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Comment by bearjaws | Hacker News Reader

Is it really that good for backend?

1. You will still need to learn JS, and now it may even be embedded in PHP depending on the type of app you are working with!

2. It still has horrible conventions, arrays being sorted maps has to be one of the worst design decisions, IMO its worse than having null and undefined as types. Mutlibyte strings are still an afterthought in the core of PHP. Inconsistent function naming. It's new typing system is plain worse than TS in every way. Async programming is still terrible. Needle Haystack swapparoos throughout the language.

3. It was built for the web as it stood 20 years ago, HTML embedded in code, single server sessions, cgi servers, and minimal latency server to server communication. It cannot feel more out of place today.

I will give it: Laravel is a robust framework that helps hide some of this, but its hard to hide most of it.

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1. I am already very good with JavaScript, I like having the language separation between frontend and backend.

2. I much prefer using PHP arrays than JS arrays. All the other stuff you mentioned have never been a issue for me in the past 10 years. I don’t care about types (I don’t even remember when I had a real type bug).

3. The modern web is an over engineered mess, all the modern js frameworks have made the user experience objectively worse. Oh wow your shitty website that has some text and a few pictures is taking 900mbs of ram and 70% of my cpu? Wow very modern! What progress we have made!

1) Okay, but in terms of getting shit done how is it helpful to people to learn two languages?

2) They aren't even arrays? How can you say that lol. If you haven't tripped over what I have listed I just cannot imagine how you have been using PHP. I ran into a multibyte encoding issue with Mongodb and Laravel last week for example. Just a few weeks ago the lovely json_encode a map was sometimes an array vs an object. Granted these are older laravel apps... I don't think a framework can fix these issues.

3) Great straw man! I am sure all PHP apps are beautiful things and their interactivity experience with the end user are perfect :)

Also speaking of over engineered, how is having to run a standalone web server along with PHP, and then having to have an entire JS stack as well not over engineered?

> 1) Okay, but in terms of getting shit done (one of your points) how is it helpful to people to learn two languages?

It's actually pretty clarifying. Two different perspectives on one single problem domain is almost always good for your brain. Like being bilingual.

Also I would dispute that there are not, fundamentally, two different environments in the browser and Node backend even now. One of those environments is a GUI which is naturally a good application for async. The other is not. Backend web development is still largely input -> process -> output. Node is just shoehorning JS in, and pretending that JavaScript's weaknesses are strengths.

> Also speaking of over engineered, how is having to run a standalone web server along with PHP, and then having to have an entire JS stack as well not over engineered?

Not sure what you mean. There are a bunch of ways to run PHP -- one is with a process manager (php-fpm, not unlike things like PM2). Another is to run Apache as a backend to something like Caddy or nginx or some other cacher; this is actually a highly robust way to do things, because Apache can be tuned in so many different ways. And yet another is to use FrankenPHP, which is Caddy with a PHP process manager.

I personally treat JS at the front end (Vue/Nuxt) as a client application development environment, and PHP as a backend development environment, as clean separate things defined by an interface. I don't believe that blurring the boundary between code running in the client and code running in the server has ever been a good idea, nor will it ever be. It just leads to edge cases where the code has to ask, and developer traps where developers don't realise they need to know.

> One of those environments is a GUI which is naturally a good application for async. The other is not. Backend web development is still largely input -> process -> output. Node is just shoehorning JS in, and pretending that JavaScript's weaknesses are strengths.

Until you need to perform two or more IO operations at the same time (e.g. more than one of: database query, Redis query, HTTP request, file operation, etc). Then it becomes:

input -> Promise.all (or Promise.race, or Promise.allSettled, or Promise.any) -> output.

If you watch Ryan Dahl's original presentation introducing Node, you'll see that JS was explicitly chosen because of its asynchronous nature — it wasn't shoehorned in: https://youtu.be/EeYvFl7li9E?t=795&si=FG0yxaGoCgz1rqOX

> Not sure what you mean. There are a bunch of ways to run PHP

Node doesn't require an upstream CGI server at all. There's a server built-in to the Node binary: https://nodejs.org/docs/latest-v22.x/api/http.html#class-htt...

> Node doesn't require an upstream CGI server at all. There's a server built-in to the Node binary

Though you'll still want a process manager for this to make sure it stays up. Which it won't, over the long term.

PHP also has a built-in webserver, which you shouldn't use.

FrankenPHP is the better way to do this with PHP: you get a full Caddy build, with all that offers, with a built-in PHP engine.

The FrankenPHP binary also needs a daemon to manage it, which is why the docs recommend using Docker. So you end up with Docker (or SystemD or whatever you prefer), managing Caddy, which is in turn managing PHP. This is because the server which ships with PHP is documented with a big red warning that says something to the effect of "don't actually use this in production, this is just a dev server" [1]. Node's built-in web server is production ready, so you can safely cut out the reverse proxy middleman. I don't actually have any major qualms about the FrankenPHP stack, I was just trying to intuit what the original commenter meant when they said "standalone server".

[1] https://www.php.net/manual/en/features.commandline.webserver...

FrankenPHP doesn't proxy to the PHP dev server. It is a PHP SAPI process manager itself.

You should be able to run FrankenPHP as the front end server just fine -- Caddy is excellent and it's my production front-end almost everywhere anyway (the Let's Encrypt support alone is worth it).

Though depending on the deployment I sometimes use Apache and mod_php still for the backend; this is still modestly less painful if you want to use WordPress in the same environment.

There is absolutely no way I would put node at the front of any server; I'd reverse proxy to it as a matter of principle, with very locked-down routing. The security situation with node package dependencies is hilariously bad, and some other server should be managing HTTPS.

Personally I consider the NPM ecosystem to be a horrific side-road in web development, and I think by contrast PHP is at least honest about what it is and what it is not. The amount of cargo-culting advice around package management in NPM is frightening.

> FrankenPHP doesn't proxy to the PHP dev server.

I didn't say FrankenPHP proxies to the PHP dev server. I'm saying FrankenPHP is a Frankenstein amalgamation of the Caddy reverse proxy server and PHP, which is necessitated by the lack of a production server built in to PHP. Some languages/runtimes like Go (which Caddy is written in) and Node have production ready servers built in to their standard libraries.

> I'd reverse proxy to it as a matter of principle [...] some other server should be managing HTTPS.

I've used Caddy and it's great, but if I have Cloudflare or some other service terminating SSL and serving static assets, then I don't necessarily need Apache, Nginx, or Caddy acting as a middleman.

> The security situation with node package dependencies is hilariously bad

Most of the security issues involving NPM are related to client side JS, not server side JS. PHP doesn't run client side at all, so it's a bit of an apples to oranges comparison. If you're just doing traditional server side templating then there are plenty of rock solid frameworks. Hapi has zero third party dependencies and was designed by one of the authors of the OAuth spec for example.

1) learning two languages is not hard or a problem. The fundamentals are the same.

2) I have no idea what you are doing but I have never had those issues. I don’t use Laravel or Mongodb though so maybe it’s that? json_encode should give you a string not an array or object?

3) stating a fact is not a strawman and calling it a strawman is not an argument. PHP is as good or as bad as you want it to be. It boils down to the skill of the developer. Bad developers will have a bad time, but that applies to most languages.

I’m not serving an entire JS “stack” either, I write fast, efficient tailored JS without dependencies or frameworks.

Sending html and having JS just for interactivity is surprisingly fast.

> 1. You will still need to learn JS, and now it may even be embedded in PHP depending on the type of app you are working with!

Yes, you will. But to me this is an irrelevance: JS has IMO very little business near the back end. I have absolutely no patience for the JS-everywhere thing.

(It is never necessary to directly embed JS in PHP; there are always choices. Sure, you might sometimes need to briefly template your JS, but that's true of all web environments; it's fundamental to the problem)

> 2. It still has horrible conventions

It does. But for example JavaScript is still riddled with bad conventions. Look at the mess that inconsistent array/object duality, inconsistent property enumeration, has wrought across the language for a whole generation of programmers

> 3. It was built for the web as it stood 20 years ago, HTML embedded in code, single server sessions, cgi servers, and minimal latency server to server communication.

So was JavaScript.

Laravel is, I think, the most sensibly-designed web framework that has ever existed. Every single other framework I have used has disappeared too far into the developers' own biases towards tier after tier of NIH decisions. Laravel doesn't have pretensions.

(I used to love Ruby on Rails but even I remember when the people who were the talk of the developer world with their brand new easy to use developer framework did not know that GETs should be idempotent)

PHP may have been built for the web (backend) as it was 20 years ago, but JS wasn't built for backend at all, so, if I had only the choice between PHP and Node (or one of the many Node alternatives), I would still pick PHP. Pretending that "you only need to learn JS, and hey, with Node you can also be a backend developer" has led to too many flaky backends already.

Exactly right. I would not call myself a PHP "proponent" because at fifty I have too little time in my life left to tell people what they should or should not choose, but I do think it is rich to see this criticism from the JS side. Everything bad about Node is bad because JS is also a "fractal of bad design".

If it wasn't that good for a backend it wouldn't have maintained complete domination of that market for decades, which it has. Incidentally the number of web development projects that have any objective use of async programming or fussy types is a rounding error. Perhaps your interests are pointing in another direction?

I remember someone trying to recruit me for a London-based startup whose developers were obsessed with async and Meteor. They struggled to ship (it was a silly idea anyway) and I don't think they survived their pivot. But the tools choice was a good part of the problem: it wasn't ready and they were imagining it had harnessable pixie dust.

I can see applications for async work within the wider backend all over the place.

But the objective justification for the async stuff being involved in the rendering of page content is thin.

And since the other applications are for sort of "high level systems" programming -- that boundary between the app and the OS -- I personally prefer Go for all of that.

Node is a significant devOps/package management pain that belongs in as few places as possible.

JavaScript is a terrible language and it still dominates front end :)

There are two types of developers that consistently bitch about languages: junior developers with delusions of grandeur and senior development that drank the coolaid and are yoked to a project using the wrong stack.

> arrays being sorted maps has to be one of the worst design decisions.

I'm curious, why is that so bad? It tends to be a useful property of PHP arrays.

Also for webdevelopment, I/O is often the bottleneck. This code creates an array with 1 million items, each being 'a' and then loops over each value, changing them to 'b':

    $array = array_fill(0, 1000000, 'a');
    foreach ($array as $key => $value) {
       $array[$key] = 'b';
    }

It executes in 2ms on my machine.

How often do you need to create and change each element of a million item array? A roundtrip TCP/IP call to PostgreSQL is bound to be slower than that for most web servers.

It is also funny to see a JS developer criticise the architecture of PHP arrays specifically.

It does hint that perhaps bearjaws is (lucky for them!) too young to remember the mess that incomplete implementation of array/object duality got the JS world into.

Been programming both languages since 2008.

Right. Then you are too young (as a developer at least!) to remember. Except that Object.entries() is there to remind you. And two different for() enumeration syntaxes (for...in and for...of).

JS has an enormous amount of bad-design scar tissue.

I find it interesting that JS developers will forgive it all (global variables, iterables confusion, broken this handling, insane implicit number and int conversions, not to mention simple stuff like semicolon handling) and think PHP developers doing the same for theirs are inferior.

It's a classic example of fundamental attribution error.

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