The PHP Singularity (2012)

blog.codinghorror.com

11 points·RyanShook··5 comments

The real sad thing is that we as a industry have not learnt a single thing from this. Deploying stuff on the server is still a nightmare with ever increasing layers of complexity and fragility. SSR on top of GraphQL on Npm on top of mongodb on top of kubernetes on top of docker on top of Linux on top of kvm. And we praise and promote this type of nonsense instead of simplifying stuff.

PHP still follows the very simple way. Install LAMP (perfected down to a simple one step script), run certbot, copy code and voila, you're done.

PHP and it's community on the other hand is learning from its mistakes. The popularity of Laravel and the clean code it forces you to write is a godsend. So is the work in the community to recommend it to every beginner.

Make me wonder...

Is there anything like TypeScript or MoonScript for PHP? A source-to-source language that tries to mitigate the quirks and issues with the target language.

Just pick a better language (e.g. Python/Ruby/Groovy/C#). Period. And JavaScript was never as horrible as PHP anyway, in my opinion.

The thing is, you have more control over what language you can run on the server-side, whereas all your web browser clients run JavaScript. So it made sense to have a transpiler targeting JavaScript.

I wasn't trying to credit the language. Just curious about the state of the ecosystem.

I had the displeasure of PHP being the first "programming language" I came across. Most of my knowledge was gleaned from w3schools and various web pages scattered around the web. I recall doing a lot of Googling while trying to figure out edge cases and such.

But mostly the language picked for a system is a well-used legacy language (e.g. Java / C / Befunge / Cobol ) chosen by a business manager.

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