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Comment by BozeWolf | Hacker News Reader

Anyone else has problems with the usage of the word “modern”?

“Modern x written in y” etcetera. To me this often is a sign to not having to read it. As if you would make or do something new in oldfashioned style without mentioning it. Eg: “what my php setup was on amiga in 1985”.

Just call it “my take on a good php setup in 2019” or something. The setup is retro in januari 2020.

Anyways, I accept the down votes.

To me this is just another setup which slapped together a bunch of fancy pancy tools. Why is docker required? I use docker a lot, but to build containers and deploy apps with it. The way it is intended to be uses. Running (python) web projects works fine without docker for development. Most team mates use macos, which is linuxy/unixy enough until you do something specific.

Make is quite an old useful tool, but certainly not modern. As are linters.

.editorconfig is a thing now.

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When languages have multiple versions in-use and significant updates, like PHP, "Modern PHP" is meaningful. It's a common phrase in the PHP community. PHP has a bad reputation, primarily due to the older versions of the language, and "Modern PHP" is the most common way to mark a clear break from that.

What word do we use when 'modern' is old though? How do we distinguish between 'modern' and 'modern modern' and 'old' and 'old old'?

Modern 2.0

contemporary

Modern is a moving target, like it's always been.

Modern php in 2019 is php > 7.1 . Modern PHP in 2013 was 5.5

It's not specific, but it's implied you're referencing the most recent versions.

Ha. I asked my architect to design me something modern, and all I got was some 1950s bungalow!

I said, “Walter! What is this? I wanted something new and innovative.”

“Oh. You want postmodern then!”

What word do we use when 'modern' is old though?

Contemporary.

Next gen.

Docker or some kind of container tool is great when you have a big team and need to maintain a stable copy of the environment for everyone. It's not without it's challenges though. We used Vagrant at a place I worked at, and for me at least it was a constant struggle to maintain then dozen different vagrant environments for the different projects. All kinds of version mis-matches and so on. No fun.

I wouldn't use it for solo-development or side projects. Not worth the brain-space.

Docker is not meant only for building and deploying containers. In fact, I would hazard a guess, it, and especially docker compose is much more commonly used in dev environments.

It is a huge help to get an identical environment to develop on. Especially when you have more complex apps with different services.

> It is a huge help to get an identical environment to develop on.

Until you stumble on some file permission problems if you use volumes; or some difference if the host is linux or macOS. Pure VM are the best: copy your virtual server, launch it, deploy your code. You can even have multiple containers launched inside your VM like on your production server.

How do you copy dev server to prod?

Like any solution, there will be some kinks to work through. When you are deploying updates multiple times a day, it is nice to not have to upload a new VM everytime we push a change to the CI.

Personally I feel like the use of Docker is overkill, at first glance. It's a neat way of dealing with multiple versions of PHP and quickly setting up a development environment if you lose your computer or hire another developer.

Overall though, it seems me that is an indication that something is very very wrong with PHP if it's easier to just spin up containers. Docker is just the work-around that allows developers to have sane PHP environments.

There is nothing wrong with PHP, any developer that is not too lazy can have any number of PHP version on the same host without any problems, a PHP "install" is basically unzipping in a separate folder and configuring the php.ini for specific needs. There may be something wrong with some IDE's where you cannot easily configure and switch between various PHP versions when you do any task that is version specific.

I'll preface my comment saying that my experience with docker is relatively light. But PHP is probably the one language/environment where using docker makes a lot of sense (vs others like node). There's a lot of versions of PHP and more importantly, anyone who's worked with PHP from the ground up knows, there's a lot of PHP modules you have to install to the system, as each project makes use of different libraries (especially ones coming from PECL etc.). Nowadays a lot of stuff are on composer instead, but there's still enough modules that don't come by a default yum/apt-get/pacman install of PHP, that are commonly used. I have side projects that I started years ago where I have to list out all the PHP extensions I use in the readme so I know what to install to get them working. Docker lets you get by all of that.

In contrast with other languages like nodejs, you can almost always just use nvm to switch to the desired node version for the project, do a npm install, and it will just run. For something like that, there's a lot less need of docker for dev.

I think you're right. If I find this article after two years then it won't be so modern anymore so the title won't fit. If the author needs to put a time indicator then -- as you said --the year could be a good fit.

Modern is used a lot in the js world with little other meaning than that it is not "what you write is what gets sent to the browser".

Yes, "modern" is in vogue right now. During the 90s I remember the word got so overused that designers turned to the word "contemporary" to mean exactly the same thing. We'll probably start seeing that word used for software soon.

In my art history classes in the late 90s, I remember 'modern' specifically being used to refer to a period between the 1900s ~ 1980s, while 'contemporary' just means the current period, whether that's 1999 or 2019. So not, those words are not the same.

Somewhere along the way, 'modern' has now come to refer to the current trends.

To me (not a designer), modern connotes modernism. But contemporary just means "current" or "present day". I could be totally wrong about this, but I always try to use contemporary unless I'm specifically referring to modernist art/design philosophy.

(SenHeng beat me to it)

Contemporary is a good word to use in discussions like these, because it's halfway to acknowledging that the choices of the moment may be as much fashion / aesthetics of a sort as they may reflect new heights of engineering quality.

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