5 ms·

Sorry for yet another rant against php, but does anyone else here feels a bit sad that those obviously brilliant people work so hard to improve this language in

by bsaul 12y ago

Sorry for yet another rant against php, but does anyone else here feels a bit sad that those obviously brilliant people work so hard to improve this language instead of basically any other main one ? Edit : seems like i wasn't clear. I don't mean sad for the people working on the project ( i'm sure they love what they're doing), i mean sad because as a non-php dev ( but basically everything else dev), i know many "better" languages that would benefit from having those kind of people on board.

exacube 12y ago
They're making a widely used bad language better, so people using (or forced to use) said bad language can improve their code. I think it's noble!
Gigablah 12y ago
I'm sorry but that's extremely condescending of you. You might as well feel sad that these brilliant people are not "curing cancer" or "eliminating AIDS" or something.
- nightski 12y ago
  About as condescending as saying it is a waste of time to improve methods for bloodletting to cure disease.
  - ta_6c_0677Fr 12y ago
    Bloodletting is still used in modern medicine. With the leeches and everything.
    - nightski 12y ago
      As is PHP ;)
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
mmckeen 12y ago
Knowing how large Facebook's PHP/Hack codebase is/was, rewriting that application would have been a disaster. Hack is a fantastic language and the work by the HHVM team benefits the PHP ecosystem as a whole. PHP may have its problems, but many companies use it for its many benefits, mainly the ease of finding developer talent.
- fishnchips 12y ago
  > rewriting that application would have been a disaster Or the best decision ever made by the company.
  - nkozyra 12y ago
    Based on what? They rewrote the language into another that is largely backwards compatible, fixes PHP's quirks and is insanely fast. Given the choice of migrating / transpiling an entire codebase or making the underlying interpreter / compiler and language fantastic and speedy, the latter is a big, big win. What would rewriting the whole thing in, say, Ruby or Python have done beyond limiting the amount of "PHP sucks!" critique they so often get? Seriously, take a look at Hack. It's very well done.
    - fishnchips 12y ago
      This is not to diss any particular language but an architectural problem - frontend and backend are very tightly coupled which makes it difficult to develop anything outside this stack. By splitting a humongous (and always growing) homogenous application into smaller services you get smaller failure domains and better interoperability with acquisitions and potential new groundbreaking projects that do not easily fit into the current development model. Again, I have no opinion about HHVM and Hack which are completely orthogonal to the problem at hand.
      - nkozyra 12y ago
        Can you expound on this? I don't perceive front end and back end being especially more coupled than, say, Node.
SamReidHughes 12y ago
PHP has merits relative to other web development tools, like the way the environment for every request starts "clean" and global state has to be explicitly managed. Adding typechecking to PHP with Hack and making it run fast is very useful and not sad at all.
skore 12y ago
HHVM is the answer to the following conversation: P1 - "PHP sucks, it's a terrible language with no proper design and no serious person would ever want to use it" P2 - "But tons of large projects are built on it and people ship with it everyday" P1 - "So? It's still terrible" P2 - "What do you think is so terrible?" P1 - "Oh lots and lots of things, I wouldn't even know where to begin" P2 - "How about this: let's throw boatloads of cash on it for a while and see where we get." P1 - "Oh gee, I dunno if..." P2 - "Boatloads of cash it is. [edit] After seeing how my comment could be seen as ridiculing HHVM: I'm a PHP dev and I'm loving every second of what they're doing. I think they're right on the money.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- tracker1 12y ago
  I actually appreciate the work that Facebook is doing in this space... it's definitely beneficial to those running PHP codebases that have been around a long time. While I don't like PHP the language, I can understand the utility of it. That said, I'm appreciating the move to containerization and micro-services more... replacing some pieces with better options becomes far easier when those pieces are smaller. I can prototype in something like node, and move those troublesome bits to something like go or c++ if needed.
girvo 12y ago
Shared nothing. Simple deployment. "Web" focused. Those are PHP's strengths, and why it continues to do well, despite it's huge amount of quirks. Modern PHP, with Composer, the PSR standards, and the Framework Interoperability Group's efforts is a very different beast to PHP4 or <=PHP5.3. Sure, one can make an argument that a "better" language would be a nicer target for this sort of amazing talent, but that ignores reality: So many things run on PHP, that it's a good idea to fix PHP's issues. HHVM and Hack are doing sp (in parallel with the communities efforts), and I thank them for it,
- coldtea 12y ago
  >despite it's huge amount of quirks. Besides inconsistent/bad library argument order/naming, and a couple parser related issues that are slowly being fixed (like the "immediately use an array returned from a function" issue fixed in 5.4) I don't see any "huge amount" of quirks. I do see a lot of bikeshedding, from people who could have found similar BS in most languages in major use.
  - aikah 12y ago
    Most languages aren't templating languages at first place. PHP was saved because it decided to look like Java,which neither Ruby or Python do,which allows writing these huge codebases like Doctrine or Symfony. I personnally started coding with Actionscript 3, I wish PHP looked exactly like that,while keeping the scripting and the execution model.
    - RussianCow 12y ago
      > PHP was saved because it decided to look like Java,which neither Ruby or Python do,which allows writing these huge codebases like Doctrine or Symfony. What does looking like Java have to do with being able to write huge codebases? Both Python and Ruby have libraries just as big as (or bigger than) Doctrine and Symfony.
      - aikah 12y ago
jamesgpearce 12y ago
I don't know if you've seen what we're doing with JavaScript :)
datashovel 12y ago
This comment is sad. First people complain about problems with PHP. Then when problems are being solved people complain about people fixing them. It honestly looks like PHP is simply in a lose / lose situation with many people. That's the real disappointment in my eyes.
- mtbcoder 12y ago
  I think much of the hatred towards PHP fundamentally comes down to the fact that it broke down a lot of barriers to entry in the web development world which allowed for anyone with a basic text editor to patch together CRUD apps. This led to an army of "w3cschools.com developers" referring to themselves as software engineers, which offended many in enterprise Java land.
- laichzeit0 12y ago
  PHP is a lose / lose only to people that are not using it / won't bother learning it. It's the same with Perl. It's not hot nor trendy and that's why many people get so frustrated when they hear about people still using it because there's something "newer and better". Haters gonna hate. It's simply not viable from a time-investment point of view to throw away tools you know extremely well, are well entrenched, well supported and stable every few years because something new comes along.
  - shiggerino 12y ago
    PHP is also a fairly new language, so it certainly wouldn't be my first choice if that was my main concern. In fact it isn't for this exact reason.
    - castell 12y ago
      New language? 1995: PHP, Javascript, Java, Ruby
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

by bsaul 12y ago

exacube 12y ago

They're making a widely used bad language better, so people using (or forced to use) said bad language can improve their code. I think it's noble!

Gigablah 12y ago

I'm sorry but that's extremely condescending of you. You might as well feel sad that these brilliant people are not "curing cancer" or "eliminating AIDS" or something.

nightski 12y ago
About as condescending as saying it is a waste of time to improve methods for bloodletting to cure disease.
- ta_6c_0677Fr 12y ago
  Bloodletting is still used in modern medicine. With the leeches and everything.
  - nightski 12y ago
    As is PHP ;)
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]

mmckeen 12y ago

Knowing how large Facebook's PHP/Hack codebase is/was, rewriting that application would have been a disaster. Hack is a fantastic language and the work by the HHVM team benefits the PHP ecosystem as a whole. PHP may have its problems, but many companies use it for its many benefits, mainly the ease of finding developer talent.

fishnchips 12y ago
> rewriting that application would have been a disaster Or the best decision ever made by the company.
- nkozyra 12y ago
  Based on what? They rewrote the language into another that is largely backwards compatible, fixes PHP's quirks and is insanely fast. Given the choice of migrating / transpiling an entire codebase or making the underlying interpreter / compiler and language fantastic and speedy, the latter is a big, big win. What would rewriting the whole thing in, say, Ruby or Python have done beyond limiting the amount of "PHP sucks!" critique they so often get? Seriously, take a look at Hack. It's very well done.
  - fishnchips 12y ago
    This is not to diss any particular language but an architectural problem - frontend and backend are very tightly coupled which makes it difficult to develop anything outside this stack. By splitting a humongous (and always growing) homogenous application into smaller services you get smaller failure domains and better interoperability with acquisitions and potential new groundbreaking projects that do not easily fit into the current development model. Again, I have no opinion about HHVM and Hack which are completely orthogonal to the problem at hand.
    - nkozyra 12y ago
      Can you expound on this? I don't perceive front end and back end being especially more coupled than, say, Node.

SamReidHughes 12y ago

PHP has merits relative to other web development tools, like the way the environment for every request starts "clean" and global state has to be explicitly managed. Adding typechecking to PHP with Hack and making it run fast is very useful and not sad at all.

skore 12y ago

HHVM is the answer to the following conversation: P1 - "PHP sucks, it's a terrible language with no proper design and no serious person would ever want to use it" P2 - "But tons of large projects are built on it and people ship with it everyday" P1 - "So? It's still terrible" P2 - "What do you think is so terrible?" P1 - "Oh lots and lots of things, I wouldn't even know where to begin" P2 - "How about this: let's throw boatloads of cash on it for a while and see where we get." P1 - "Oh gee, I dunno if..." P2 - "Boatloads of cash it is. [edit] After seeing how my comment could be seen as ridiculing HHVM: I'm a PHP dev and I'm loving every second of what they're doing. I think they're right on the money.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
tracker1 12y ago
I actually appreciate the work that Facebook is doing in this space... it's definitely beneficial to those running PHP codebases that have been around a long time. While I don't like PHP the language, I can understand the utility of it. That said, I'm appreciating the move to containerization and micro-services more... replacing some pieces with better options becomes far easier when those pieces are smaller. I can prototype in something like node, and move those troublesome bits to something like go or c++ if needed.

girvo 12y ago

Shared nothing. Simple deployment. "Web" focused. Those are PHP's strengths, and why it continues to do well, despite it's huge amount of quirks. Modern PHP, with Composer, the PSR standards, and the Framework Interoperability Group's efforts is a very different beast to PHP4 or <=PHP5.3. Sure, one can make an argument that a "better" language would be a nicer target for this sort of amazing talent, but that ignores reality: So many things run on PHP, that it's a good idea to fix PHP's issues. HHVM and Hack are doing sp (in parallel with the communities efforts), and I thank them for it,

coldtea 12y ago
>despite it's huge amount of quirks. Besides inconsistent/bad library argument order/naming, and a couple parser related issues that are slowly being fixed (like the "immediately use an array returned from a function" issue fixed in 5.4) I don't see any "huge amount" of quirks. I do see a lot of bikeshedding, from people who could have found similar BS in most languages in major use.
- aikah 12y ago
  Most languages aren't templating languages at first place. PHP was saved because it decided to look like Java,which neither Ruby or Python do,which allows writing these huge codebases like Doctrine or Symfony. I personnally started coding with Actionscript 3, I wish PHP looked exactly like that,while keeping the scripting and the execution model.
  - RussianCow 12y ago
    > PHP was saved because it decided to look like Java,which neither Ruby or Python do,which allows writing these huge codebases like Doctrine or Symfony. What does looking like Java have to do with being able to write huge codebases? Both Python and Ruby have libraries just as big as (or bigger than) Doctrine and Symfony.
    - aikah 12y ago

jamesgpearce 12y ago

I don't know if you've seen what we're doing with JavaScript :)

datashovel 12y ago

This comment is sad. First people complain about problems with PHP. Then when problems are being solved people complain about people fixing them. It honestly looks like PHP is simply in a lose / lose situation with many people. That's the real disappointment in my eyes.

mtbcoder 12y ago
I think much of the hatred towards PHP fundamentally comes down to the fact that it broke down a lot of barriers to entry in the web development world which allowed for anyone with a basic text editor to patch together CRUD apps. This led to an army of "w3cschools.com developers" referring to themselves as software engineers, which offended many in enterprise Java land.
laichzeit0 12y ago
PHP is a lose / lose only to people that are not using it / won't bother learning it. It's the same with Perl. It's not hot nor trendy and that's why many people get so frustrated when they hear about people still using it because there's something "newer and better". Haters gonna hate. It's simply not viable from a time-investment point of view to throw away tools you know extremely well, are well entrenched, well supported and stable every few years because something new comes along.
- shiggerino 12y ago
  PHP is also a fairly new language, so it certainly wouldn't be my first choice if that was my main concern. In fact it isn't for this exact reason.
  - castell 12y ago
    New language? 1995: PHP, Javascript, Java, Ruby

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]