Comment by phphphphp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by phphphphp | Hacker News Reader

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I don't wish to be the bearer of bad news, but nobody is trying to convince you to use it: nobody cares what you're using for software development... and you're working with out of date information if you think that A Fractal of Bad Design is relevant any more. PHP has evolved a great deal over the last decade, as have the people using it and as has the ecosystem.

Personally, as my username might hint, I've been using PHP for a long time, and, as I've commented on HN before, I would not choose PHP if I was building an engineering organisation from the ground up, and I do not use PHP professionally at the moment, but I absolutely choose to use PHP for my own projects and can enthusiastically say it's a great language in 2023.

If you're not willing to try out modern PHP, that's fine, but ranting and raving about PHP based on your experience more than a decade ago is not relevant any more, given this is a post about the improvements made in the last decade. Many people with experience beyond PHP think PHP is a great language today.

Quoting myself:

> They claim that the article A Fractal of Bad Design (which was really cathartic to me when it came out) is out of date, but when I look, all the old footguns are still there, all the problems with the standard library are still there and stdout still writes directly to the browser.

You can quote yourself ad nauseam but that does not turn your incorrect statement into a correct statement. If you spent any amount of time looking at a modern PHP codebase, you'd discover that the type of code people write today is radically different to the type of code you'd have seen at the time A Fractal of Bad Design was written. There are still aspects of modern PHP that stand to be improved, absolutely, but that's true of all languages.

Your argument is basically:

"Yes, yes, the footguns are still there front and center, but we added more guns that don't shoot you on the foot."

If I was using PHP, I'd be livid that the cruft is never removed. Just deprecate and remove it

A lot of stuff is deprecated and not removed.

Can you give an example of the footguns you so fear?

No, my argument is that most of the footguns described in A Fractal of Bad Design have been long since fixed and those that remain are being removed as and when it's feasible and the PHP community has matured a great deal to the point where the remaining footguns don't really apply in modern codebases because of libraries, static analysis and testing.

Spend any amount of time actually using PHP and you'd discover that it is meaningfully different to what it once was. It's far from perfect, and still has a long way to go, but if you reflect on where it was and what had to change to get where it is today, the improvement and progress has been excellent.

http://maettig.com/2020-09-16-revisiting-a-fractal-of-bad-de...

Nearly every point in the original blog shown to be solved here.

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