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Comment by csomar | Hacker News Reader

As an ex-PHP developer (almost 10 years now), I do not miss it. As a language, it is a scripting language with an okay interpreter. But as an eco-system, it is a hot mess. It has both the worst software developers (and I was one of them) as well as the worst clients (and the cheapest, regardless of geography).

It is not a surprise that PHP is running the web. That's because WordPress made sites/e-commerce accessible to the average Joe. Despite the massive security issues with these setups, it has enabled a large number of people to run businesses.

But if you are a software developer, I'd strongly advice you not to do PHP.

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This just reminds me of what originally got me into PHP as a teenager. Creating a site for our gaming community in PHP-Nuke was all too easy. Extending it with plugins, and eventually writing my own plugins to show live data from our game server.

Now I look back on PHP3/PHP4 with disgust. Globals, function names, massive pieces of code right in the middle of HTML, shell_exec.

> Globals, function names, massive pieces of code right in the middle of HTML, shell_exec.

And they're not inherently bad.

PHP made the internet fun. Anyone could get going with a PHP enabled host with by creating an HTML document starting with <?php> and have a working something that the world could see by end of the day.

Today's web development feels like such a drag. In that you need to choose the scaffolding, create the scaffolding, wait for the concrete to dry, drill holes for the infrastructure and then construct the infrastructure.

When you then go to connect the infrastructure you find that one of the girders has buckled which requires a patch-up or refactor. Someone's misprinted the blue-prints and the cable ferret has gotten lost down one of the connectivity holes. You then discover that a new scaffolding company has come to town so your construction is now obviously out of date.

PHP enabled you to have something cool in days. Nowadays you spend days just trying to setup react. my two cents.

This matches my experience. In the old days (mid-2000's) I did a ton of PHP freelance work. This was done mostly with home grown "frameworks", built around HTML form to MySQL database mapping and CRUD operations. This was before REST APIs were really a thing, everything was page driven ("SSR" in today's terms, I guess.) For anything dynamic, we'd use JQuery, make an ajax call, return partial HTML, and inject it into the page. It was actually incredibly productive. I later moved on to Laravel and ditched the home grown stuff for newer projects.

I don't do PHP work much these days (permanent "working from home" made me not want to do any extra work from home after hours), but it felt incredibly productive compared to the more modern tech I've seen in my day jobs. There's a lot of crap to wade through nowadays. A typical small project might have a React front end, Python back end, REST API's, documentation, cloud deployments, on-and-on. Web development isn't fun anymore.

What's the closet think to a modern PHP nuke?

PHP was the Visual Basic 6 for web. People without proper training and theoretical knowledge just went and did stuff.

I think this is a sound analogy. I certainly recognize myself in the person without proper training and theoretical knowledge that just went and did stuff. Of course I changed and so did my tooling.

If it wasn't for how easy it was to get started and learn PHP back in 1998 when I started, I'm pretty sure I'd have gone to culinary school and became a chef instead of an software engineer.

I owe everything I have to Rasmus and his beautiful "shitty" language.

and made millions of dollars

billions

Considering Facebook is PHP (oh shut up Hack is PHP too) we could even say trillions.

It relocated wealth, but it did not create it.

There are lots of industries that are lucrative, but there's clearly no linear correlation to quality or societal benefit.

> did you make the pie bigger or did you take a bigger slice?

I think PHP did make the pie bigger, but there won't be shortage of companies who used PHP to only take a bigger slice.

Empowered a generation to get stuff done.

And leaving a steaming pile of unmaintainable shite being them.

Can we see your non-steaming pile of totally maintainable non-shit for comparison?

I saw a webpage in the early 2000s that when I clicked something, it remembered the data on the next pages. Think simple counter. I checked out the site and it claimed to be using something called PHP which even free hosts of the time provided. How is this not enabling right?

I had a similar "simple counter" moment at a later date and the tech was AJAX. I am yet to have a similar moment after that. Perhaps WASM based interfaces? But it's not the same. Maybe I am not the same.

Modern PHP may as well be a new language. But then node came along. It's almost like PHP users couldn't stand a clean ecosystem.

I don't think the language is the problem. As bad as it is, it is certainly more well thought that the original JavaScript. But PHP is used mostly by "businesses" with no budget and this is essentially the absolute rock-bottom of the "software" industry.

I think the language is the problem in some key areas. I started using PHP at the tail end of 2.x and remember trying to get a couple of endemic sources of bugs fixed in 3.x: register globals, requiring constant diligence NOT to ignore errors, and inconsistencies around things like parameter ordering for array functions or magic type conversion. Every time, it got pushback from someone saying it’d break too much code – at a time when there were billions of lines less PHP in the world, and when those were causing high profile security issues and app failures. I ditched PHP in the 2000s after getting tired of that, but picked up a legacy project a couple of years ago. Register globals is finally gone but everything else which I remember causing having to carefully train developers to avoid in the 90s is still a rake in the grass today.

NodeJS is the new PHP aka it's the first language someone who want to "web stuff" pick up. A decade ago most blog post about PHP had major security issues because the people who wrote those posts were just learning the ropes and copying each other in the same way most tutorial about react these days don't care about cleaning themselve up, unit testing and all that stuff that make the difference between a cowboy and a software made with quality in mind.

The state of JS is maddening, whoever spit on PHP but love JS will need to explain why an hello world from create react app has 800 dependencies in the node_modules, why do we keep using babel when most browser is already supporting es6 fine and why do we have some many way to import modules. PHP had its issues which got fix over time but we can't say the same with JS.

I wonder how many more years it will take HN to stop pointing out client development idiosyncrasies when comparing Javascript to a language like PHP that has no client development story at all when supposedly trying to compare server-side DX.

Clean???¿??????

Dude, Node is as broken as PHP. And it starts from having no standard library leading to hell like leftpad and general software supply chain holes that PHP never had in the same quantity.

It isn't clean. Node was just shinier and had more applications to leveraging it for a shiny frontend.

I think that’s what he’s saying: That they jumped from php to another hot mess. At least that’s how I read it.

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