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Comment by geek_at | Hacker News Reader

I was never able to move from PHP to something else. I tried nodejs for a few months but it always seemed much more complicated. Especially the dependency and build system.

With PHP to move my code to a production system I just need to run `git pull` and the new codebase is instantly live. No builds, no server updates.

The Markup system of PHP is also very very handy. No more messing with handlebars or external libraries.

Realistically you can start a small site with PHP and HTMX and no external PHP package dependencies in an evening.

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I'm in the same boat! PHP is so insanely functional. There are a lot of powerful frameworks but I personally like to keep my projects very simple with minimal dependencies and nothing comes close in terms of how fast I can go from idea → prototype → production. PHP + SQLite is a beast.

Nit: Most code written in PHP is the (an) opposite, of what many people discussion programming languages would call "functional". It is procedural, and maybe object oriented, although important things are missing, like generics/parametric polymorphism.

Functional here means that it functions well. Not that it's a functional language.

In case it wasn't obvious from the context of the rest of my comment, I was using this dictionary definition of 'functional':

> designed to be practical and useful, rather than attractive.

It gets the job done. Really well.

all he said is that he can get his work done.

definition of "functional" is "designed to be practical and useful, rather than attractive"

And all I said is, that most people understand something different under that term, when talking about programming languages ...

But thanks everyone, for the dictionary definition lookup.

I spent years making money off of PHP. I was doing PHP when shitting on PHP was cool.

I spend most of my time writing GO now.

Go + htmx + tmpl is all you need for a basic site. The go runtime produces binaries... While you're still installing php and a web server, my binary is already running and in systemd.

Need validation, grab validator. Need a DB, grab sqlc and write sql and then have the code for your API calls generated for you!!! (This bit of code generation feels like magic candidly)

Need a command line tool? GO.

Have to build a Key Value store? GO

Want to build a database? GO

Do you need a container deploy system ... well Kubernetes is already in GO...

There was a magic to LAMP and PHP 4... it was the right stack at the right time. When I work in go now I feel all that magic again.

I like Go. But how come they have not fix the issue with implicit nulls? Null guards everywhere... I cannot believe that a company as mighty as Google did not choose to use decades old insights on how to fix this.

Now it's really hard to fix. The std lib already does implicit nulls all over the place.

Kotlin kind of fixed it for Java, and it really helps us.

PHP is old, and makes it easier to forgive it's mistakes. But Go?

> I like Go. But how come they have not fix the issue with implicit nulls? Null guards everywhere... I cannot believe that a company as mighty as Google did not choose to use decades old insights on how to fix this

They relied on decades old insights of persons who worked on C and Unix. That said, I'm honestly still on the fence about if nil checking is really braindead, or just what it boils down to in the end and the rest like exceptions and Options/Result is just theatrical.

What I don't get is that they are not more pedantic about checking nil errs in the compiler. They error hard during compilation on unused variables, but err checking is simply not done.

Why? Like, besides some basic cli tool, and some “system” network programming (what google meant in their marketing, as go is definitely not a system language), I fail to see any benefit of that thoroughly uninteresting language.

It’s basically Java 1.2, sold in “Unix-flavor”, somehow making it acceptable to the people that otherwise hate to touch anything non-C (and in extension, never having used anything more modern)

Why go:

I like Rust, and zig. Both end up with better performance than go. All three will output portable binary.

I like Ruby and Django. I can get a V1 site out faster than I can with go.

Java is java. Its great if its huge, but hard to do "simple" in java... and the specter of "is this the year oracle fucks every one" looms large in the java ecosystem.

The compile/test loop for GO is stupid fast. How go deals with dependency is fist class. Go nailed concurrency model has found a sweet spot between safety, ease of use and developer performance that is unmatched.

Go is the "brutalist architecture" of programing. Most people look at it and go "why" but if you embrace it, and adopt it, there is an effective sensibility that you're not really getting elsewhere.

If third party libraries are important to you, it's hard to recommend Go over PHP. Everything is available in PHP. Go is still very new. Maybe you can code all that you need by yourself, but that's a pill some companies won't swallow.

On another note, whether or not I can make a database in Go is irrelevant. We're talking about replacing PHP, a web language. Why would I need my web language and database language to be the same?

>> Go is still very new.

Well over a decade old.

>> If third party libraries are important to you, it's hard to recommend Go over PHP.

There are plenty of third party libraries for go. This is where most of Go departs from PHP/java/ruby. Php/ruby you might look to something like larval or rails. Java had spring/hybernate/struts/grails (there's a lot there). Is there A framework you're going to jump on in Go? No, Go isnt Rails, it isnt omakase. Go has a ton of parts that "just work" and work well together.

You can pick an ORM (gorm) or use code generation like SQLC (magic!). There is a clean validation implementation that covers 99 percent of your use cases and is easy to extend. If you hate that there are 3 solid alternatives. Do you want a custom router, there are lots of choices but the standard library is good enough. How about logging? Works fine out of the box but plenty of choices here too. Auth, Identity and Access control what do you need there is a middle ware for it already or you can build one in 10 minutes. Are you parsing massive JSON files? hey if the standard lib is too slow there's 4 other choices depending on your use case.

Want to recycle all your code for CLI tools or service workers ... go is a hell of a lot more elegant than ruby or PHP for this (better concurrency primitives).

> On another note, whether or not I can make a database in Go is irrelevant.

I have a little project: the web server, the DB the, images, everything. One simple binary, one config file. Im not installing web servers, run times, databases. It's clean simple and out the door. Im playing with a search engine in go that looks like it could be mixed into that same binary and be 75 or 80 percent of what a solr/open search server would be.

Would rails or larval be faster to launch. Sure. Are they going to keep getting features out ahead of go after 6 months or a year. No things are gonna be really even. And when ruby or PHP hits the wall (and they have a point where scaling them stops making sense) then what do you do? Port to java... or go? You could just pick go from the start and scale it all the way out. Binary blob monolith to scaled services you can just stick with go....

I think you're underestimating how big the PHP ecosystem is compared to Go. Auth, Routing, and Sql code generation are basic things that every ecosystem offers. Even obscure languages have these things. Furthermore, Golang is a famous pain in the ass to parse other people's Json, but is fine for known data structures. It's a great example of where the simplicity of the language falls short as well.

As a side note, golang doesn't seem to offer anything even close to what other ecosystems offer for Auth without using a third party service. They have some pretty basic libraries from what I've seen, but I could be wrong. These are not things that you're gonna roll in 10 minutes.

When working for clients, and they need to connect to an obscure payment processing service, you could roll your own. But I don't want to be the one to tell them why we can't connect to these services without writing these things ourselves when their competitors can because they chose a language like PHP

>> As a side note, golang doesn't seem to offer anything even close to what other ecosystems offer for Auth without using a third party service.

https://awesome-go.com/authentication-and-oauth/

Theres ORY if you want your own in house auth zero...

There are piles of other things out there.

>>> They have some pretty basic libraries from what I've seen, but I could be wrong

Basic, maybe... Minimal closer. I like to think of go as brutalist architecture its so drab and functional that it feels ugly, void, and lacking.

Look at go's standard library. It's complete, but there isnt a lot of flash there. Good go packages maintain that stance. They give you enough to finish the job. Your not gonna find a package with a lot of "utility" functions in it, your not gonna find a lot of "left pad" like micro libraries.

And when you adopt this sort of thinking you dont really need as many choices. When every thing is boiled down to "this is functional/working" it doesn't leave a lot of room for implementation details or interfaces as distinguishing features.

I also use PHP this way and the speed I'm able to get something from a database to the page and iterate is still unmatched.

And that's why people look down on it - it's the same as how movie reviewers don't like regular movies, or book reviewers only like complex barely-readable books.

The simple stuff is just too boring once you are an expert in the subject.

Similar to how Stephen King will never win the Literature Nobel but he is such an incredible writer.

Personally I never shat on php because of simplicity but because of lack of expressiveness, limited language constructs and bugs. Combined with the massive new crowd going into programming with it, it gave rise to immense walls of pain (I remember wordpress sociable code source 12 screens long loops visually..).

Later they started to move away from all that with PSR, typed object layer and more es6/py3 set of features.

I shit on php because when you develop professionally with it, you want strong types so what happend was that people started to use comments to hint types.

Those hinted types are than enforced through an IDE.

Thats just horrendes langauges missuse / misdesign.

I write go so... types.

Types are great and they have downsides. Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, JS, Lua, lisp, objective c are proof that you dont NEED them to have working code.

Go’s types are like talking about how cool internal combustion engines are, and you bring up a crank.

Maybe upgrade to a recent version of PHP from the last five years. It has strong typing, not just hints in comments.

If you like strong typing, great, but many popular languages have weak types and dynamic types by design. It’s not some horrendous oversight.

interesting that it finally landed.

But just because PHP apparently added reasonable typing in >7.2 still makes it a ranchy languages for most of its lifetime.

Anyway ranting about it doesn't imply that i hate it or that i haven't used it. Its one of my first languages, but from my personal view, php is a shitty language in comparision to most others

You would have to compare PHP to the alternatives available at the time. Originally PHP replaced Perl and ASP, which have their own problems and no static types (back then). Ruby/Rails came out and got traction but was slow, buggy, and still no types. Python also slow, no types, and not great for web development.

Then we got Javascript and Node, with even less sensible types (no integers!) so you have to use Typescript and lots of tooling to get what PHP offers.

In enterprise environments Java and then C#/.Net dominated and did have strong typing, but that’s not the world of PHP.

Comparing PHP from a decade or longer in the past to Go et al. hardly seems apples to apples.

So if you want to dismiss PHP as “shitty” compared to “most others” define shitty and identify the others.

PHP without types / types in comments existed in parallel to spring boot for years.

And im pretty sure that the history of PHP is still everywere inside PHP, like php function inconsistencies across the board.

Or whats the current situation on unicode support?

When i started with PHP4 and Lamp, what a great time. JavaEE was bloated, not a lot of good free webservers available, granted.

But while PHP5 was great and had a loooong shelflife, JEE became much cooler and had fundamental critical things like CDI and really good CDI Frameworks.

Eclipse Java IDE was always really good, something PHP hadn't had for ages.

And if you look at the fundamental difference between lets say java and php: In Java you have specs and reference implementations (partially also thanks to oracle, you now have mulitply companies having their JVMs) which made the JVM very robust and fast.

When Facebook did the hhvm/hack stuff, that was great and pushed enough nerves to rethink the performance of PHP but the performance gains were stupid crazy. Thats a very good indication when a language with so little money and support has such a huge performance gain after such a long time existing.

The fact that Facebook than threw the PHP community under the bus with hhvm/hack didn't make it better.

I don't think PHP and Java really compete for mindshare. Java has mainly thrived for larger enterprise projects, whereas PHP appealed to individual developers and smaller businesses, and applications like WordPress. Of course there's overlap and companies may use both, but writing a web application in Java requires significantly more investment than choosing PHP.

Eclipse supported PHP from 2007, and the PHPStorm IDE from JetBrains dates to 2010 or 2011. Java has always had better tooling because of the enterprise focus. PHP IDEs are very good today.

PHP 7.x and 8.x have seen big performance improvements. I haven't seen hack/hhvm get much traction outside of Facebook but maybe it did.

I don't wish to put words in your mouth, but it certainly sounds like your argument is essentially, "PHP was bad, therefore PHP is and will always be bad, no matter what improvements it makes."

This...doesn't seem particularly reasonable?

You're not required to like PHP, and you don't need a reason why things you dislike are objectively bad in order to be allowed to dislike them.

Its just a discussion and my personal opinion i'm sharing.

Its hn, i think its reasonable to discuss asthetics of langauges?

But yes the history of PHP is murky and i do believe, that a few small changes could have big advantages for PHP and because PHP was one of my first languages and i also developed for it for a few years, i do have some type of connection to it.

Just imagine having a more community / sig driven approach defining a spec first, than having a reference implementation and opening it up to others.

And a PHP base rework would also help. Rethinking the architecture and code, cleaning it up and fixing issues which are still there because of it like unicode support.

> It has strong typing, not just hints in comments

Even for arrays?

PHP arrays are ordered maps, not arrays of a homogenous type as in Go or Java. Array is a type in PHP, but all arrays have the same type, regardless of what they contain.

You can describe the expected value or key/value types of an array in PHP doc comments for IDEs and static analyzers, but PHP won't enforce those.

there are many loosely typed languages that are used professional (in addition to PHP). dynamic typing it has its pros and cons but that doesn't stop it from being used professionally.

My point was that the professional side of PHP developers at that time, decided that they want to have a strong type system.

I would argue it's not the same at all.

If you're very much into art, you've probably seen the simple stuff already, and you would prefer to see something that surprises you or makes you think instead of the nth iteration of the same tropes.

But PHP is a tool, and you want your tools to be boring and reliable. (Whether PHP fits the description is a different discussion.)

You'd be surprised. A lot of programmers want complex tools because they are more interesting. They also tend to write unnecessarily complex code.

For example instead of just doing something there are multiple levels of indirection and instead of simply operating on a variable they tend to setup overly complex types that get passed around. Obviously sometimes you need that, but I'm talking about adding this complexity when it's not necessary.

Of course those people exist, and they also exist in PHP land because as soon as you start using its more advanced features it is as complex as the other mainstream languages.

But I would guess that a majority of developers that are not CS researchers value simplicity over complexity, at least in theory. After all they’re just trying to get shit done.

> And that's why people look down on it

Okay fair enough...

> > I was never able to move from PHP to something else.

But that's why people like PHP, they have little exposure to something else.

People that have experience with langs like Rust, Java or C#, Kotlin, Haskell or Elm, OCaml of F#, they usually do not like PHP. Why would that be?

People who only every have used PHP (and maybe some JS) they are usually the only ones raving about the language.

If you have seen a lot of movies (critics usually have) you are better at judging the merits of movies. Same for languages.

I suspect it's actually you that doesn't have exposure to PHP. I have exposure to about half of those, and I like PHP.

> are better at judging the merits of movies

Their definition of "merit" is "surprises me and brings something new to the table", while a regular person wants "is entertaining". i.e. they are better at judging the merit of something not actually wanted.

What did you have to build? `node index.js` and it works, without build.

And what did you mean with "no server updates"? PHP has to be updated and the server processes has to be restarted.

The markup of PHP is a mess, OK js is not much better :D

Sure you can start PHP without any dependency, cause it has a "million" dependencies included.

And yes, i use both. The right tool for the right job.

> Sure you can start PHP without any dependency, cause it has a "million" dependencies included.

This is exactly what good/great languages are doing: providing a standard large standard library.

I do not agree, that this is the only way of great languages. Great languages in my opinion are those, that implement concepts in a way, that they compose well and enable you to do anything you want elegantly. With the concepts they implement, they give you an answer to any situation might come across, without forcing you to write tedious ugly code as a workaround for lacking facilities.

Perhaps what you refer to are great ecosystems of programming languages?

> And what did you mean with "no server updates"? PHP has to be updated and the server processes has to be restarted.

This is not true. You can update a PHP file without restarting your server, and it will run your updated code.

> With PHP to move my code to a production system I just need to run `git pull` and the new codebase is instantly live. No builds, no server updates.

Make sure your .git folder is not "instantly live" as well...

low-skill sounds much more negative than "not complicated enough to constantly fail" :P After so many sightings of bespoke build tooling I kinda miss this part the most.

I mean, if I had been doing PHP-only professionally for years and then as an alternative merely checked out NodeJS, I wouldn't budge either, I think. But NodeJS is not known to be an elegant, fascinating or even horizon expanding language. None of that. So I am not surprised. Additionally it is kind of in the same language family as PHP is (while there are differences). Add to that all the overhead you have with minifiers, bundlers and whatnot, and I can understand easily, how one would not want to switch to NodeJS coming from PHP.

However, it might be a good idea to try languages, that are encouraging different paradigms, belong to another family of programming languages, or are often used for other things than PHP usually is. Try a Haskell, try an Erlang, an Elixir, a Scheme/Racket, a Rust. Languages so significantly different, that they add value for your learning experience as well as enabling you to do new things and get to know elegance in programming language design.

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