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Comment by taytus | Hacker News Reader

In all fairness this is ancient history on the PHP world.

That's the point that pkrumins/andreyvit are making, code where logic and presentation are mixed turn into a nightmare to maintain. And the practice is now ancient history.

Apart from here it is again...

I explicitly do _not_ state that it applies to React, because there's no domain logic in React components. (Or at least there shouldn't be. It is certainly possible to write a spaghetti component that would do everything.)

> It is certainly possible to write a spaghetti component that would do everything.

So...like PHP, then?

Not really. You're strongly coaxed into doing it the right way by design, which is not my experience with the old-skool PHP approach.

> In all fairness this is ancient history on the PHP world.

No, because PHP still work that way (hypertext pre-processor) and Yes because, PHP has frameworks that makes PHP work like other solutions (Ruby,Python,Java + frameworks), but one still need a <?php on top of a file.

And again, a lot of PHP developers despise these frameworks and question their usefulness. In theory, they are right since PHP is a template language which goal is to render text content, and separation of concerns can be easily achieve without a complex framework in the case of a web application. In practice a framework makes large codebases more maintainable, no question.

PHP is a strange beast. It's somehow rigid like Java, at least more rigid than most dynamic languages, it's a dynamic language, and a template language and it keeps on getting stuff from Java like languages (PHP 7).

It's ironic that PHP was created because its author kind of found Perl too difficult to use for web dev, then wasn't taken seriously by pros then tried to imitate Java in some ways to feel more professional and now is on part with Perl in terms of complexity, while half of the PHP community praises over engineered codebases often found in the JEE world.

I have no idea how starting with <?php in a file is relevant. Should we also start mocking languages that expect a given file extension?

My point is that PHP renders text first and foremost, writing code in PHP is "opt-in" somehow. An HTML file for instance is a valid PHP file. AFAIK an HTML file isn't a valid Ruby or Python file. You don't need to tell the interpreter to kick in at first place. But that's not the main idea I tried to convey in my comment.

Right, your comment argued that "view logic, domain/business logic and database boilerplate code intermixed in a single file" is not "ancient history in the PHP world". Which it is, regardless of the `<?php` tag at the top of all the files. How a source file is processed has no impact on how programmers choose to model their applications.

Theoretically no, perhaps, but practically I think there is an impact.

I can't dump html into a .rb or .js file, so I'm less likely to do so as a beginner. On the other hand, starting out with php, that seemed like the logical thing to do. Because I could.

Because it demonstrates that that pattern does not follow the default mode of operation for the language.

> No, because PHP still work that way (hypertext pre-processor)

I think what the commenter is saying is no one builds like this anymore in PHP, regardless of whether or not you're using a framework.

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