8 ms·

While it's certainly true that PHP is better than it was 7 years ago, that is primarily in the ecosystem and not the language. The language remains as bad as i

by PLejeck 13y ago

While it's certainly true that PHP is better than it was 7 years ago, that is primarily in the ecosystem and not the language. The language remains as bad as it was 7 years ago, and they seem to be woefully unwilling to actually fix it.

harshreality 13y ago
A fixed php would be a different language. The differences between Python 2.x and 3.0 would be minor compared to what would need to be fixed in php... and look how well that migration has worked out for python.
- pekk 13y ago
  It has worked just fine for Python, now. Maybe your impressions of how well it went were set in 2010 and not revisited?
PommeDeTerre 13y ago
What you say is very true. PHP is in the same boat that JavaScript is in. Their very severe, yet very inherent, language flaws just cannot be covered up with one library or framework after another. The only real option is to give up backward compatibility, to then throw out every broken language feature, and to then reimplement them properly. Unfortunately for those two languages, that would involve an awful lot of stuff getting thrown out and reimplemented, which is very likely why it hasn't happened yet. Given how much core functionality needs to be reworked in both cases, I don't think they can really be saved. There are numerous other better languages out there, and it's easier just to use them instead of trying to salvage PHP or JavaScript.
- philipp-de 13y ago
  They are doing it, though. For example they have now deprecated the dreaded mysql_, pgsql_ interfaces (including mysql_now_escape_the_string_for_real() and the like ;) for accessing the database in favor of PDO. They will be removed in the future. Lots of projects still use those. Just 1 example of PHP dropping backwards compatibility. It's not quite so bad as you make it out to be.
  - PommeDeTerre 13y ago
    Deprecation of those awful vendor specific DB extensions is a good start, no doubt. But those are library functions, rather than language features. Another thing to consider is that PHP developers have a track record of deprecating certain functionality, then a few releases later changing their minds and no longer deprecating it. Some examples of this include is_a, and var in property declarations. Given how it's still relatively common to see PHP 4.x installations in use today, 10 or more years after they were first released in some cases, merely deprecating some of the broken functionality now won't help much. We'll still see deprecated features in use in 2020, if not well beyond then. The broken functionality needs to be stripped out completely within a reasonable time frame (well under a year), not merely deprecated and left around for years, if it even stays deprecated. But this involves the PHP community acting responsibly, and going along with these changes for their own good. I don't think we can expect that level of responsibility out of them, unfortunately.
    - giulianob 13y ago
      Look at how slow Python 3 adoption has been. I don't think completely breaking backwards compatibility is a quick thing. The Python folks expected 5 years for Python 3 to become the default version because of the dramatic changes. http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/63859/why-do-people-hesitate-to-use-python-3 http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/63859/why-do-...
      - PommeDeTerre 13y ago
        Not every Python user uses Django, you know. I've worked on a number of software systems at several different organizations that have very effectively used Python 3 for years now. I think that Python 3 has been adopted perfectly fine by many other people and organizations, too. We're just not overly vocal about using it, because it has worked for us with so little pain and so little effort in many cases. It really wasn't much different going from 2.7 to 3.0 or 3.1 than it was going from 2.6 to 2.7, for example.
        13y ago
dasil003 13y ago
How would they fix it anyway? It was never really designed, it just evolved as a slow accretion of features using whatever syntax was convenient in the parser codebase over a couple of decades. The author makes a good point that people like me who ditched PHP in the mid-2000s should probably stop complaining about it since we don't really know the current state of affairs. The problem is when we have languages like Ruby, Clojure, Scala, Haskell, or even plain old Javascript ala Node, why would I waste another thought on PHP? PHP was created to make very simple dynamic web pages, and I would still use it for that in the way that I still write bash scripts for simple shell operations to avoid a higher level dependency like Ruby or Perl. I'll use PHP for small stuff, but I see no benefit towards putting any real engineering effort into a PHP project.
- philipp-de 13y ago
  Javascript, of all things, wasn't neatly "designed" either. The core language was hacked together in several weeks, by a few developer at Netscape. Javascript wasn't made for large applications. It was made for form checking and rollover menues (some of the earliest examples back in the day) ;) It can be argued that Javascript has many unfixable design bugs, too. Just sayin.
  - dasil003 13y ago
    Well that's why I said "even" Javascript. Brendan Eich actually pulled off a small miracle by embedding incredibly powerful functional and prototypal paradigms in JS. It's not perfect, and there are plenty of warts, but JS came out of the gate with a powerful core that PHP took decades to add in a Frankenstein manner.
    - PommeDeTerre 13y ago
      Enough with the "JavaScript is a functional language" myth, please. Merely having first-class functions does not make a language a functional programming language. JavaScript does not promote the use of pure functions, referential transparency, and the minimization of state. JavaScript does not encourage the use of recursion. JavaScript has an atrociously broken type system, rather than a robust and theoretically sound one. JavaScript does not offer pattern matching and other functionality offered by modern functional languages. In fact, JavaScript goes out of its way to promote a very imperative, non-functional style of software development, even when efforts are made to try to use it in a functional way. And JavaScript's prototype-based OO is anything but powerful. In practice, it's nearly useless. That's why we see so many JavaScript developers try to fake a class-like OO system using it, since class-based OO does offer what they need and want. But due to the incapability of JavaScript's prototype-based approach, these hacks end up being incompatible maintenance headaches. JavaScript does not have a "powerful core". It has a rotten core, just like PHP, and it has evolved in a broken manner, just like PHP.
level09 13y ago
I strongly disagree, php 5 has introduced a lot of fixes, performance improvements and many nice and great new features. I'm a big fan of python and I think that very intelligent people are behind its architecture, but honestly most of the money I made through the past years came from php websites that I can build really fast. I have eventually used python (fabric) to automate creating php websites.
agumonkey 13y ago
Not so fast. PHP evolved a lot as a language, maybe it will never be enough to fix its ancestry, but namespaces, closures, generators, ~~typed~~ expressions (you can finally slice a function call returning an array without unnecessary variables) and some literals. It's still not 1958-worthy to me, but they do evolve.
- rizalp 13y ago
  It is evolved indeed, but is there any language designer / guru who ever come close to exploring its good parts (like Douglas Crockford did with Javascript)? I don't think so...
  - agumonkey 13y ago
    Well, first I think it's irrelevant with what we were saying. Secondly, I doubt there will ever be such a document toward PHP, since it wasn't conceived with a linguistic background (Rasmus Lerdorf wanted a pragmatic dynamic layer on top of C code without resorting to perl). There's no special abstraction principle in PHP, as opposed to prototyping, which (after a quick wikicheck) is not a core abstraction in mainstream languages and could benefit from a book explaining how to think in it. PHP is more and more aiming toward mainstream class based OOP, and everything has been said about it but I can be wrong.

by PLejeck 13y ago

harshreality 13y ago

A fixed php would be a different language. The differences between Python 2.x and 3.0 would be minor compared to what would need to be fixed in php... and look how well that migration has worked out for python.

pekk 13y ago
It has worked just fine for Python, now. Maybe your impressions of how well it went were set in 2010 and not revisited?

PommeDeTerre 13y ago

What you say is very true. PHP is in the same boat that JavaScript is in. Their very severe, yet very inherent, language flaws just cannot be covered up with one library or framework after another. The only real option is to give up backward compatibility, to then throw out every broken language feature, and to then reimplement them properly. Unfortunately for those two languages, that would involve an awful lot of stuff getting thrown out and reimplemented, which is very likely why it hasn't happened yet. Given how much core functionality needs to be reworked in both cases, I don't think they can really be saved. There are numerous other better languages out there, and it's easier just to use them instead of trying to salvage PHP or JavaScript.

philipp-de 13y ago
They are doing it, though. For example they have now deprecated the dreaded mysql_, pgsql_ interfaces (including mysql_now_escape_the_string_for_real() and the like ;) for accessing the database in favor of PDO. They will be removed in the future. Lots of projects still use those. Just 1 example of PHP dropping backwards compatibility. It's not quite so bad as you make it out to be.
- PommeDeTerre 13y ago
  Deprecation of those awful vendor specific DB extensions is a good start, no doubt. But those are library functions, rather than language features. Another thing to consider is that PHP developers have a track record of deprecating certain functionality, then a few releases later changing their minds and no longer deprecating it. Some examples of this include is_a, and var in property declarations. Given how it's still relatively common to see PHP 4.x installations in use today, 10 or more years after they were first released in some cases, merely deprecating some of the broken functionality now won't help much. We'll still see deprecated features in use in 2020, if not well beyond then. The broken functionality needs to be stripped out completely within a reasonable time frame (well under a year), not merely deprecated and left around for years, if it even stays deprecated. But this involves the PHP community acting responsibly, and going along with these changes for their own good. I don't think we can expect that level of responsibility out of them, unfortunately.
  - giulianob 13y ago
    Look at how slow Python 3 adoption has been. I don't think completely breaking backwards compatibility is a quick thing. The Python folks expected 5 years for Python 3 to become the default version because of the dramatic changes. http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/63859/why-do-people-hesitate-to-use-python-3 http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/63859/why-do-...
    - PommeDeTerre 13y ago
      Not every Python user uses Django, you know. I've worked on a number of software systems at several different organizations that have very effectively used Python 3 for years now. I think that Python 3 has been adopted perfectly fine by many other people and organizations, too. We're just not overly vocal about using it, because it has worked for us with so little pain and so little effort in many cases. It really wasn't much different going from 2.7 to 3.0 or 3.1 than it was going from 2.6 to 2.7, for example.
      - 13y ago

dasil003 13y ago

How would they fix it anyway? It was never really designed, it just evolved as a slow accretion of features using whatever syntax was convenient in the parser codebase over a couple of decades. The author makes a good point that people like me who ditched PHP in the mid-2000s should probably stop complaining about it since we don't really know the current state of affairs. The problem is when we have languages like Ruby, Clojure, Scala, Haskell, or even plain old Javascript ala Node, why would I waste another thought on PHP? PHP was created to make very simple dynamic web pages, and I would still use it for that in the way that I still write bash scripts for simple shell operations to avoid a higher level dependency like Ruby or Perl. I'll use PHP for small stuff, but I see no benefit towards putting any real engineering effort into a PHP project.

philipp-de 13y ago
Javascript, of all things, wasn't neatly "designed" either. The core language was hacked together in several weeks, by a few developer at Netscape. Javascript wasn't made for large applications. It was made for form checking and rollover menues (some of the earliest examples back in the day) ;) It can be argued that Javascript has many unfixable design bugs, too. Just sayin.
- dasil003 13y ago
  Well that's why I said "even" Javascript. Brendan Eich actually pulled off a small miracle by embedding incredibly powerful functional and prototypal paradigms in JS. It's not perfect, and there are plenty of warts, but JS came out of the gate with a powerful core that PHP took decades to add in a Frankenstein manner.
  - PommeDeTerre 13y ago
    Enough with the "JavaScript is a functional language" myth, please. Merely having first-class functions does not make a language a functional programming language. JavaScript does not promote the use of pure functions, referential transparency, and the minimization of state. JavaScript does not encourage the use of recursion. JavaScript has an atrociously broken type system, rather than a robust and theoretically sound one. JavaScript does not offer pattern matching and other functionality offered by modern functional languages. In fact, JavaScript goes out of its way to promote a very imperative, non-functional style of software development, even when efforts are made to try to use it in a functional way. And JavaScript's prototype-based OO is anything but powerful. In practice, it's nearly useless. That's why we see so many JavaScript developers try to fake a class-like OO system using it, since class-based OO does offer what they need and want. But due to the incapability of JavaScript's prototype-based approach, these hacks end up being incompatible maintenance headaches. JavaScript does not have a "powerful core". It has a rotten core, just like PHP, and it has evolved in a broken manner, just like PHP.

level09 13y ago

I strongly disagree, php 5 has introduced a lot of fixes, performance improvements and many nice and great new features. I'm a big fan of python and I think that very intelligent people are behind its architecture, but honestly most of the money I made through the past years came from php websites that I can build really fast. I have eventually used python (fabric) to automate creating php websites.

agumonkey 13y ago

Not so fast. PHP evolved a lot as a language, maybe it will never be enough to fix its ancestry, but namespaces, closures, generators, ~~typed~~ expressions (you can finally slice a function call returning an array without unnecessary variables) and some literals. It's still not 1958-worthy to me, but they do evolve.

rizalp 13y ago
It is evolved indeed, but is there any language designer / guru who ever come close to exploring its good parts (like Douglas Crockford did with Javascript)? I don't think so...
- agumonkey 13y ago
  Well, first I think it's irrelevant with what we were saying. Secondly, I doubt there will ever be such a document toward PHP, since it wasn't conceived with a linguistic background (Rasmus Lerdorf wanted a pragmatic dynamic layer on top of C code without resorting to perl). There's no special abstraction principle in PHP, as opposed to prototyping, which (after a quick wikicheck) is not a core abstraction in mainstream languages and could benefit from a book explaining how to think in it. PHP is more and more aiming toward mainstream class based OOP, and everything has been said about it but I can be wrong.