Hacker News Reader

Comment by cblconfederate | Hacker News Reader

Hey if you don't like PHP please don't use it. I 'd hate to bring the culture of tiny packages, fake compilers, transpilers and weekly trends to PHP. Personally I use php because it works well and fast and still supports my 10 year old websites, not because it's cool.

View on HN

Oh well we are about to break most of said 10 year old web sites.

Particularly, PHP 8.1 has some changes that low key force people to update, such as the use of return types when extending a built-in classes (https://php.watch/versions/8.1/internal-method-return-types).

Yeah, the area between "backwards compatibility at all costs" and "progress" is full of potholes. I think PHP was to mach on the "backwards compat." site of that gradient, I think that some bc breaks are onavoidable when improving the language itself and its standard library. Sure, it would be nice to have something like rusts "editions" (and I am sure other languages share that concept to some degree) where we could have the runtime support all code that was valid before, but that comes with its own complexity.

As someone who still owns their rent coding PHP, I really enjoy the development of the language from php 7 onwards. It certainly feels better in any way compared to the 5.x or even 4.x days.

As long as we do not get another python 2 vs 3 disaster, I am happy.

I like PHP and still use it today. But never in my life heard PHP is cool. Am I missing something?

Well, early 2000s it was definitely cool.

Using ASP and want to calculate an MD5? Oh, you need to pay an add-on for that. Want to send an email? Ditto.

Then there was PHP, with all included (and cheaper hosting, because Linux). I started working on a web shop and after a month ASP was legacy and PHP the new cool thing, together with MySQL instead of using... Access as "database" in ASP.

I was new to the world of software development in 2000 (in high school) but immediately loved PHP / MySQL. Made it easier for me to stand up websites for my two bands and integrate more dynamic and database-oriented features into those sites. And hand-wrote JS for things that at the time seemed cool (silly in retrospect hover effects).

It was the SQL part of the book that helped me build the SQL skillset that is an integral part of my day job.

Used a book similar to this one:

https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/professional-php4-programming_...

"Access as database in ASP"

haha. My first ever project as an intern in 2004 was exactly this.

They're making a rhetoric against JS style of development... Though I question what they mean by fake compilers...

A compiler translates code from a source language into a target language, normally targeting either physical hardware or some virtual machine. That is not what happens when "compiling" - or more accurately, "transpiling" [1] - JS-related software where what often feels like the JS-related dialect of the day (coffee-, mocha-, type-, tea-, frappucino-, latte-, pilzener-script) is converted into the resident JS dialect, discombobulated through some language feature thingamajig, transmogrified by some other package-combining gizmo (not the same gizmo as you used last week, that is now ancient technology, the new one is sooo much slower^Wbetter and has a snazzy content-less website to prove it), mixed and matched with a bunch of related packages many of which are marked with dire warning about bugs and staleness by the helpful package manager thing (which you had to update before even trying to proceed since the current version was no longer supported even though you're running version 12 and the box stated you needed at least version 9), uglified (as if it wasn't ugly enough already) and zipped up.

Doesn't all that make you long for the days of ./configure --prefix=/somewhere/sane && sudo install -d -o yourusername /somewhere/sane && make install? Just add empscripten to the tool chain and you can do web things with it, sort of...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source-to-source_compiler

transpilers*

If people call something "cool" - that's actually a red flag for me.

That sounds fairly childish. Aside from the very obvious fact that you'll miss out on a lot of cool stuff, if you don't agree with the value judgements of your peers, the problem most likely resides with your choice of peers.

Red flag just means that you take a close and critical look - not that you automatically dismiss. And those "peers" are the people on the internet - f.x. blog authors.

How's that policy working out for you?

If I did that I'd have missed a hell of a lot of cool stuff in life haha

good, I'd say. I'm not waiting half an hour in a queue in front of a hipster ice cream parlor. when I go into nature I have a good chance of actually finding some peace b/c I do not go where Instagrammers take their selfies. I'm not torturing my soul on TikTok. I use choose technologies conservatively instead of by hype cycle. List goes on.

Php change from 4.x to 5.x broke my web sites and I still don't trust php after that. I guess they might do it again from 7.x to 8.x, we'll see.

If having the same code working for a long time is the most important for you then you should probably use java or .net. Maybe c++ also but that is not as popular for building web apps.

I made my homepage in PHP, nothing important, but I spent some time doing it and I liked the result.

Then I didn't have enough time to maintain it, and I stopped paying attention to it for a while.

Later I checked my homepage again, the webhosting company updated the PHP version, nothing works anymore. It is not simple to fix, so I gave up.

I am not going to spend the same amount of effort on making my homepage in PHP again. Trust is easier lost than gained.

I would still be willing to code something in PHP for someone else, because hey, if it stops working in a year or two, it's their problem, not mine. But I would warn them that something like this is possible, and in my opinion likely to happen.

PHP are deprecating language "features" from 7.x to 7.y.

It's very hard for me to treat a language seriously when I could write code that simply won't be valid PHP in 2 years time, or worse, behaving differently.

Given the severity of some past PHP vulnerabilities, being on an old version can certainly be a problem.

> I guess they might do it again from 7.x to 8.x, we'll see.

PHP 8 has some _massive_ breaking changes

I found the transition from 4 to 7 oddly easy, but that might just be the conventions i was using. I don't know about 8, don't plan to use it until i have to

I would love not to use it, but I'm compelled to. It is not only my choice, but the choice of others who are not interested in new languages (assuming that Python is new language...) and prefer to use PHP because they don't know anything else.

So yes, let me express my antipathy toward the PHP language and its ecosystem.

I work not "well". It has hundred of issues that are not, and will never be addressed. Like the inconsistent choice of function names, the antic (if not prehistoric) way of extension managing, the clumsiness of xdebugger, the bugs in the PDO library, etc.

I spend 80% of the time trying to figure out "a hack", and spend too much time on php.net & stackoverflow hunting for the right answer.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com