love Perl. Is Raku worth trying considering I love Perl for its performance, syntax, brevity, and so forth? Raku feels like a different language to me, and it seems not-so-serious, maybe because of the name and their mascot (which is unfair to the language).
  - em-bee 1y ago
    i haven't looked at it in detail, but if you like perl and you are looking for an interesting new language that has the spirit of perl, i'd say it is worth a try
- topspin 1y ago
  > and perl hasn't evolved much since then Perl (5) has been evolving, quietly. The language has had many nice additions over the years. Some of it is backporting from 6.