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PHP's evolution since PHP 5 has been substantial, and I think this is a real problem. As someone who learned the language years ago, the pace of change (generic

PHP's evolution since PHP 5 has been substantial, and I think this is a real problem. As someone who learned the language years ago, the pace of change (generics, attributes, match expressions, typed properties) makes modern codebases genuinely difficult to follow. I suspect this affects many developers who cut their teeth on PHP but haven't kept up. The language has become a different beast, which is a strength for the community but a barrier to re-entry.

phplovesong 11mo ago
PHP has no generics? I read somewhere that is was "too hard" to get right in PHP land, mostly because of how primitive the typesystem is.
- dreadnip 11mo ago
  If you're interested about generics in PHP, you can read this blog post by the PHP foundation: https://thephp.foundation/blog/2024/08/19/state-of-generics-and-collections/ https://thephp.foundation/blog/2024/08/19/state-of-generics-... or this PR by Nikita: https://github.com/PHPGenerics/php-generics-rfc/issues/45 https://github.com/PHPGenerics/php-generics-rfc/issues/45. TLDR: The PHP compiler isn't really suited for the job, it would introduce a lot of complexity to an already complex codebase and the memory/performance hit would be substantial.
  - phplovesong 11mo ago
    Yup, this was pretty much what i recalled. The typesystem, while being incredibly "unintelligent", somehow still is so complex that generics are not going to happen.
- deaddodo 11mo ago
  It has nothing to do with being “too hard”, and everything to do with not making sense to the type system. PHP is weakly-typed and heavily reflection-based (so everything is aware of it’s and each other’s type at all times). Adding generics to PHP would make CS fundamentalists somewhat happy, but do nothing to change the fundamental design of PHP nor offer any of the traditional benefits that generics offer to strongly-typed and compiled languages. And would be a massive headache to implement, while bulking an already heavy VM implementation.
  - phplovesong 11mo ago
    > And would be a massive headache to implement Exactly. The type system was never built for anything even slightly more complex. Its basically annotations for primitive types and classes. PHP has always had an weak type system, so adding generics will most likely never happen. > Adding generics to PHP would make CS fundamentalists somewhat happy PHP has really only one collection datatype (the infamous array), so having generics would be tremendously useful, as an example you cant return an typed array from a function, witch is just really bad. For an counter example, Python managed to do this, while also being a dynamic language, although having a stronger typing than PHP.
    - deleted 11mo ago
      [deleted]
    - duckerude 11mo ago
      Python managed to do this by not actually checking the types at runtime. If you declare a list[int] return type but you return a list[string] then nothing happens, you're expected to prevent that by running an offline typechecker. PHP chose to check types at runtime. To check that a value is really an array<int> the runtime could have to loop through the entire array. All the types PHP currently implements are simple and cheap to check. For more elaborate cases you need an offline checker like PHPstan and comment-based type annotations. (PHPstan catches 99% of issues before the runtime gets to it so for my own code I'd prefer the Python approach with its cleaner syntax.) The runtime checking seems the key difference, not so much the historical strength of the type system. Python's language implementation does very little typechecking itself and PHP's third-party offline typecheckers are respectably advanced.
      - phplovesong 11mo ago
        Precisely. PHP has tools for this too, but lack the syntax. Right now you need to to all typings in comments, and thats just as bad as jsdoc was in 2005. This could be the way PHP could go, they just need the lexer to handle types, and not do any runtime checking at all. But i guess that goes against what the php devs want, but it sounds so wasteful, to typecheck the same code time after time even if it passed some sort of initial "compile time step".
- senfiaj 11mo ago
  You are probably talking about this: https://stitcher.io/blog/generics-in-php-3 https://stitcher.io/blog/generics-in-php-3 . If I remember correctly, the author claims it will either cause runtime overhead or extreme memory overhead. The best solution is to introduce a typed superset of PHP like TypeScript was done for JavaScript.
gramakri2 11mo ago
IMO, newer PHP is still very readable. I programmed with C++ for a decade, but I can safely say that I cannot understand a modern C++ code base anymore.
- idoubtit 11mo ago
  Are the new features really readable? I have no idea what this code from the OP is meant for: #[SkipDiscovery(static function (Container $container): bool { return ! $container->get(Application::class) instanceof ConsoleApplication; })] final class BlogPostEventHandlers { /* … */ } As a side note, even PHP's official wiki cannot highlight correctly the multiline attributes behind a "#". See https://wiki.php.net/rfc/closures_in_const_expr https://wiki.php.net/rfc/closures_in_const_expr
  - TimWolla 11mo ago
    The examples in TFA are terrible and I don't get why it was necessary to jump the gun by submitting that article instead of actually waiting for the release and the official release page with more carefully designed examples. Given that the cat effectively is out of the bag, does the example on the release page (sneak preview) make more sense to you: https://www.php.net/releases/8.5/en.php#closures-in-const-expr https://www.php.net/releases/8.5/en.php#closures-in-const-ex...? > As a side note, even PHP's official wiki cannot highlight correctly the multiline attributes behind a "#" Yes, unfortunately the off-the-shelf software of the Wiki uses a custom-built highlighter instead of the `highlight_string()` function that is bundled with PHP: https://www.php.net/manual/en/function.highlight-string.php https://www.php.net/manual/en/function.highlight-string.php
    - rafark 11mo ago
      > The examples in TFA are terrible and I don't get why it was necessary to jump the gun by submitting that article instead of actually waiting for the release and the official release page with more carefully designed examples. Clout.
  - attendant3446 11mo ago
johnisgood 11mo ago
I think PHP is way better now than it used to be. Learn PHP 8 and you are good to go.
- erickf1 11mo ago
  Until two years later the same thing is said about PHP 9, 10, 11. Constant change is not good.
  - johnisgood 11mo ago
    People still complain about PHP saying how it is not secure at all, how shitty of a language it is, and so on, because they are stuck at PHP 5. Everyone should just start from PHP 8. I have no clue what the future brings for PHP, but PHP 8 is definitely a good start, and we should put PHP 5 to rest. PHP 10 might not be that different from PHP 8 for all I know. We do not know if there will be "constant change". Out of curiosity, what programming language do you use that you also love? FWIW, if by "constant change" you mean improvements or bug fixes, then I do not see why we should not have those. I do not even mind breaking backwards compatibility if the reasons for breaking justifies it, but it has to be a really good reason.
  - kyriakos 11mo ago
    It gets updated but breaking changes are not that many and always well justified. Most breaking changes I've seen the past decade only broke if your code was already bad relying on non standard ways of using language features. There are tools that help with migration.
  - tedd4u 11mo ago
    People also hate how _slowly_ Python moves and complained forever about that. They also complained forever during the many years of 5.x PHP releases that PHP was moving too slow. It was only after Facebook forked first the runtime (HHVM) and the language (Hacklang) and showed how fast and advanced PHP could be made that the PHP team started accelerating. Which I think has been a boon to the community. This is all given away for free as open-source after all.
pjmlp 11mo ago
This is true for most languages though, compare C# 14 with C# 1.0, Java 25 with Java 1.0, C 23 (plus common compiler extensions) with K&R C,....
- ffsm8 11mo ago
  I think he's thinking more along the lines of PHP 5-8.5 That version 1-latest is understandingly highly different, but these are all decades old languages, which barely changed for some time, but are now all introducing new syntax. Which I think makes sense, but it's obviously going to leave 9-5 devs behind that don't particularly care for coding and want to invest as little time as possible into their language knowledge.
  - rytis 11mo ago
    And what exactly 9-5 has to do with caring for coding or time investment in language learning?
    - monooso 11mo ago
      Not GP, but I assume the suggestion is that it's difficult to stay abreast of new developments within the constraints of a typical work day. Especially if your job utilises older technologies, as most do.
    - ffsm8 11mo ago
      A person that cares for coding will inevitably code more then 9-5 and consequently get familiar with new syntax A person that invests time into their language knowledge will not have issues handling new syntax because they spend as much time as necessary to get familiar with the new syntax So the criteria is being a 9-5 who doesn't particularly care about coding and doesn't invest time into their language knowledge
- deaddodo 11mo ago
  C hasn’t changed all that much, and someone who coded in C99 would take about 30mins to catch up to a modern C23 codebase’s changes. Famously so, as conservatism to change is the main friction in the community for about two decades now. If you pull out examples of the earliest C, sure, it looks weird. But that C was already obsolete in 1989. Since then, it’s had a minor iteration (e.g. five-eight additions/modifications) every decade-ish (99, 11, 17, 23). Has it changed? Sure. Can it be compared to the iteration and speed of things like C#, Java, C++, etc? No way.
ivolimmen 11mo ago
Most likely this can be said about a lot of languages, most languages are being maintained and improved. I am an hired expert in Java and I needed to explain some new languages features to some colleagues that have been introduced recently, I only mention them if they actually improve readability though. I think PHP might be slightly different than other languages as a huge amount of people use this to create their first website as a hobby.
woodrowbarlow 11mo ago
but would you even be considering re-entry if it hadn't improved dramatically?
jm4 11mo ago
To be fair, that’s true of many languages and programming domains. The web, in particular, is one where you have to keep pace or end up out of the field. Java and C# are a couple other popular languages where the same is also true.
segmondy 11mo ago
It's a real problem with almost all software today, nothing ever gets done. they just keep piling unto it no matter how great it was. the idea of simplicity as a goal and feature is lost on this generation.
- tim333 11mo ago
  Simplicity may often get ignored but I think it's been a big reason for Python's success which has gone from about #10 on the TIOBE language list to #1 since when I started learning it, which was probably around when the XKCD "everything is so simple" cartoon came out. (https://xkcd.com/353/ https://xkcd.com/353/)
  - segmondy 11mo ago
    I have been programming in python since the 90's too. The success IMO is still that it retains the simplicity and CFFI. Moving up TIOBE is more of CFFI and the ecosystem.
  - okeuro49 11mo ago
    Doubtful it is anything to do with simplicity. Python's success is explained by it being the language of choice for AI.
    - graemep 11mo ago
      I think its the other way around. Python became the language of choice for AI because it was already popular. Lots of things made it popular: use for systems management scripts, web apps (Django, especially), then numerical stuff,... I think the reason is that it is easy to learn enough to get things done, but it is very flexible, very readable, and once the ecosystem started gaining momentum (which it clearly had by the time of the XKCD cartoon) that became an advantage too.
    - aj_hackman 11mo ago
      Python has been massive since the 2000s. When AI rolled around, it was already there, a bunch of people knew it, and it was Good Enough (tm).
tehbeard 11mo ago
You can still write php 5-esque slop and have it run... mostly (some particulars like the half dozen ways of interpolating a variable into a string have been paired down, some extensions left in the dustbin, but the fundamental "shit out a script and run it" capability still remains doable). non of the "modern" things are particularly taxing to teach someone with more than two braincells. If they don't understand them then they haven't kept up with ANY programming trends in the past decade and are best placed infront of the TV with an iPad than left to mess with the possible critical infrastructure of a business.
danaris 11mo ago
I dunno; I started with PHP 5 (actually, I think I started in late PHP 4), and I've only been happy with the changes as it's evolved. The only one that's caused me any significant stress is the deprecation of the old `mysql` DB interface; I had to refactor a whole bunch of code for that, since I'm maintaining a codebase that's been in continuous use & development since 2001. The additions to PHP since 5 add more things you can do, but they don't really change the simple things you can do to first learn PHP. You can still just create a .php file and start interspersing HTML and <?php script tags with basic operations.
_DeadFred_ 11mo ago
I used laracasts.com plus AI code assistants to bring myself back up to speed pretty quickly.
- gnabgib 11mo ago
  Wasn't AI meant to disenfranchise? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45994928 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45994928
Capricorn2481 11mo ago
I work on projects from PHP 5.6-8.4 and I can't say it feels that different. It's mostly just type differences. But PHP 5 was released 21 years ago and is unsupported. Companies using it are putting their customers at risk.

phplovesong 11mo ago

PHP has no generics? I read somewhere that is was "too hard" to get right in PHP land, mostly because of how primitive the typesystem is.

dreadnip 11mo ago
If you're interested about generics in PHP, you can read this blog post by the PHP foundation: https://thephp.foundation/blog/2024/08/19/state-of-generics-and-collections/ https://thephp.foundation/blog/2024/08/19/state-of-generics-... or this PR by Nikita: https://github.com/PHPGenerics/php-generics-rfc/issues/45 https://github.com/PHPGenerics/php-generics-rfc/issues/45. TLDR: The PHP compiler isn't really suited for the job, it would introduce a lot of complexity to an already complex codebase and the memory/performance hit would be substantial.
- phplovesong 11mo ago
  Yup, this was pretty much what i recalled. The typesystem, while being incredibly "unintelligent", somehow still is so complex that generics are not going to happen.
deaddodo 11mo ago
It has nothing to do with being “too hard”, and everything to do with not making sense to the type system. PHP is weakly-typed and heavily reflection-based (so everything is aware of it’s and each other’s type at all times). Adding generics to PHP would make CS fundamentalists somewhat happy, but do nothing to change the fundamental design of PHP nor offer any of the traditional benefits that generics offer to strongly-typed and compiled languages. And would be a massive headache to implement, while bulking an already heavy VM implementation.
- phplovesong 11mo ago
  > And would be a massive headache to implement Exactly. The type system was never built for anything even slightly more complex. Its basically annotations for primitive types and classes. PHP has always had an weak type system, so adding generics will most likely never happen. > Adding generics to PHP would make CS fundamentalists somewhat happy PHP has really only one collection datatype (the infamous array), so having generics would be tremendously useful, as an example you cant return an typed array from a function, witch is just really bad. For an counter example, Python managed to do this, while also being a dynamic language, although having a stronger typing than PHP.
  - deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]
  - duckerude 11mo ago
    Python managed to do this by not actually checking the types at runtime. If you declare a list[int] return type but you return a list[string] then nothing happens, you're expected to prevent that by running an offline typechecker. PHP chose to check types at runtime. To check that a value is really an array<int> the runtime could have to loop through the entire array. All the types PHP currently implements are simple and cheap to check. For more elaborate cases you need an offline checker like PHPstan and comment-based type annotations. (PHPstan catches 99% of issues before the runtime gets to it so for my own code I'd prefer the Python approach with its cleaner syntax.) The runtime checking seems the key difference, not so much the historical strength of the type system. Python's language implementation does very little typechecking itself and PHP's third-party offline typecheckers are respectably advanced.
    - phplovesong 11mo ago
      Precisely. PHP has tools for this too, but lack the syntax. Right now you need to to all typings in comments, and thats just as bad as jsdoc was in 2005. This could be the way PHP could go, they just need the lexer to handle types, and not do any runtime checking at all. But i guess that goes against what the php devs want, but it sounds so wasteful, to typecheck the same code time after time even if it passed some sort of initial "compile time step".
senfiaj 11mo ago
You are probably talking about this: https://stitcher.io/blog/generics-in-php-3 https://stitcher.io/blog/generics-in-php-3 . If I remember correctly, the author claims it will either cause runtime overhead or extreme memory overhead. The best solution is to introduce a typed superset of PHP like TypeScript was done for JavaScript.

gramakri2 11mo ago

IMO, newer PHP is still very readable. I programmed with C++ for a decade, but I can safely say that I cannot understand a modern C++ code base anymore.

idoubtit 11mo ago
Are the new features really readable? I have no idea what this code from the OP is meant for: #[SkipDiscovery(static function (Container $container): bool { return ! $container->get(Application::class) instanceof ConsoleApplication; })] final class BlogPostEventHandlers { /* … */ } As a side note, even PHP's official wiki cannot highlight correctly the multiline attributes behind a "#". See https://wiki.php.net/rfc/closures_in_const_expr https://wiki.php.net/rfc/closures_in_const_expr
- TimWolla 11mo ago
  The examples in TFA are terrible and I don't get why it was necessary to jump the gun by submitting that article instead of actually waiting for the release and the official release page with more carefully designed examples. Given that the cat effectively is out of the bag, does the example on the release page (sneak preview) make more sense to you: https://www.php.net/releases/8.5/en.php#closures-in-const-expr https://www.php.net/releases/8.5/en.php#closures-in-const-ex...? > As a side note, even PHP's official wiki cannot highlight correctly the multiline attributes behind a "#" Yes, unfortunately the off-the-shelf software of the Wiki uses a custom-built highlighter instead of the `highlight_string()` function that is bundled with PHP: https://www.php.net/manual/en/function.highlight-string.php https://www.php.net/manual/en/function.highlight-string.php
  - rafark 11mo ago
    > The examples in TFA are terrible and I don't get why it was necessary to jump the gun by submitting that article instead of actually waiting for the release and the official release page with more carefully designed examples. Clout.
- attendant3446 11mo ago

johnisgood 11mo ago

I think PHP is way better now than it used to be. Learn PHP 8 and you are good to go.

erickf1 11mo ago
Until two years later the same thing is said about PHP 9, 10, 11. Constant change is not good.
- johnisgood 11mo ago
  People still complain about PHP saying how it is not secure at all, how shitty of a language it is, and so on, because they are stuck at PHP 5. Everyone should just start from PHP 8. I have no clue what the future brings for PHP, but PHP 8 is definitely a good start, and we should put PHP 5 to rest. PHP 10 might not be that different from PHP 8 for all I know. We do not know if there will be "constant change". Out of curiosity, what programming language do you use that you also love? FWIW, if by "constant change" you mean improvements or bug fixes, then I do not see why we should not have those. I do not even mind breaking backwards compatibility if the reasons for breaking justifies it, but it has to be a really good reason.
- kyriakos 11mo ago
  It gets updated but breaking changes are not that many and always well justified. Most breaking changes I've seen the past decade only broke if your code was already bad relying on non standard ways of using language features. There are tools that help with migration.
- tedd4u 11mo ago
  People also hate how _slowly_ Python moves and complained forever about that. They also complained forever during the many years of 5.x PHP releases that PHP was moving too slow. It was only after Facebook forked first the runtime (HHVM) and the language (Hacklang) and showed how fast and advanced PHP could be made that the PHP team started accelerating. Which I think has been a boon to the community. This is all given away for free as open-source after all.

pjmlp 11mo ago

This is true for most languages though, compare C# 14 with C# 1.0, Java 25 with Java 1.0, C 23 (plus common compiler extensions) with K&R C,....

ffsm8 11mo ago
I think he's thinking more along the lines of PHP 5-8.5 That version 1-latest is understandingly highly different, but these are all decades old languages, which barely changed for some time, but are now all introducing new syntax. Which I think makes sense, but it's obviously going to leave 9-5 devs behind that don't particularly care for coding and want to invest as little time as possible into their language knowledge.
- rytis 11mo ago
  And what exactly 9-5 has to do with caring for coding or time investment in language learning?
  - monooso 11mo ago
    Not GP, but I assume the suggestion is that it's difficult to stay abreast of new developments within the constraints of a typical work day. Especially if your job utilises older technologies, as most do.
  - ffsm8 11mo ago
    A person that cares for coding will inevitably code more then 9-5 and consequently get familiar with new syntax A person that invests time into their language knowledge will not have issues handling new syntax because they spend as much time as necessary to get familiar with the new syntax So the criteria is being a 9-5 who doesn't particularly care about coding and doesn't invest time into their language knowledge
deaddodo 11mo ago
C hasn’t changed all that much, and someone who coded in C99 would take about 30mins to catch up to a modern C23 codebase’s changes. Famously so, as conservatism to change is the main friction in the community for about two decades now. If you pull out examples of the earliest C, sure, it looks weird. But that C was already obsolete in 1989. Since then, it’s had a minor iteration (e.g. five-eight additions/modifications) every decade-ish (99, 11, 17, 23). Has it changed? Sure. Can it be compared to the iteration and speed of things like C#, Java, C++, etc? No way.

ivolimmen 11mo ago

Most likely this can be said about a lot of languages, most languages are being maintained and improved. I am an hired expert in Java and I needed to explain some new languages features to some colleagues that have been introduced recently, I only mention them if they actually improve readability though. I think PHP might be slightly different than other languages as a huge amount of people use this to create their first website as a hobby.

woodrowbarlow 11mo ago

but would you even be considering re-entry if it hadn't improved dramatically?

jm4 11mo ago

To be fair, that’s true of many languages and programming domains. The web, in particular, is one where you have to keep pace or end up out of the field. Java and C# are a couple other popular languages where the same is also true.

segmondy 11mo ago

It's a real problem with almost all software today, nothing ever gets done. they just keep piling unto it no matter how great it was. the idea of simplicity as a goal and feature is lost on this generation.

tim333 11mo ago
Simplicity may often get ignored but I think it's been a big reason for Python's success which has gone from about #10 on the TIOBE language list to #1 since when I started learning it, which was probably around when the XKCD "everything is so simple" cartoon came out. (https://xkcd.com/353/ https://xkcd.com/353/)
- segmondy 11mo ago
  I have been programming in python since the 90's too. The success IMO is still that it retains the simplicity and CFFI. Moving up TIOBE is more of CFFI and the ecosystem.
- okeuro49 11mo ago
  Doubtful it is anything to do with simplicity. Python's success is explained by it being the language of choice for AI.
  - graemep 11mo ago
    I think its the other way around. Python became the language of choice for AI because it was already popular. Lots of things made it popular: use for systems management scripts, web apps (Django, especially), then numerical stuff,... I think the reason is that it is easy to learn enough to get things done, but it is very flexible, very readable, and once the ecosystem started gaining momentum (which it clearly had by the time of the XKCD cartoon) that became an advantage too.
  - aj_hackman 11mo ago
    Python has been massive since the 2000s. When AI rolled around, it was already there, a bunch of people knew it, and it was Good Enough (tm).

tehbeard 11mo ago

You can still write php 5-esque slop and have it run... mostly (some particulars like the half dozen ways of interpolating a variable into a string have been paired down, some extensions left in the dustbin, but the fundamental "shit out a script and run it" capability still remains doable). non of the "modern" things are particularly taxing to teach someone with more than two braincells. If they don't understand them then they haven't kept up with ANY programming trends in the past decade and are best placed infront of the TV with an iPad than left to mess with the possible critical infrastructure of a business.

danaris 11mo ago

I dunno; I started with PHP 5 (actually, I think I started in late PHP 4), and I've only been happy with the changes as it's evolved. The only one that's caused me any significant stress is the deprecation of the old `mysql` DB interface; I had to refactor a whole bunch of code for that, since I'm maintaining a codebase that's been in continuous use & development since 2001. The additions to PHP since 5 add more things you can do, but they don't really change the simple things you can do to first learn PHP. You can still just create a .php file and start interspersing HTML and <?php script tags with basic operations.

_DeadFred_ 11mo ago

I used laracasts.com plus AI code assistants to bring myself back up to speed pretty quickly.

gnabgib 11mo ago
Wasn't AI meant to disenfranchise? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45994928 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45994928

Capricorn2481 11mo ago

I work on projects from PHP 5.6-8.4 and I can't say it feels that different. It's mostly just type differences. But PHP 5 was released 21 years ago and is unsupported. Companies using it are putting their customers at risk.