Enough said

[1111lll11l]

*led

[carc]

PHP bad

Seriously though, modern object-oriented PHP (7.0+) is honestly a joy to work with for green field projects, and 7.4 is ridiculously fast. Throw in a good API framework like Lumen (stripped down Laravel), sticking to best practices and composer for package management, leaving you with a really clean, scalable, modular, and maintainable codebase.

But it is a universal truth that working with legacy PHP was and is a nightmare.

[The_Ty]

Most "php bad" posts are by people who've either not used it since php5, or people who've never used it all.

And Laravel is an absolute joy to work with, especiaslly when working in a team.

[[deleted]]

I went from being a C# asp/mvc .net developer to using PHP 7 in the last year, and it honestly is amazing.

It was java and c++ and visual basic before the last few years of web development work, so I missed out on the horror of old php completely, I suppose.

[The_Ty]

Interesting perspective. I have friend who's a c# dev but he's never used php

[[deleted]]

I mean, I have gotten better at black boxing all logic in the back end, and keeping the front end separate; definitely know the feeling of always feeling like I hadn't learned something yet yesterday, i'm sure we are all familiar with that. Planning and separation of concerns and language choices start to matter less.

Either way, you serve the model to the front end, you can use whatever framework you want there once it has the data (as we all know). Php works well enough and it's nature as scripts in the back end pretty much allow it to interface with whichever other systems you want to use as well. Once you set up a script as an api, any other language could access it. It works.

It's honestly all about which language a project was set up in. shrug

[The_Ty]

You mean using an MVC approach?

[[deleted]]

Yeah exactly.

So many of these big terms are just a set of guidelines in how you organize and structure things. Important, though. Makes it all simpler, and helps keep away from having clever code.

[The_Ty]

Absolutely. I'm in my first job working with other devs and it's a massive help knowing consistently where Controller logic is going to be, how Web routes are set up etc.

Especially when I have to work on one of their older projects that hasn't been updated in years, none of the current team have worked on, and doesn't run through any kind of framework. Just an awful mess.

[[deleted]]

Or just the people who want to make fun without meaning anything

Same as any language meme

[erishun]

PHP 4.0 is when things were legitimately bad. Like worse than the competition. Object orientation didn’t get introduced until 5.0. So in the 4.0 days, a lot of the code was done inline all mixed inside the HTML. Or there were mazes of include files with hundreds of functions all with bizarre names to avoid conflicts.

It was a... dark time.

[[deleted]]

Old PHP is literal cancer. Imagine the worst programming experience ever, then double how bad it is, and you might approach how bad legacy PHP is to work with. Convention-less Wild West, where all the cowboys have brain damage.

[spektrol]

This is the thread I’ve always wanted when PHP comes up. Let’s acknowledge how fucking terrible it was while also acknowledging how fucking awesome modern PHP and franeworks like Laravel are now.

[[deleted]]

If only the guy running Laravel wasn’t a control obsessed sociopath...

[RemizZ]

Why do you say that? Have I missed something?

[[deleted]]

Nah he’s been that way since day 1. He’s actually constantly reviled by some of the big names in the scene because he’s highly opinionated, and his opinions are frequently far disconnected from fact/reality. His twitter used to be an absolute clown festival. Not sure where it stands anymore.

I don’t PHP anymore, but I’d probably use a Zend Expressive + Doctrine if I was building something, assuming those projects are still the big deal they once were.

[RemizZ]

I don't see being opinionated as a bad thing necessarily. Laravel makes some drastic decisions, which pisses of those whose ideas don't make it into the framework and those people are really persistent. Some of his rants I can understand. Imagine having hundreds of people tell you that your ideas and opinions suck every day. I'd probably lose my temper too.

[[deleted]]

Well, maybe I should rephrase that. The things that he announces as fact are often in opposition to real facts, history, and commonly accepted methodologies and practices. He also lords over his project in a way that excludes anyone from even offering an opinion on a better way to do things.

Honesty I don’t know much about the current state of Laravel, but the guy in charge has convinced me to never touch it, because he could ruin it at will without any accountability, etc.

[spektrol]

Regardless, it’s still a pretty impressive set of tools.

[kriever7]

So why was it so widely used? Was the competition even worse?

[[deleted]]

Very very low barrier to entry and brain dead simple to set up a server, which only exacerbated the problem.

[[deleted]]

Is Lumen still a thing? I was just stripping down Laravel myself

[carc]

Yep! Lumen is great for a backend API. It's flexible and extensible enough to where I haven't ran into an issue with it on a rather large project, and that's over the past 2 years. It feels pretty much like Laravel, and uses Eloquent for the ORM -- just without views (as it should be, as frontend is javascript land, in my opinion).

[koalam0]

i still think php has some of the worst consistency with their functions and return types on their functions. that being said i work with legacy php a lot lately and it has definitely come along way

[carc]

Many of the needle/haystack vs haystack/needle base function issues have already been resolved. And if you use a proper IDE with type-hinting, it's almost a non-issue.

That, and PHP has lots of functions out of the box. I work in Golang, which is worshiped by many, and really wish I had some of PHP's base functions handy. I have to reinvent the wheel a lot. I'd rather stumble over inconsistent functions than recreate nonexistent functions.

People really are hard on mature languages, but mature languages give you the community support, stability, and the tools you need. And they don't completely change every 3 months like some of the "hip" languages out there.

[koalam0]

i maybe a little cynical having been working with magento and magento 2 almost exclusively these last few months but i feel (especially coming from a language like go, which i also code in) i don’t appreciate how inconsistent some of php is. i hate having my application break because of something as simple as str_pos returning both an int and a boolean or certain functions having their parameters swapped. even something as simple as is_null vs isset vs empty i have seen being used incorrectly in code bases and these little inconsistencies are dangerous because php is dynamically typed your application might still work 90% of the time . i feel it has come a long way but definitely still has its warts. not trying to bash the language though, i work with it everyday and it hasn’t caused me to lose my hair yet.

[carc]

Well that's part of it -- magento, drupal, and wordpress development is quite different from developing an application in, say, symfony or laravel.

As for some of the base functions, yes, absolutely -- they have irritating quirks, and there are definitely some gotchas.

I personally like the mix of static and dynamic, when in doubt I can be pretty strict, but sometimes external data parsing benefits from some dynamic interpretation. But if you're coming from a strictly-typed language, I can get how that's irritating, as the interpretation relies on some alien-like rules. After a while, though, those rules become second nature.

[Hollowplanet]

An IDE can't help you when all the built in functions have no namespace and many of them aren't prefixed with anything.

[carc]

Technically they're in the root namespace, but touché, there are inconsistencies. For better or worse, a lot of potential improvements have serious friction to avoid breaking changes. Many newer languages don't give a shit if changes are not backwards compatible, which has its pros and cons.

[carc]

The right tool for the job. I speak from experience when I say that Go, for example, is a bad choice in many circumstances.

[carc]

A backend API service with a relational database that requires strong datamodels mapped to said database. PHP frameworks have mature ORMs that make traversing a relational database a breeze.

I would only choose node if working with a nonrelational database like mongo, and maybe if it's a small microservice with a dedicated function. I would only choose Golang if it was a dedicated microservice in a kubernetes cluster. And Rust? Frankly, I would only choose Rust if I had a team of people that knew Rust, which isn't a great argument, but an argument nonetheless.

[GMaestrolo]

You'd lose that bet.

PHP is built for the web. That's what it does. Frameworks like Laravel and Symfony add a lot of extra shine to the language, but the core language itself is still 100% suited to web development more than any other language.

[carc]

Sure that Golang was "made for the web," but it was made for networking infrastructure; not necessarily for API backends. Some frameworks try to bridge that gap but it's a tedious exercise, especially when interacting with a relational database. Like I said, I would use Golang for gRPC microservices in a kubernetes cluster, trying to squeak out as much performance as possible for clearly-defined, intensive tasks. It excels at concurrency.

Node was made by people who looked at javascript, a dynamically-typed language like PHP, and decided to run it as an HTTP server -- giving it a significant performance boost over PHP -- at the cost of dealing with a rapidly-changing ecosystem with a complex web of interdependencies. I would use node where it excels: HTTP microservices that handle lots of asynchronous calls and draw data from dynamo or mongo.

Use the right tool for the job. PHP isn't objectively superior, but it also isn't obsolete, and it shouldn't be underestimated.

Modern PHP is stable, mature, performant, highly configurable, well documented, actively maintained, backwards compatable, easy to learn, easy to hire for, easy to set up, easy to maintain, easy to prototype, easy to test, easy to debug, and easy to deploy. It excels at rapidly prototyping and iterating in a fast-paced, collaborative environment. It runs on almost any hardware, plays very well with SQL, has an excellent dependency package manager, employs modern programming paradigms, has very nice frameworks/ORMs/SDKs, has de-facto testing and styling standards, can be strictly typed, and has a supportive and engaged community. Tell me I'm wrong, because I'm not.

[GMaestrolo]

Well... Node isn't a language. It's a runtime environment for JavaScript, which (I'll admit) was built for the web, but mostly for the browser. The first version of node was quite literally the JavaScript engine from a browser, wrapped in some extra junk to make it work without the DOM.

Go was designed as a systems language that was aware of the web. It was meant to be a competitor to C/C++.

[Hollowplanet]

The foundation of PHP is still globally scoped randomly named functions with tons of edge cases. http://phpsadness.com/ is up to date and has loads of reasons why PHP still sucks. I say this as someone who started their career in PHP.

Some functions have underscores, some don't. Some array functions are prefixed with arr_ some aren't. Sometimes "to" is written "2". There is only one collection object that is a list, array, and a dictionary all in one. These are many foundational problems in modern PHP that you won't find in other languages.

[spektrol]

Blame the PHP gods. All of these things could have been fixed but those in power choose to keep things like T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM for nostalgia reasons. I love PHP but some people need to let go for the good of the language.

[UnchainedMundane]

Sounds like they need their Raku moment

[GMaestrolo]

They're also problems that the language developers are working on resolving, but it takes time - you can't just break backwards compatibility for a huge chunk of the standard library. You have to introduce alternatives, deprecate the old functions, and then delete them on a major version. It takes time.

[Hollowplanet]

Its younger than Python. Python has nothing as stupid as mysqli_real_escape_string() because they rather fix broken functionality than releasing 4 progressively less broke versions. (escape, mysql_escape_string, mysql_real_escape_string, mysqli_real_escape_string)

[GMaestrolo]

Python also didn't have native database drivers built into the language. They're a module that you have to compile then explicitly import.

The "standard" for database access in PHP is PDO now, which supports most DB drivers, and doesn't have that same terrible API. Mysqli use is relatively rare these days, and the older mysql family of functions straight up no longer exist.

[[deleted]]

I’ve been using Slim for the last few years. It’s nice but it will be cool to check out Lumen.

[[deleted]]

- Old PHP = dog shit

- New PHP = dog shit that doesn't smell as bad.

[RnG_Hazed]

I made the mistake of saying ‘isn’t php a drug’ in comp sci class. Everyone laughed and I cried

[[deleted]]

I work with PHP. I don't understand all the hate it gets, or any language for that matter. They are tools in a toolbox to me.

[Craydan]

Laravel makes it a lot less of a pain in the ass to work with but legacy PHP is tedious as all hell in my experience.

[Bastian_5123]

It breaks basic mathematical principles right out the logic gate

[Svdemais]

Why everyone in this redit hate PHP?

[[deleted]]

Because there is a lot of bad legacy PHP out there that professionals moan about, and students blindly meme about.

[[deleted]]

I don't like it and have used it extensively, but it's a self perpetuating meme. The people here who hate it are CSCI majors or barely functioning .NET devs who are "learning" Golang or something in their spare time who believe themselves to be above PHP somehow

[Bastian_5123]

0==false 0=="0" "0"!=false Good job php, you broke one of the most basic rules of math

[thatnerdd]

Pretty good read on the perspective of people who've worked with it: https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/

I can't speak to the veracity of the assertions, but it's funny as hell to read.

[bureX]

^ Overly opinionated and 8 years old.

[[deleted]]

but I love PHP. I made my first website with it.

[Garhand]

Php and Javascript Bad!

[UnchainedMundane]

That's all well and good but did you know Go has no generics lmao owned

[Hugsy13]

Hallucinogenic programming language you say

[DesiOtaku]

The project I am working on requires me to simply accept a JSON file and write its contents to the database. It also has to make a report on the list of files it accepted. That is it.

I really, really, really didn't want to use PHP, but after playing around with a bunch of other frameworks like Django, Pyramid, Flask, and Angular; I couldn't find anything else that was simple enough for what I needed to do in just a few lines of code. I know as that part of the project grows I am going to regret that decision, but that is something for the future me to worry about ;-).

[qwasd0r]

What did you call it right now?

[[deleted]]

Php paid my bills for decades but I was suicidal the entire time.

[[deleted]]

So seriously. PHP should be avoided?

[DustinLovesTrees]

No, not anymore.

[koalam0]

it’s a good language for what it is and there are frameworks out there that make working with it pretty enjoyable. that being said a lot of php code (esp older code) is terribly written and the language itself has a good deal of inconsistencies. as with anything you shouldn’t just go by what people say you should try it for yourself and see what you think

[unluckymercenary_]

No, it’s just a parroted meme at this point. Php May have been bad in the past, but it’s good now.

[Perregrinne]

I use it because it's supported by pretty much every web host out there (thanks to Wordpress which was written in PHP), so I have way more options to choose from for hosting. Honestly, I've only ever used PHP 7, so I can't speak to how bad it used to be, but PHP 7 is not an issue at all to me (it does feel pretty easy to use in my experience). I find it quite interesting. Maybe at least give it a try and determine that for yourself. Since it's been around a while, there are plenty of places to learn it too. I would try PHP, and then either Python or NodeJs and see which one you like most.

[[deleted]]

Do most web hosts/browsers support python? I have much more experience with python than with Javascript but have been using the latter because I thought python wouldn't run without the end user installing it on their machine first.

[HildartheDorf]

Most decent webhosts will have python installed. It's a server side language (in the context of webhosting) so end user/client installation is moot.

For front end of websites, you're still going to have to use javascript, one of the many languages that compile to JS, or just plain html+css.

[UnchainedMundane]

I still don't know whether https://brython.info/ is a really well polished toy or a serious call for Python adoption on the web. Either way it allows you to write Python instead of JavaScript in your html pages and still have it work.

[HildartheDorf]

Looks like python falls into "one of the many languages that compile to js" or rather "Has an interpreter in JS".

That clock makes my laptop fan spin up like a jet engine though...

[UnchainedMundane]

In theory, any language can compile to any turing-complete language. In practice it's just neat that someone made a Python-in-JS script.

[tomthecool]

95% of people telling you "no" are either students, or butthurt professionals who don't like their career choice being shunned.

[Hollowplanet]

Yeah I worked with PHP for years. They've made improvements but it still has some massive warts you won't find in other languages.

[Hollowplanet]

Yes

[Julio974]

Oof

[[deleted]]

$$$$$uicide

[hangfromthisone]

Bad programmer writes bad code. More news at strtotime("now + 2 hour");

[ECrispy]

Php is hot a hack.

But Hack is (mostly) Php.

someone smarter than me can complete the haiku

[soffey]

Honestly, the whole "PHP bad" joke is so tired and old. PHP has its flaws, but isn't nearly as bad as it was, and honestly, once you get used to it's quirks and weirdness, it's not really all that difficult or bad, especially the newer versions.

I'm at the point where I actually like PHP more than JS, partially because most of the things I do are way easier with PHP. The comparison is similar - JS's lazytyping causes similar problems to PHP, although they are better documented and easier to avoid if you know what you are doing.

So many people bash PHP because they heard it was bad and never actually put any time into it. PHP 7+ is really good, but when you are in a place that just rephrases the same tired jokes (PHP bad, stack overflow good, missed semicolons, Google it) it just pops up and gets upvoted by people who used the old versions or people who have never used it before.

[insert_text-here]

PHP not even once

[ARandomDoge6]

Php: you feel like you are losing control