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Comment by mooreds | Hacker News Reader

Tons and tons of the web runs on PHP. It is a super easy language to learn and be effective in quickly. Especially if you are talking about open source content management systems, PHP is dominant.

Anything that improves overall code quality of this language should be welcomed with open arms. Types, especially if they are backward compatible (as these are) will do so.

I'd be interested in what kind of automated or ide support will be available, but I suppose that won't be known until this is released later this year.

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PHPStorm has excellent support for types and version 2019.2 released last week includes typed properties already: https://www.jetbrains.com/phpstorm/whatsnew/

Other editors (VSCode for example) can hook into Psalm or Phans Language Server to get type information from these static analyzers.

Typing support in PHP Ides is usually excellent.

at 199 USD yearly phpstorm is prohibitively expensive for small teams and independent devs

I don't know the state of the language server for newer php versions, but intellisense for vscode is too taxing on the CPU for relatively large projects (20k+ lines of code)

>independent devs

Don't they fall under the cheaper individual license?

This. I use an EDU license for work and buy a personal license for home use, a personal license starts at $83 first year .. I'm on my fifth or so year so it's only $53 yearly ...

I saw no reference to cheaper licenses in the PhpStorm website

The individual license[0] starts at 89 USD a year, and continues to decrease the longer you pay for it[1] (with a 40% discount for the 3rd consecutive year and onward, putting the final price at 53 USD).

[0]: https://www.jetbrains.com/phpstorm/buy/#personal?billing=yea...

[1]: https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/206386064-What...

Yes, it's $89, $71 the 2nd year, and $53 every year after that.

Try Psalm’s language server: https://psalm.dev/docs/running_psalm/language_server/ and let me know how it is for you - I use it on its own codebase (160k LOC) and also on Vimeo’s (much bigger)

thanks! will try it out

~2-5 hours gross income per year is nothing for a good tool.

200USD is 1/3 labor month for a regular dev in brazil

It's a little rude to assume how much people are earning. I think you might be surprised how little people earn in certain parts of the world.

For people making minimum wage and programming on the side, that’s actually at least about 20 hours or more

Depends on which country you're from but to me $199/year is nothing for what JetBrains gives me (If you go for individual license, you start from $89 down to third year and onwards $53). In fact I pay for all products pack and am in a good discount beyond the third year, like $13/mo.

yeah, in Brazil that is quite expensive...

prohibitively expensive? I think you haven't thought this through.

Already Chairs, Desk and Rent for every engineer is more expensive than 200 USD every year. Their salary is many hundred times 200 USD. I pay more for coffee and water that they can get for free every year.

Independent devs without income can get PHPStorm at much lower rates.

can you tell me how independent devs can access PHPStorm at lower rates? I would love to stop using VSCode. 200USD might be ok for you, but over 800 reais for an IDE is not something I can pay.

Notebooks in Brazil are almost three times as expensive as abroad, internet costs are through the roof here as well as living costs...

I thought this through, I just have a harder reality than you I guess

You can get a free license if you are part of an open-source project: https://www.jetbrains.com/opensource/

And if you are an individual, the license is just 89 USD.

If you are an individual contractor, then maybe you quality for a startup discount? This also gives you 50%: https://www.jetbrains.com/phpstorm/buy/#personal?billing=yea...

I completely missed the `For individuals` tab...

I can also suggest you to approach JetBrains people if you see them in at a conference. They sponsor many PHP conferences, and open source maintainers (don't have to Linus) can request or open-source license.

They also have an Early Access Program that you try out beta releases, and they are free of cost.

JetBrains has a handful of ways that can significantly reduce or eliminate license fees for their products https://www.jetbrains.com/phpstorm/buy/#discounts

>can you tell me how independent devs can access PHPStorm at lower rates?

Individual license starts at $89, and fall to $71 in the first renewal, then to $53 onwards. So I think it is not that expensive. YMMV.

you also get a perpetual license if you pay for a year upfront or 12 consecutive months of your subscription, so you can stop paying and keep using the version you paid for forever

> Already Chairs, Desk and Rent for every engineer is more expensive than 200 USD every year.

In my part of the world it is, too. But I don't think that's the case for _every_ engineer worldwide.

> at 199 USD yearly phpstorm is prohibitively expensive for small teams and independent devs

First, that $200 rate is for teams; independent devs can pay a significantly lower rate (the catch is, you have to pay it personally, not expense it or be reimbursed by an employer).

And even for teams, $200 a year is nothing. If you can afford to hire devs in a first world country (US/EU/Aus/etc), you can afford tools for them. NO employer you should possibly consider working for is going to quibble over the license fee; not when they're already paying 1000 times that in fully loaded costs in salary/rent/overheads/benefits/etc.

If you can't find $200 for a tool to help you do your job, you're not really a professional. (Again, in a 1st world country.)

yes, I realised my mistake of not seeing the For individuals tab... 89 USD is a little more palatable.

The thing I do not agree is that you have to pay for tools in order to be a professional. That is quite elitist. People make careers out of free platforms like Linux so for an IDE is not asking much to have a good tool for free. The community benefits from labor put into developing a free tool.

> The thing I do not agree is that you have to pay for tools in order to be a professional.

Absolutely not! You don't have to pay, and there's tons of free tools which are top rate.

What I said is that if you're a professional, you're able to pay for the tools that are worth it. If Phpstorm is worth it (and I think it is, but many devs I respect feel otherwise), $200 is deeply affordable by Western standards.

As a professional, you should have a budget for things like software licenses, books, donations to open source projects you really like, etc., whether that comes out of your funds as a consultant, or team's budget, etc. If your employer is too stingy to cover things like Phpstorm licenses...they're not treating you like a professional.

(Again, in first world/Western countries. Budgets and pay scales are different in some places!)

> If you can't find $200 for a tool to help you do your job, you're not really a professional.

I am sorry if I misinterpreted you, but that was precisely what you said.

Elaborating, I agree with you, reinvestment is really important to improve work and product quality.

> I am sorry if I misinterpreted you, but that was precisely what you said.

If you have the money to spend on tools, but think Linux or VS Code is best, that's fine.

If OS X would be better for you, but you use Linux because you can't afford the tools you need, that's a problem.

Being able to find the money for something doesn't mean you have to spend the money. At the price point of a few hundred dollars a year or less, my concern is what's best, not what's cheapest. The company I work for will happily buy a Phpstorm license for any dev who wants one, but some are happy with VS Code, and one holdout is still using NetBeans. Nothing wrong with that!

I can't even convince IT to put an SSD or increase my RAM from 8GB to 16 on this workstation. There's a process that I tried to go through and later my boss said they spent two hours on the phone with IT but it went nowhere so I asked my boss to not waste any more time on this nonsense.

I can't imagine having to justify a subscription to IntelliJ at this workplace. At least I imagine you can bring your own license to Jetbrains on a work computer here, at least that is my understanding and I won't ask anyone lest they say I am wrong!

Other professionals go to bazaar and flea markets to get their tools at a discount, but they still have to pay for them.

Just in IT it is now fashionable to feel entitled to earn money without buying tools, then comes dual licenses, closing doors or acquisitions because devs don't pay supermarket with pull requests.

Spending money doesn't make you a professional. Not being able to afford liceases, saas costs, etc is common.

Why pay $ amount per year when there are great open source products available?

- How much time (i.e. labor hours) will it take to find and vet an alternative solution Y to solution X (provided that you already know that X will solve your problem/save you time)? - How do you value your time? - What's your tolerance for community-only support vs. commercial support?

The list goes on, but gratis isn't always better just because you don't need to pull out your wallet.

You usually need to vet all editors. You download a free trial or you download an open source version. After a month the paided on stops working until you pay causing friction. The open source editor keeps working and even provides updates.

In general choosing open source saves you time with yearly licease management, licease audits and removes the risk of surprise price increases and product shutdown.

Commercial support can be invaluable and can provide more value over community support. Commercial support for a code editor is wasteful in terms of cost/value and wasteful timewise (who is calling spending time about a macro feature not working).

Because even open source products should be paid for, specially when one earns money thanks their existence.

I think you misunderstand what open source is.

They are paid for by future development and / or increased adoption.

Take the most popular open source editor (vscode). Do you think microsoft is getting value from this open source product? Why didn't they charge a yearly licease fee instead of open sourcing it? They were probably more interested in increased adoption...

My point was about random people trying to make a living out of open source, while others feel entitled not to support them, while enjoying earning money.

Not about corporations doing open source as advertising stunt.

Which is precisely why anything I produce, is either commercial or under GPL.

Couple interesting things about the Jetbrains licenses.

- The yearly cost is purely for updates. Meaning you could just pay one time, get updates for a year and then continue using whatever version you have. - For small teams they offer a 50% discount (less than 10 people, in business less than 5 years) - If this is perhaps an open source project you can get it for free.

I got sucked into the Jetbrains family because of just how good their PhpStorm is. Especially in regards to refactoring and debugging tools.

I only wish their Javascript tools were anywhere near as good as their Php tools.

> I only wish their Javascript tools were anywhere near as good as their Php tools.

I guess this is partially because JavaScript is a much harder language to write good tooling for, but I'm open for other explanations.

This isn't completely correct. A few years ago JetBrains changed the license.

You get the version available when you pay, and then you get a year of updates, which you can only continue using if you renew the license.

So you can only use the version available as of the moment you pay for a license.

I've come to realize that PHPStorm is _the_ IDE for PHP, after having tested several IDEs (including VSCode).

This statement is pretty much true for all Jet Brains products.

For the most part, definitely. WebStorm is the only one of their IDEs I'd disagree about, particularly if you're writing TypeScript (which you probably should at least be thinking about doing). VSCode and its language server integration are great.

2019.2 fixed a lot of intellij/typescript papercuts for me, vscode still has a slight edge (it's error messages are still better) but the gap is close enough that I haven't had to boot open it in vscode to figure out what the error message means since I started using the RC.

I kept hearing this, then Google migrated to InteliJ as basis for Android Studio and I changed my mind about Eclipse (for the better).

Most shortcuts are only three keys instead of relying on both hands, files get incrementally compiled on save, just like Netbeans I can use Ant or Maven as the project format, indexing actually stops instead of being done every time application starts, my humble laptop doesn't sound like a propeller plane getting ready for take-off, Javadoc works out of the box without having to dive into settings, no more hunting for problems, easily displayed dynamically without having to trigger manual inspections, ...

You can see Psalm's support today: https://psalm.dev/r/55e554c1d8

Psalm supports all the same checks on typed properties that it already does for properties with docblock-defined types, and will make sure all your properties are properly initialised in a class's constructor.

Is there a document that explores the backwards compatibility of these (and related) changes?

Particularly for open source software it's hard to just say "from next version well use 7.4 min" so anything that can be added and fallback gracefully on older versions is handy.

So these new features are backwards compatible in that old code that has no typed properties will continue to work.

This is a minor release and PHP tends to be almost completely BC even between major release versions so it's unlikely you'll face any issues.

If you want to start writing code that uses these features in an existing library then you can branch a new version that depends on PHP 7.4, and define that as the requirement in composer. That way users with older PHP versions will pull older versions of your library.

https://php.net/migration5 https://php.net/migration51 https://php.net/migration52 https://php.net/migration53 https://php.net/migration54 https://php.net/migration55 https://php.net/migration56 https://php.net/migration70 https://php.net/migration71 https://php.net/migration72 https://php.net/migration73 https://php.net/migration74 (tbd)

That's kind of the inverse of what I'd like to see.

Similar to browser docs what you're often interetested in is the latest things and how far back you can use them, and where they will degrade gracefully further back.

Those mostly assume you have old code that you want to make work on new versions, not that you want to write new code that takes advantage of as much new stuff as possible while still working reasonably well on old versions.

It's understandable that they would prefer that everyone just upgrade faster, so it's probably not something they want to encourage (both in documentation and in making features degrade gracefully if that requires any tradeoffs.).

problem is that a lot of code is written using older PHP versions, and it is not that easy to upgrade from say PHP 7.0 to 7.3. Lots of refactoring deprecations involved (if you want to keep for example debug logs without breaking backend output).

I find it hard to trust a language that changes so much between minor versions. If I am wrong please tell me where so I can stop my grief at work and finally upgrade the PHP version we use.

>it is not that easy to upgrade from say PHP 7.0 to 7.3

Is that true?

everything has to be upgraded. Older version of composer doesn't work with php 7.3, cakephp must be carefully upgraded. In my tests we even got different query results.

So maybe upgrading PHP itself might not be that bad, something I can't tell you for sure, but in my experience nobody uses vanilla PHP, they all wrap it in frameworks, and those must all be carefully upgraded too.

No. My employer upgraded from PHP 5.4 to 7.0 with minimal fuss (we spent about a week on the migration, testing, and deployment, and it went smoothly), and 7.0 to 7.3 is trivial in comparison.

There are a few edge cases out there of course. Maybe your code base has basically been in stasis since the early days of PHP 5.x, may not even be using composer or namespaces, relies on tons of abandoned or horribly outdated dependencies, doesn't have good test coverage, etc., and then suddenly someone gets a bee in their bonnet about PHP 7.x and wants to upgrade. That's often not going to work out very well, but that's not really a PHP 7.x (or even a PHP thing). :) If you've been maintaining the code, have tests, no ancient vulnerable libraries, using current framework versions, etc, the process is going to be easy. If you're trying a big bang upgrade straight from the medieval period, not so much!

It is if your web host doesn’t allow you to upgrade your software because they control the machine

There are compatibility checkers that can analyse the code and tell you what needs to be taken care of. Fixing is not automatic but it takes a few minutes to confirm each issue and upgrade it. If you have unit tests then it's all straight forward.

No, definetly not true. The backwards-compatability of PHP is insanely good, so upgrading is usually super trivial.

it's so good i am not able to install phpbb on php 7.3 because they're not allowing it...

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