Comment by binarymax | Hacker News Reader

Comment by binarymax | Hacker News Reader

I have minimal exposure to PHP, but recently helped a friend out with a small project on the weekends, that someone else he knew had built. When I first saw the codebase I found a veritable mess of very unreadable unmaintainable code. No functions - no OOP of any kind - no separation of concerns - nothing reusable - SQL calls (probably vulnerable to injection) mixed with HTML - a hulking mess of spaghetti.

Can tools like these fix code like that, or at least help? It would have taken me about a day per page just to make it readable - and there were dozens of pages. I don't plan on going back into that minefield if I can help it, but it would be good to know in the future.

--EDIT-- Thanks for all the helpful replies. Luckily I'm pretty sure the project is behind me. Seeing that PHP reminded me of old bad ASP (pre .NET) - it was easy to get away with lots of really bad stuff (on error resume next anyone?). It makes me wonder if auto-refactoring spaghetti is a crackable problem. When I dared look I did see lots of things that I could have fixed with a little bash and sed, but of course I am human so I understand the 'intent' of the code. Fascinating stuff.

Those problems are not related to PHP but to inexperienced developers. Refactoring such code is always a pain. So unless there is nice money involved: don't refactor, just fix what's broken.

I don't think refactoring of spaghetti can be automated. But there are other tools that can help you to find bad code. Some that come in mind:

  https://github.com/fabpot/PHP-CS-Fixer
  http://pear.php.net/package/PHP_CodeSniffer/redirected

Those tools are used for coding standards (PSR-x), but those standards are also helpful to track down bad code.

Good advice, with a couple of caveats about PSRs:

- They're not all about coding standards: only two of them are. PSR-0 is a class autoloading standard and PSR-3 is a common interface for loggers. The next PSR is likely going to be a common caching interface.

- PSR-1 and PSR-2 are controversial (although PSR-1 less so than PSR-2), and don't necessarily represent best practices amongst the larger PHP community. They're useful insofar as the PHP Framework Interoperability Group (PHP-FIG, http://www.php-fig.org/), the people crafting the PSRs, needed an internal standard and really shouldn't be represented as anything more than that. Much of both standards are an amalgam of individual practices produced via an internal survey of PHP-FIG member projects.

If you have nothing, PSR-1 and PSR-2 aren't bad places to start, but diverging from them is more likely to happen than not, especially if you're working with projects or teams that have existing coding standards.

    > PSR-1 and PSR-2 are controversial
    > Much of both standards are an amalgam of individual
    > practices produced via an internal survey of PHP-FIG
    > member projects.

Those member projects include codebases like Zend Framework, Symfony, Composer and Doctrine. Those standards are are a very accurate representation of the way the best, most popular open source PHP code is being written.

The only controversy I'm aware of is those petty pull requests opened by people who didn't like that they chose spaces over tabs, which eventually drove one of the founders of the group to quit out of frustration.

> Those standards are are a very accurate representation of the way the best, most popular open source PHP code is being written.

PHP-FIG members have repeatedly cautioned[1][2][3][4] that the PSRs (notably PSR-2) are not a set of best practices, but merely a survey of commonalities of PHP-FIG member projects. Even then, several member projects do not, and have stated they will not, implement PSR-1 and/or PSR-2. Treating them as the best or most accurate representation of how PHP is being developed at large is exactly the wrong thing to take away from the PSR process.

[1]: http://www.php-fig.org/faq/

[2]: http://paul-m-jones.com/archives/2420

[3]: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/php-fig/TRpoq0kdrZk/OkyD-J4u...

[4]: Matthew Weier O'Phinney's comment on http://brian.moonspot.net/php-coding-standards

> It makes me wonder if auto-refactoring spaghetti is a crackable problem

I'm not sure it should be. It would probably still be a mess, just hidden and split over multiple source files.

It's not PHP's fault, mind you. PHP pays the price for its own success here, meaning that lots of inexperienced hacks think they can code a web application, leaving behind these steaming piles of suck. It's also important to note that PHP is just a language, not a framework - as such it leaves unskilled "developers" a lot of rope to hang themselves with.

You could in theory code the same nightmare you're describing with, say, Ruby on Rails. But in practice that doesn't happen because Ruby has a different clientele and Rails gives people a somewhat reasonable structure they can cling to.

I do a lot of my development with PHP, it's a quite capable language. My biggest gripe with it is actually its syntax and uneven naming schemes for internal libraries. But the runtime itself is quite good and it is possible to do some very elegant things with it.

> I do a lot of my development with PHP, it's a quite capable language. My biggest gripe with it is actually its syntax and uneven naming schemes for internal libraries. But the runtime itself is quite good and it is possible to do some very elegant things with it.

Indeed. I always wondered at how different the class syntax is from the rest of the language. In comparison to the rest of the language it looks... sane.

Can tools like these fix code like that, or at least help?

If you're working with PHP professionally, invest in PHPStorm. The time savings it brings - not to mention, the improved reliability - make it an instant win.

How is it better than Netbeans or Eclipse? I've been using mostly the former (after Zend Studio went AWOL). How does PHPStorm compare to those alternatives?

How is it better than Netbeans or Eclipse?

It's been a couple of years since I last looked at Netbeans/Eclipse, so take this with a grain of salt: PHPStorm just works.

The biggest issues I used to have were finding Netbeans very slow, and auto-complete in both Netbeans and Eclipse being somewhat unreliable - great when they worked, but that wasn't 100% of the time.

Essentially, PHPStorm is what I always wanted Netbeans/Eclipse to be.

As I say, though, it's been a long time since I last looked, and that's for a very good reason: at long last, I'm completely satisfied with my IDE.

Thanks, checking out their free trial now

PHPStorm is like the perfect gateway drug. I first became familiar with JetBrains products through PHPStorm, but have since upgraded to IntelliJ IDEA. IntelliJ IDEA is the perfect polyglot IDE, with support for the following either in-built or via plugin (and forgive me if I leave anything out, or add it in a reply):

- Java

- Scala

- Clojure

- Android

- PHP

- html/css/javascript

- Python/Django

- Ruby/Rails

- Groovy/Grails

- Actionscript/Flex

I'm a raving fan!

If you're working with PHP professionally, you probably have enough privilege in the world to be able to spare the few afternoons it'll take you to learn a real programming language and stop having to suffer such amateur-hour bullshit day-in, day-out.

Seriously, spend a weekend learning Python or Ruby. Your life will improve vastly.

Using a shiny and expensive IDE to make hacking PHP suck less is like buying a huge box of band-aids as the solution to the problem of your carving knife continually cutting you open.

If you're working with PHP professionally, you probably have enough privilege in the world to be able to spare the few afternoons it'll take you to learn a real programming language and stop having to suffer such amateur-hour bullshit day-in, day-out.

Ugh, really? For what it's worth, I've been doing web development professionally for the last fifteen years, and actually really enjoy coding with PHP.

If you're suffering from amateur-hour bullshit day-in, day-out, I'd kindly suggest that you're doing whatever you do wrong.

Seriously, spend a weekend learning Python or Ruby. Your life will improve vastly.

Python never really did that much for me, but I probably should investigate Ruby one of these days. Right now though, I'm enjoying playing with Erlang, and want to take a look at Go at some point.

Horses for courses, I'd say.

Using a shiny and expensive IDE to make hacking PHP suck less is like buying a huge box of band-aids as the solution to the problem of your carving knife continually cutting you open.

Surely using an IDE, for whatever language, will generally make your life better?

Whilst syntax-highlighted Vim or even Notepad++ have their merits, you can't beat a lot of the features modern IDEs provide, PHP, Python, Ruby, Erlang or otherwise.

> For what it's worth, I've been doing web development professionally for the last fifteen years, and actually really enjoy coding with PHP.

Me too— except that last part. My first web app was PHP in 1998.

http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-de...

Just because you enjoy it doesn't mean that you should.

If you know Python already, Django will change your life. Go try it.

I'm a PHP developer who knows Python. I tried to learn Django awhile ago and to be honest I wasn't that impressed. Super leaky abstraction... nearly every single error message was something about string manipulation inside the Django code itself, with no reference at all to my own code. It made it totally impossible to learn by doing. Also, this was probably a result of my lack of experience with Django, but the way I was told to organize my Django project (with functionality kept in modules) felt very wrong in a web app (as opposed to a website) where all the pieces are interconnected. I ended up having only one custom module that would be totally unreusable for anything else, which made me question the point of putting it in a module at all.

You're right: PHP silently converts your vars to strings and then does the wrong thing without ever telling you.

I think you misunderstood. I'm not talking about Python throwing errors about the types of my variables. Like I said, I'm already quite comfortable with Python. I'm talking about Django failing to check whether my Django-specific code (e.g., templates) is valid, so that Python gives me an error message that appears to originate inside the Django codebase, instead of Django giving me an error message about the syntax of my template.

I've only briefly tried CakePHP, but IIRC its error handling was excellent.

Currently the refactoring available for extracting code is "extract method". "extract function" is not available yet and may even be implemented as "extract static class" or something, because it may be safer to achieve.

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