Comment by riantogo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by riantogo | Hacker News Reader

I'm in a bit of a reverse situation. I left programming some 12 yrs and want to get back into it. But I find it so hard with all the commandline installs, config files etc. The barrier to just getting to "hello world" seems so high now. Pasting my recent ask HN here in case I have better luck:

What is the easiest way to launch a simple PHP website these days?

-A simple CRUD web app

-No new sytax to learn (just good ol' PHP)

-Simple flexible front end library (I have used Materialize CSS, is that the best?)

-Any easy way to make the MySQL pieces easier to manage? Any boilerplates?

-Any end to end integrated development environment? I have codeanywhere subscription and inmotion hosting. Is that good?

Essentially I have decent experience with PHP/MySQL from past and want to launch a simple CRUD website using as much off-the-shelf pieces as possible. Looking for the easiest path to get there.

It would be gravy on top of some day I can wrap it into a mobile app (for location, camera etc.)

Does it have to be PHP? No offence but you’d get so much more from learning Python and the barrier to entry really isn’t that high.

The hardest hurdle initially is to set up a “virtual environment” which means you have a project by project collection of all the packages you need instead of installing everything globally.

Setting up virtual environments used to be a pain. Today it’s so easy:

1. Make sure you have Python 3.8 installed. There’s installers for Mac and Win. 2. Create a folder for your new project. 2. Inside that folder, use your console or terminal to write: python3 -m venv p_env 3. You now have a virtual env, all your stuff will be stored in that p_env folder. 4. Activate it with another command: source p_env/bin/activate 5. It’s now activated and you can use “pip” to install packages like Django a great web framework.

By the way go check out Django and go through the tutorial. It’s very fun and will get you going with a CRUD in no time.

It need not be PHP. Just that I'm most familiar with PHP and ASP.net from back in the day. I'm confident that I can pick up most languages. I will look into Python and Django. But honestly the setup steps already scare me a bit :)

Go for it! Forget about setting a DB at first. Django will default to a “pseudo database as a single file” called SQLite and for all intents and purpose it’ll function as if it was MySQL or Postgres.

ASP.Net has moved on a bit and can now be hosted on Linux or Mac. ASP.Net Core 3.1, which will become the all-new integrated ASP.Net 5 at the end of the year, offers a much more mature developer experience without all the MS lock-in (MS SQL Server / Windows IIS etc.). The free version of Visual Basic actually runs pretty well on Mac OS X.

I was in the exact same position -- the ecosystem looks intimidating these days, but fortunately PHP is pretty much still PHP. I started back in by getting a handle on Composer[0], which is the only new necessity, and if you have any *nix experience is just a basic package manager (so you don't have to worry about checking for updates and managing individual dependency files like the old days).

Composer also provides the benefit of a lot of neat packages that can help accomplish a lot of the heavy lifting, depending on your needs. For my purposes, the Slim Framework[1] was perfect. Beyond that, PHP still has PDO, so I wrote a simple class to manage my common CRUD activities. I haven't bought into the npm-gulp-JS-babel hamster wheel nonsense for the front-end. I still download the odd JS library and FTP upload my files.

Tying it back to the OP, I really rediscovered the joy of programming by ignoring all the over-engineered nonsense that's taken over (particularly in web dev). I stopped feeling like I'm behind if I don't spend a day learning about a process that might save me 20 minutes but will be deprecated in a month and obsolete in a year. I went back to just writing the code that does what I need it to do.

[0] https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/php-composer/

[1] http://www.slimframework.com/

> I have decent experience with PHP/MySQL from past

Let's be honest: you don't have any experience with php or mysql anymore. 12 years ago was the era of php 5 with some remnants of 4. Php 7 and the ecosystem are a lot better nowadays (composer, Symfony etc.). For database people tend to use Postgres when they can but even MySQL added lot of good things with JSON, CTE, window functions.

You may want to start learning from scratch.

"Hello world" is still those letters in a .php file uploaded to a host tho.

I can't think of anything that doesn't have a steep learning curve, aside from just not using any frameworks and writing PHP code. If you're building something solo and it's not too complicated, that's a decent option if you don't want to spend time learning things that won't get you to hello world. But, depending on what you're doing, something like WordPress might do what you want out of the box.

Im looking to build something similar to HN

FWIW news.ycombinator.com codebase is partially open I think but written in a small Lisp dialect.

I think lobste.rs is open source.

Edit: it is. Also I thought it was written in PHP but it turns out to be Rails.

FWIW and IMO Java and .Net has gone in the opposite direction of many others and I find myself reaching for them now (I used to prefer PHP, later PHP/Symfony, smaller PHP frameworks and then Python with Flask but the last 5 years Java and .Net has become so simple and fast (in dev, prod has been fast for a long time) that I see no reason to go with anything else.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com