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Comment by thrusong | Hacker News Reader

I don't care what anyone says— I absolutely love PHP.

I automated my home theatre with it as seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cc8K6lg7Ag8

I built a website just for me so I can stream my movie collection anywhere I go, but it also has a button to start playing an automated show in my theatre.

I call it the Phantom. When you start a show, it plays a Dolby ad, a dancing hot dog-style vintage drive-in ad, and several random trailers in the same genre before the feature.

The Phantom PHP code controls the lights, projector, curtain, and sound system.

The lights come up for the credits and the whole room goes to sleep 30 minutes after the presentation.

I've only shared it once here before and someone, I'm guessing a PHP hater, gave it a thumbs down on YouTube.

PHP is extremely powerful in my experience and has been very lucrative in my career.

One of the best things I ever did was learn how to program with it.

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Agreed. Ignore the haters. PHP is a silent giant that is hugely under-rated. While it is a perfect fit for the web, it is also an excellent general purpose scripting language for things that can traditional be done with bash.

PS. Sweet home theatre setup!

Thank you! Not ironically— another thumbs down. All some people have to offer this world is negativity. I feel sorry for them.

Also, HN removed it from the front page despite the upvotes. After, November 28 it may be more worthy

I've done a bit of PHP and it is not under-rated. Compared to most other languages it is terrible. Nobody is saying that you can't make cool stuff with it.

Try Typescript in your next project.

I also like PHP. It is also an awful language, though, and always has been. Inconsistent parameter ordering, the infamous NULL/0/""/FALSE heffalump trap, object-orientation as an afterthought. Many more. It's OK once you know the language well, but a lot of PHP developers don't.

I have a PHP app written in PHP5.6, for my own use (not exposed on the internet). Naturally it broke when I upgraded to Debian Buster. Upgrading the code would have taken ages; but it took me just a day or so to work out how to get PHP5.6 working on Buster.

I've retired, because I can, and because I prefer not to work if I don't have to. There's a pretty steep learning curve from PHP5 to PHP8; I don't want to do that learning, if it's no longer necessary for my job, and I'm only using it for a private app.

I've not used PHP8 on anything serious, but my impression is that it's a HUGE improvement on PHP5. It's a lot more coherent, a lot faster, and a lot more secure. A lot of what has been dropped was dropped because it was insecure crap - it had to go sooner or later. In the end it was "better late than never".

I think PHP7+ has provided a lot in terms of modernization and focus on the OO paradigm.

For what it's worth, there are a couple of tools out there that should help getting your personal app up and running on PHP7 if you're interested in doing that at some point. Most of the breaking changes I've run into are because deprecated features were removed, which in a lot of cases seemed like strange/wrong syntax to me anyway.

I have a legacy app that can't feasibly be updated past 5.6 because it uses a totally undocumented framework that wasn't built in-house. While I could run one of the tools I mentioned, 99% of the framework code probably never runs so there would be a lot of work done for nothing.

Why did you go with PHP over another language? Do you have comparable experience with other languages to have had legitimate alternative options? Genuine question.

I'm deeply interested in your project as I have a similar goal. I would also like to create my own custom entertainment setup, throwing in commercials/trailers with feature presentations. Do you have a website or place I can reach out to you with questions?

Or for Hacker News readers, if I want to create a similar custom media playlist kind of thing, is it possible to do that with VLC or would I have to write a custom solution?

I've dabbled a bit in C/C++, and even a little Python, but not enough to build something like this.

Maybe one day I'd like to re-write it with everything I've learnt so I can compile it and monetize it.

I've also thought about open sourcing it, but the code is a little rough (messy) as-is and I struggle with what to do.

I know JavaScript and PHP, and PHP just seemed to do everything I needed.

I built a website a long time ago for collaborative music composition. It interacted with command line software and used XMPP to communicate with the server.

That sorta lead to using PHP to control everything in the theatre, plus a lot of the components I bought can be controlled through HTTP commands.

Overall, this was a side-project and I've slowly perfected the timing and the features over the past six years to where I have it pretty feature complete and reliable now.

Everything is timed perfectly, it can handle intermissions, overtures, and exit music. If there's some sort of break down, it shows film melting, shuts off the projector, and brings the lights up... Stuff like that.

As for VLC: This all runs on a Raspberry Pi 4. I originally used VLC but started having trouble with it when I moved from the Odroid XU4 to the Pi, so now it runs on mpv.

Moved to the Pi because I wanted to run Netflix in the theatre easily as well. If the Odroid ran Netflix (and some other small things), I'd prefer it.

For my part, I learned PHP because a lot of small web-shops were using it, and I wanted a job in a small web-shop. Previously I had coded professionally in COBOL, C, VB6, and Java, and I knew Forth.

I made money writing PHP for a decade-and-a-half. Straight PHP is not particularly lucrative work; but Drupal module development can pay quite well.

For the "custom media playlist": VLC is just a player. But there's a player built-into your browser; my home-brew playlist originally used VLC, but I switched to using the <video> tag once it became reliable (and would play ogg/vorbis properly). You still need a backend; and you'll probably need quite a bit of Javascript.

> But there's a player built-into your browser; my home-brew playlist originally used VLC, but I switched to using the <video> tag once it became reliable (and would play ogg/vorbis properly).

Interesting. To use a very high level example, would something like the following work? Have a backend generate a webpage with a video from local storage playing via <video> tags, then refresh with javascript and have a different video playing?

Absolutely - that's exactly what I do. I have a playlist manager, navigation and so on. You can use a mouse, but it's designed for keyboard operation; there's a lot of hotkeys.

Hang on - you said "from local storage". The video is played from server-side storage. If it was on local storage on the client, you could only play it on that client. So I take it you meant "local to the server", in contrast to online video resources.

> Hang on - you said "from local storage". The video is played from server-side storage. If it was on local storage on the client, you could only play it on that client. So I take it you meant "local to the server", in contrast to online video resources.

Bingo. In switching over to pet project thought mode I started thinking "local to myself" rather than the usual client-server wording.

Thanks for the advice! That sounds genius. I can much more easily imagine implementing this with my existing skills compared to figuring out how to script VLC or some other media player.

Now I'm guessing this approach serves the server media file to the client browser, and the client browser then plays it locally. Would it be possible to create a kind of TV-channel/radio-station type of approach where the server is constantly playing a video, and any client on the network can hop onto the stream like a TV channel?

The <video> tag also has a javascript model you have to learn, like with VLC. It gets video in junks, on request from the browser; if nobody's requesting chunks, no chunks will be played. You can't play if there's nobody listening. It doesn't serve files. If you start a new item, it begins to play immediately - it doesn't seem to need to buffer.

I imagine your media channel thing can be done, but I haven't tried it or thought about it. Not my use-case!

It's not "genius", BTW - I'm no media expert, not even a very good programmer. I'm just a tinkerer with an itch to scratch. And there's no way I'm sharing my code - it's a pile of crap, permanent work-in-progress.

I like the <video> tag very much, because it's cross-browser, and (IMO) is easier to script than previous players.

I think there is nothing wrong with PHP if you are using it for what it was built for and you aren't pretending it's something it's not.

It's the people saying "PHP is the best language for building web apps in 2021" that are problematic.

No. It's simply not. We have come a long way since then and that view point can only be held out of ignorance.

That isn't to say you can't build awesome stuff in PHP, you can and in your case did.

But to say PHP > Java/C#/Rust/Elixir/etc is just being an edgelord for the sake of it. Language tech improved, PHP didn't come with it. That is fine, C didn't come with it either but it still has it's place.

Right tool right job, PHP can still be the right choice for lots of things if you have experience with it and can use it to make the thing you want.

PHP did evolve, and still is.

> It's the people saying "PHP is the best language for building web apps in 2021" that are problematic.

OP didn't say this.

> No. It's simply not. We have come a long way since then and that view point can only be held out of ignorance.

> Language tech improved, PHP didn't come with it.

Are you familiar with the changelogs over the past 10 years? Are you ignorant of the changelogs?

> But to say PHP > Java/C#/Rust/Elixir/etc is just being an edgelord for the sake of it.

OP isn't saying that.

> Right tool right job, PHP can still be the right choice for lots of things if you have experience with it and can use it to make the thing you want.

Isn't this true of any language?

I was agreeing with OP. You can use PHP, just don't be someone like you and it's fine.

Weird, I thought there was a resurgence of web app developers using React|VueJS on the frontend and Laravel (PHP framework) on the backend?

I'm not saying you're wrong or your point isn't valid, but I think it's subjective.

PHP developers are highly sought after in my fair Canadian city's web community. Not saying WordPress and PHP are ubiquitous, but the big players for web shops and even boutique agencies are using them.

It's my niche and one that's still lucrative, and since it's what industry needs and demands, it's what we teach at my workplace: a post-secondary college.

It may not be the best language or the best tool overall, but in my experience it almost always has been.

I don't think it's going anywhere anytime soon and it's constantly getting better, so I'm going to stick with my niche and keep turning to this really powerful tool.

I think you are correct. It sounds like PHP works well for the problems you solve.

I think it's similar to saying Python is the best choice for data science. It is. Not because it's a good language (it's not) but because due to factors like ecosystem it's the right tool for the job.

There is nothing wrong with embracing these local maximums.

I'm just tired of people asserting PHP is an -objectively- good/comparable language. Because it's not, for all of it's improvements it's still not close.

Is that ok? I think it is. Still solves problems effectively.

My "objectively inferior" language is Ruby. I use it all the time to do all sorts of things, little web servers, home automation, scripts on my desktop/laptop, etc. I like it, it works for me. Doesn't change the fact Ruby is flat out inferior to the languages I use at work.

> Language tech improved, PHP didn't come with it.

I'm curious what you are basing that on?

PHP is not a fixed language. 8.0 was just released last year and has significant improvements. And has had several minor releases since (latest one being just weeks ago).

It has a package manager, a community of OSS libraries, tooling... everything a mature language has.

According to Github in the last month:

> 36 authors have pushed 311 commits to master and 329 commits to all branches. On master, 413 files have changed and there have been 19,469 additions and 7,581 deletions.

Not including popular libraries like CakePHP, Laravel, Wordpress, Drupal, etc. All of which are also very active with hundreds (if not thousands for some) of contributors.

That doesn't seem stagnant to me.

Edit: As a note, I don't even use PHP anymore (though I used to a lot in the past). I'm just confused by how someone can say it hasn't evolved with the times. If anything PHP has proven time and time again it is in fact willing to involve. With releases that make leaps and bounds for performance (with benchmarks) and add new more "modern" features consistently for over a two decades.

I guess it depends on what your bar is. I'm comparing it against Java/C# primarily. If you compare it to Python then yeah, it looks like a pretty fast moving language, I just don't think that is a relevant comparison when your choices are much broader than just Python or PHP.

PHP 8 introduced a lot of great stuff but to me it's just about playing catch up to things like Kotlin, i.e null safe operator, etc. They made the runtime a lot faster with the JIT and the Opcache but it still pales in comparison to the JVM or CLR.

Type system is still not a real type system, it's more analogous to Typescript. I get why, it's because you can't turn around and make PHP backwards incompatible, but that is also why it can't ever be in the same class.

Meanwhile in JVM land you have things in progress like Loom which present a fundamental change in how highly concurrent applications can be built. Since Java 9 huge things landed like Jigsaw + ZGC and Shenandoah which are cutting edge GCs, not cutting edge for Java but in language-tech overall, i.e it's Java that sets the pace for what a modern VM looks like and that has been the case for some time now. v8 was perhaps more impressive for a short while until InvokeDynamic came along and escape analysis got better but these days JVM is pretty squarely in the lead with CLR closely following.

PHP won't ever be on the cutting edge and tbh, that is probably fine. Like I said, C isn't cutting edge and it's just as applicable as ever.

The difference between that and what people in this thread are arguing is they are saying things like "PHP is modern and generally good!" which just isn't true. It's improving and that is great, but modern and generally good it is not.

Doesn't stop it from being useful in the places it excels but as a general purpose language there are just better options.

I appreciate the detailed response to my question. But...

> as a general purpose language there are just better options

I don't think PHP ever pretends or tries to be a general purpose language or cutting edge. But I think to say it hasn't evolved is a bit misleading.

PHP has always been a domain specific language.

It is designed to do one thing well: stateless request oriented applications with strong ability to scale horizontally. And for that, it does pretty well.

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