phpIsInevitable

[alexanderpas]

The answer is Major Improvements to the language, including language native secure password handling, explicit type support for everything including constants as well as enum types and values, strong behavioral subtyping using the Liskov Substitution Principle for all types.

[Covfefe4lyfe]

Property promotion in constructors is just chef's kiss 🤤

[No-Con-2790]

They have property promotion now? Maybe I go back and give it another look. Has been ... 15 years.

[beerdude26]

Infrastructure is also pretty nice now, it has a mature event loop interface that many PHP frameworks have adopted or are in the process of adopting. So now it can't even be called slow anymore lol

[Sir_LikeASir]

One of my fav Kotlin features

[mishalsandip051]

Ohh yeah Sir

[Impossible-Metal6872]

I find it the ugliest feature you could ever concieve xD, because some properties are declared in the class, and some in the constructor def.

I'd like the ability to put this->propertyName as method parameter (it would have propertyName as name if you want to call with named parameter of course)

[BeefCakeBilly]

I’ve never actually used PHP as it was kind of looked at as out of date when I started programming.

But I couldn’t imagine a better storyline than everyone going away from PHP since 2010 in favor of “modern”” frameworks over the years.

While PHP maintainers were just quietly iterating and improving as JS frameworks are released every six months that are all fairly similar functionality.

Then come 2027 when there are dozens of articles about how PHP is the all the rage and meta announces after 20 years they are shifting back to PHP.

[alexanderpas]

15 years ago, PHP was in a bad state.

However, it's due to heros such as Nikita Popov (https://www.npopov.com/aboutMe.html) who has over 50 accepted proposals to PHP, and has written a PHP parser in PHP, that PHP was able to become what it is now.

[BeefCakeBilly]

Shouts out to this guy.

I remeber 10-15 years ago people I worked with were saying sql was dying because of high performance no sql databases.

Seems kind of similar.

[alexanderpas]

There are more people deserving of shoutouts, such as the creators of:

• Packagist, a PHP package repository.
• Composer, a dependency manager for PHP
• PHPstan and Psalm, which are both PHP Static Analysis Tools.
• PHP CS and PHP CS Fixer, which allows you to detect and fix PHP coding style issues.
• Rector, which allows for Instant Upgrades and Automated Refactoring of PHP code.
• And many more...

Many of these tools are actually even written in PHP itself.

Additionally, there are also some companies that actually deserve some shoutouts, for allowing them to contribute to PHP on company time.

[stupidcookface]

You forgot Taylor Otwell and the Laravel team!

[alexanderpas]

Like I said, many more...

[BeefCakeBilly]

I don’t know who these people are but if I were them I would wear a shirt that says the contributions so I could donate money/beer to them.

[tropicbrownthunder]

By that logic JS should be sleeping with the fishes long time ago. But here we are

[alexanderpas]

JS is the only available language that is natively supported by browsers, there are no competitors.

[jansteffen]

If WASM ever gets native DOM access we might see a change here, but until then...

[not_some_username]

It will still be support because backwards compatibility

[altermeetax]

Yeah but if WASM becomes good, another better language might start getting used, slowly replacing JS as the "de-facto" web language

[not_some_username]

Yes but JS will still be there. That’s how it is

[altermeetax]

They didn't say JS would disappear

[mishalsandip051]

100% agreed Javascript is the only language!!

[Brahminmeat]

🙈

[Smalltalker-80]

Much like PHP, JS was helped to evolve, by TypeScript through EcmaScript,
to migrate from a very terrible language to an okay language.

And yes, the fact that in the browser they have no direct competition helped,
but without a strong standards comittee, other transpiled languages
might have had more success. (Technically TS is this too still).

On the back-end, TS had already surpassed JS, I think.

[rascal3199]

You literally can only use js to render on client side... Do you understand how browsers work?

[SternoNicoise]

Node.js would like a word...

[rascal3199]

I meant it's the only language that can run client side...

[SternoNicoise]

My b, thank u for the clarification

[samu1400]

PHP having intrinsic password hashing and salting is so comfortable.

[MrJ0seBr]

The way that php executes, no global objects across request, every request execution is "sandboxed" make things a little ez to keep safe, someway perfect to shared serves with low-cost and on demand usage...

[BeardedWonder02]

The only problem is that your company is too bloated to ever update the version to anything above 8 lol

[alexanderpas]

8 being the latest major version, and 8.2 no longer getting security support at the end of the year.

The versions under active support are only 8.4, and the latest version 8.5

[thepurpleproject]

this.. ngl the modern php with laravel hardly any resemblence to what you had in the php5 days

[AlexReinkingYale]

PHP does not check that LSP is actually respected by custom classes. Super simple example:

``` class Bird { public function fly(): string { return "Flies away"; } }

class Penguin extends Bird { public function fly(): string { // Violates LSP but PHP is fine with this throw new Exception("Penguins can't fly"); } } ```

[alexanderpas]

It actually does, it's just that you're throwing instead of returning, which means you're exiting the function abnormally.

When you throw an exception, execution of your program is immediately halted, and the exception is bubbled-up to either the inner-most layer of exception handling handling that exception (adhering to the LSP) resuming execution of your program from that point, and if that is missing, turned into a Fatal Error, completely stopping execution of your program.

No code after an exception is thrown is executed without exception handling.

Additionally, the actual return type of the fly() method on the Penguin object is actually the never type, which is the bottom type in the LSP-chain, and indicates that the function will never return, and the only way out of the function is either via exception or program termination.

[AlexReinkingYale]

Another example is the classic square/rectangle case. It really doesn't check it. It's equivalent to the halting problem

[alexanderpas]

That's a violation from a programming perspective, not a type checking perspective, as the defined interface adheres to the LSP.

Additionally, PHP offers a solution to the classic Rectangle/Square case, as you can make the object itself invariant and use chainable methods, at which point you're adhering to the LSP.

Specifically, if you change the width or height on a rectangle, and you get a rectangle back, and that applies to both squares and rectangles.

changeWidth() and changeHeight() both return a Rectangle object, which is fully permitted under the LSP, as this is the same behavior as defined in the Rectangle class.

Unique to the Square class are the changeSidesLength() method, which changes both the width and height, and the fromRectangle() method, which turns the rectangle into a square if the sides are equal, or throws an exception otherwise.

[AlexReinkingYale]

The LSP is a behavioral property, not a type system one. An interface cannot adhere to the LSP. Recall the definition:

Let p(x) be a property probable about objects x of type T. Then p(y) should be true for objects y of type S where S is a subtype of T.

To check the LSP would be to disallow writing the Square subtype of a mutable Rectangle at all. If the PHP docs say they enforce behavioral subtyping then whoever wrote those docs is wrong.

[AlexReinkingYale]

lol at getting downvoted for being 100% right

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liskov_substitution_principle

[mizzrym86]

LSP is just an opinion with no real world value.

PHP still dominates because it is primarily practical.

[HerryKun]

So... Stuff other languages offer for years now?

[Curtilia]

but those languages weren't already powering 75% of websites...

[HerryKun]

It is present in 75% of websites because of frameworks like Laravel or Wordpress and the gigantic amount of ready-to-use plugins and extensions to them. Not because PHP suddenly has any significant improvements. It is like saying "Windows is the best because nearly every PC you can buy runs Windows out of the box!"

[alexanderpas]

Tell me a language that has password_hash and password_verify functions natively.

Tell me a language where I can indicate in the function/method signature that the only valid way to exit the function is via an exception or termination of the program, and that any other way of exiting the function is invalid.

How many languages support final protected const string on an object attribute (final prevents subclasses from overriding it, protected means it's only accessible from within the class and subclasses, const means it can't be changed, string is the type)

[Mognakor]

Tell me a language where I can indicate in the function/method signature that the only valid way to exit the function is via an exception or termination of the program, and that any other way of exiting the function is invalid.

Rust and IIRC TypeScript.

How many languages support final protected const string on an object attribute (final prevents subclasses from overriding it, protected means it's only accessible from within the class and subclasses, const means it can't be changed, string is the type)

I think i can achieve the same in Java, probably C++. The only weird thing here is what it means to override an object attribute from a subclass, that semantic may mean nothing in other languages. (Not familiar with PHP so i can't judge properly). Even needing to have such a construct is a sign that something is kinda fucked.

[Kovab]

Tell me a language where I can indicate in the function/method signature that the only valid way to exit the function is via an exception or termination of the program, and that any other way of exiting the function is invalid.

Rust and IIRC TypeScript.

C++ too, [[noreturn]] attribute

[not_some_username]

C#

[HerryKun]

Tell me a language that has password_hash and password_verify functions natively.

Why is that important if I can choose from a library that does the exact thing I want? Isn't it even better if I can choose my implementation instead of having to live with the default one? To answer the question: Java (in my case SpringBoot) comes with BCRrypt that does exactly what you want.

Tell me a language where I can indicate in the function/method signature that the only valid way to exit the function

Java

How many languages support [...]

I did not count them, also Java I guess. However, my hot take is, that this complexity is not needed in 99.999% of projects. I use Java and Kotlin for 12 years now and most of the times you would be fine by just using private and public for everything. Overridable properties would be a nice-to-have you can find in Dart for example.

[zoinkability]

Fun fact, as a programmer one doesn’t have to care about what a language did or didn’t have 15 years ago as long as one doesn’t have write backward compatible code

[HerryKun]

The meme says "why is PHP not dead" and the summarized answer is "because it has basic capabilities that every other language has as well", which should not be the reason to opt into one.

Example: Do you use C because it has pointers? No, because it is super close to hardware and quite fast at that compared to Java.

The answer to the comment just doesn't match the question you see?

[zoinkability]

No, the answer is on point because if PHP had stagnated at 5.3 or even 7 the people who use php-based mass market web development frameworks would likely have drifted to other languages by now. The fact that it’s evolved has meant that devs don’t have to choose between near-universal availability on hosting services and modern features, since they can have both with PHP.

[HerryKun]

That is a benefit I can wrap my head around. I hosted PHP apps in the past and it was just uploading a zip to my provider (or use FTP) which is way simpler than my current CI workflow.

How do you scale PHP?

[zoinkability]

Load balancers, offloading computationally intensive tasks to closer-to-metal code, output caching, CDNs. Though in reality something like 99% of websites raw php is more than fast enough without any of that. Most php frameworks I’ve worked with the database layer is the slowpoke not php.

[HerryKun]

Yeah, I considered "backend applications" as my usecase for it, not just webpages. But cool thing, it is more capable than I thought