4 ms·

I think the “bad rep” is coming from developers that stopped developing themselves.

by spiderfarmer 5mo ago

frutjgma 5mo ago
I did PHP for 15 years. Modern PHP looks good but I still wouldn't go back.
- phplovesong 5mo ago
  What is even "modern php"? It has the same warts than it had back in the day, last i looked nothing is fixed.
chuckadams 5mo ago
I've written PHP off and on since the .php3 extension was a thing, and I can say that PHP very much deserved the bad rap it had for some time. It's evolved beyond most of that, but a lot of that is due to the composer ecosystem making up for it while the behavior of many builtins remains beyond repair. Which is fine, every language has baggage and warts. PHP's warts are sometimes heinously ugly, and they're on full display in many legacy codebases, but modern PHP is something I actually find to be fairly pleasant to develop with, far more than Go or vanilla JavaScript.
- spiderfarmer 5mo ago
  The most under appreciated thing about PHP is the fact that after 20+ years I can still develop in PHP and never had to learn a JS framework, Rust, Go, Ruby, Java or .NET.
  - fancyswimtime 5mo ago
    ?? you can write JS without having to learn a framework. They exist in PHP too such as Symfony. This constant complaint about frameworks seems less about the framework and more about having to learn to work with people which is partly why the framework abstraction exists.
esskay 5mo ago
A lot of it came from the rather harmful "php a fractal of bad design" article that used to get posted everywhere despite being highly inaccurate and out of date. Thankfully its fairly rare to see someone daft enough to still try using it in a discussion. PHP's come a very long way since then.
- thayne 5mo ago
  What is inaccurate about it? Maybe it is out of date now, but when I first read it about a decade ago, when I did a fair amount of PHP development, I had personally encountered most of the issues mentioned in there. I've heard that PHP has improved a lot since then, but I don't see how you could really fix all the inconsistencies, global state, and "oddities" without a lot of breaking changes and really making it into a different language.
  - spiderfarmer 5mo ago
    PHP should learn from JS where you have to abandon frameworks every two years.
  - esskay 5mo ago
    > What is inaccurate about it? It's been debunked so many times over the years, I'm afraid I don't have the energy or desire to do it again when it's really not needed if you're far out of the php ecosystem that it really won't make a difference. Suffice to say the PHP it is talking about is nothing at all like modern PHP.
    - thayne 5mo ago
      Sure PHP has improved since that was written, but I'm pretty sure it was accurate when it was written. And I suspect that it was probably a contributing factor in some of PHP's improvements since then.
      - esskay 5mo ago
        It was accurate when it was written, but within a couple of years of that it wasn't yet it was still constantly used. Thats where it became damaging, people not grasping how inaccurate it was yet still kept pushing it as a current understanding of the language.
fg137 5mo ago
No. Bad rep comes from developers who used other languages and never looked back.
- spiderfarmer 5mo ago
  So they stopped developing in PHP am I right?
luke5441 5mo ago
I think the biggest problem is that the main way to use it is as a HTTP response handler, whereas other languages are more general purpose. So when a developer wants to develop themselves outside of a HTTP response handler, they need to switch languages. Of couse it can be argued that PHP can be used outside this one way as well, but even e.g. https://symfony.com/doc/current/mercure.html https://symfony.com/doc/current/mercure.html is using golang.
- TRiG_Ireland 5mo ago
  I've thrown together quick and dirty CLI scripts with PHP, just because it's the language I know best. It works fine.

I think the “bad rep” is coming from developers that stopped developing themselves.

frutjgma 5mo ago

I did PHP for 15 years. Modern PHP looks good but I still wouldn't go back.

phplovesong 5mo ago
What is even "modern php"? It has the same warts than it had back in the day, last i looked nothing is fixed.

chuckadams 5mo ago

I've written PHP off and on since the .php3 extension was a thing, and I can say that PHP very much deserved the bad rap it had for some time. It's evolved beyond most of that, but a lot of that is due to the composer ecosystem making up for it while the behavior of many builtins remains beyond repair. Which is fine, every language has baggage and warts. PHP's warts are sometimes heinously ugly, and they're on full display in many legacy codebases, but modern PHP is something I actually find to be fairly pleasant to develop with, far more than Go or vanilla JavaScript.

spiderfarmer 5mo ago
The most under appreciated thing about PHP is the fact that after 20+ years I can still develop in PHP and never had to learn a JS framework, Rust, Go, Ruby, Java or .NET.
- fancyswimtime 5mo ago
  ?? you can write JS without having to learn a framework. They exist in PHP too such as Symfony. This constant complaint about frameworks seems less about the framework and more about having to learn to work with people which is partly why the framework abstraction exists.

esskay 5mo ago

A lot of it came from the rather harmful "php a fractal of bad design" article that used to get posted everywhere despite being highly inaccurate and out of date. Thankfully its fairly rare to see someone daft enough to still try using it in a discussion. PHP's come a very long way since then.

thayne 5mo ago
What is inaccurate about it? Maybe it is out of date now, but when I first read it about a decade ago, when I did a fair amount of PHP development, I had personally encountered most of the issues mentioned in there. I've heard that PHP has improved a lot since then, but I don't see how you could really fix all the inconsistencies, global state, and "oddities" without a lot of breaking changes and really making it into a different language.
- spiderfarmer 5mo ago
  PHP should learn from JS where you have to abandon frameworks every two years.
- esskay 5mo ago
  > What is inaccurate about it? It's been debunked so many times over the years, I'm afraid I don't have the energy or desire to do it again when it's really not needed if you're far out of the php ecosystem that it really won't make a difference. Suffice to say the PHP it is talking about is nothing at all like modern PHP.
  - thayne 5mo ago
    Sure PHP has improved since that was written, but I'm pretty sure it was accurate when it was written. And I suspect that it was probably a contributing factor in some of PHP's improvements since then.
    - esskay 5mo ago
      It was accurate when it was written, but within a couple of years of that it wasn't yet it was still constantly used. Thats where it became damaging, people not grasping how inaccurate it was yet still kept pushing it as a current understanding of the language.

fg137 5mo ago

No. Bad rep comes from developers who used other languages and never looked back.

spiderfarmer 5mo ago
So they stopped developing in PHP am I right?

luke5441 5mo ago

I think the biggest problem is that the main way to use it is as a HTTP response handler, whereas other languages are more general purpose. So when a developer wants to develop themselves outside of a HTTP response handler, they need to switch languages. Of couse it can be argued that PHP can be used outside this one way as well, but even e.g. https://symfony.com/doc/current/mercure.html https://symfony.com/doc/current/mercure.html is using golang.

TRiG_Ireland 5mo ago
I've thrown together quick and dirty CLI scripts with PHP, just because it's the language I know best. It works fine.