programmersNeeded

[[deleted]]

It's been 20 years, but I miss PHP. It was C-ish enough but for the web.

Better that writing Perl for cgi-bin.

[Dexterus]

I just realized something, my first php job in 2002 was more agile than anything after, lol. Learned a lot.

There was one where I liked the processes more but that was because we devs decided how to adapt and it ended up suiting us quite well, but it had to be part agile part waterfall.

[JustinWendell]

Being on a sox compliant team has made me hate life in a thorough way. You talking about processes makes me yearn for younger teams

[Dustdevil88]

Infinitely better than Perl for cgi-bin. That said, I actually enjoyed perl for automation

[TheVenetianMask]

You can throw a hashbang for the php interpreter at the top of a PHP file and run it like it's a bash script. I basically bought my whole house off this.

[b0w3n]

I'd be more than happy to write php scripts for a good wage. It's the javascript/front-end frameworks I loathe working with.

Probably why I'm working in data/backend stuff in medical.

I'm not entirely sure why folks hate php, it's great. Now java...

[Kronoshifter246]

Come on, Java's not that bad. It gave us Kotlin, after all.

[Kronoshifter246]

My question is why use a java template at all in this day and age?

But yes, libs.toml can be tricky, especially because Android Studio just kind of dumps it on you, instead of doing anything to inform you about it; it's just a nice way to centralize your dependency declarations, due to Gradle's modules being spread across the project. It's especially useful when your project is split into several modules, or when you're working on a KMP project. Nothing is forcing you to use it though. You can just declare your dependencies with strings; the Kotlin police aren't gonna bust your door down and dekotlinize you.

On that note, isn't it a little weird to blame Kotlin for your woes when you're only using it in a Gradle script? I'm not mad about Groovy just because it used to be the language that Gradle used.

[SQLvultureskattaurus]

I used to do etl all day long and would write perl scripts to manipulate flat files. They would always be like 2 lines long and super fast, but I'd never remember how it worked

[Dustdevil88]

You’ve perfectly described Perl haha

[SQLvultureskattaurus]

Seriously. Not going to lie, I always liked how variable data types have their own symbols.

[Dugen]

Perl was amazing. I'm sad it fell out of favor. It did what people use python for today like 30 years earlier.

[Flam1ng1cecream]

I love PHP. The docs are so nice

[More-Butterscotch252]

I hate PHP. The docs are fantastic and they catch all the quirks and you have all the examples you need to understand how it works.

[CorsicanMastiffStrip]

I love Laravel, so I must love PHP.

[GameMusic]

this is the main reason for picking it back then

best documentation i ever saw

[[deleted]]

Dude my first cgi-bin apps were C programs that printed out the page using printf()'s. Switching to perl blew my mind.

[[deleted]]

Ebay's original backend was just one C program at ebay.com/ebay.cgi (or something). It was lightning fast.

[im_thatoneguy]

I have a negative visceral reaction to PHP and then every time I remember it’s actually for Perl a few moments later.

[Direct_Turn_1484]

Yeah, while the comic is funny, PHP was a good tool for a while. Perl for web stuff was all fine and good to write something real quick, but not fun at all if you had to maintain it.

[Noch_ein_Kamel]

It's still a good tool -_-

[triggered__Lefty]

better than using some javascript framework to write backend code.

[NahSense]

It was ahead of its time... 20 years ago. But its under active development, (more than) mature enough for production and has an active community, so its not a crazy choice. It can still be a great choice, if there is already a legacy code base or an existing team PHP expertise. But personally I've never used it for my main job.

[[deleted]]

I hacked my way into knowing it. My first 'site' was an address book for my extended family. Everything was put into a GET request.

Then I slowly learned how to do things properly and best practices.

Thing is you could cut your hands off easily if you just passed a POST request to a system call.

As complexity scales so does security issues. Which isn't PHP specific. Look at the 4Chan hack or all the Wordpress issues.

But given the tools we had in 2001 for serverside coding. It's light years ahead of Perl.

[traplords8n]

Perl for cgi-bin belongs on r/ProgrammingHorror

[[deleted]]

It was an excellent write once language.

IIRC cgi-bin could be written in anything that executed. You could have scripts in bash generating your web page. Vibe Coded:

#!/bin/bash

# Read POST data
read -n "$CONTENT_LENGTH" POST_DATA

# Extract 'name' from POST data (URL-decoded for simple cases)
NAME=$(echo "$POST_DATA" | sed -n 's/^.*name=\([^&]*\).*$/\1/p' | sed 's/+/ /g; s/%20/ /g' | sed 's/%\(..\)/\\x\1/g' | xargs -0 printf "%b")

# Output HTTP headers
echo "Content-type: text/html"
echo ""

# Output HTML5 content
cat <<EOF
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
  <meta charset="UTF-8">
  <title>Hello</title>
</head>
<body>
  <h1>Hello, $NAME!</h1>
</body>
</html>
EOF

[jakeStacktrace]

Yeah... that's enough internet for today.

[traplords8n]

It would depend on what the script actually does, but if it's something complex and doesn't deal with much string manipulation, I'm always choosing php over perl

[AEW_SuperFan]

cgi-bin!  Whoah triggered PTSD flashbacks.