Comment by raziel2p | Hacker News Reader

Comment by raziel2p | Hacker News Reader

This is such a surface-level article. Most of the things listed as advantages exist in other languages as well.

Here are some actual reasons to like PHP:

1. Java-like interfaces and classes and strict argument (and soon parameter) typing enforced at runtime

2. Autoloading and "lazy loading" of classes means defining bi-directional relationships between classes/types is painless (this can of course also make you shoot yourself in the foot, but I prefer that to dealing with circular imports in Python for example)

3. The deployment model is dead simple on a VM (with drawbacks, but by the time you need things like atomic deployments you've probably moved to containers anyway)

4. Statelessness

5. Performance (despite the statelessness!)

6. A very healthy package ecosystem, with several cross-framework interoperability projects

It has lots of bad parts as well, of course, but so does every language. And you may disagree with some of the things I listed if you don't like the particular feature or design, but that doesn't make them not advantages.

Hey, really good list, better than the article.

I don't really like PHP, because of inconsistency (it tends to break to flow for me) (but maybe it changed since 2014), but php with strict typing is a big plus for me and php7 is already more than fast enough. I might try it again.

The real issue i have with PHP is frameworks :/

Too much choice is a productivity killer for me.

I'd really love if we could just start over with the PHP base library design. There's just a lot of cruft that could be neatly packed into classes.

For instance, the arguments for array_map and array_reduce are reversed, one takes the function as first argument, one the array.

AFAIK, PHP 8 will support named arguments. I think that will make it easier to call built-in function without knowing the correct order of its arguments.

Symfony

Compared to what language? I don't think PHP frameworks are very different from other languages I've played with.

Here's my framework guide: Slim if you're a minimalist and like doing things yourself, Laravel if you like convenience and are a quick learner, Symfony if you want to build something that will last 5+ years.

Laravel or Symfony. Laravel is far better for actually getting things to production quickly IMO. It's quite batteries-included but still lets you roll your own paradigms where you need to.

> you may disagree with some of the things I listed if you don't like the particular feature or design, but that doesn't make them not advantages

Since the above equally applies to you, I suppose you're saying that these "advantages" are a matter of opinion.

You're right, probably the word advantage was a bad choice here.

The point I wanted to make was that you might disagree with a certain feature/design but that doesn't make them invalid reasons for someone else who likes them to see them as advantages.

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