Comment by krick | Hacker News Reader

Comment by krick | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

PHP in 2023 is a great language, I always scoff when somebody tries to imply that Python or JS are "clearly superior" languages to PHP (which, to me, is a clear sign of illiteracy). But I am also kind of "the right tool for the job" proponent. Now is PHP the right tool to build Desktop Apps?

- It is cumbersome to distribute. Rarely people have PHP installed outside of a docker container, and given quite short development lifecycle chances are their version of PHP is already outdated.

- Concurrency support in PHP is still very poor. That seems quite a big deal for a desktop app.

- NativePHP is anything but native. It relies on Electron, which is somewhat questionable on its own (even though very common nowadays).

- …And, since it pretty much is just Electron, why do I need a Laravel app underneath anyway?! If there is a job for JS, it's exactly programming UIs (primarily because there are millions of UIs and thousands UI-targeted libraries written in JS by now)

So, I am very skeptical.

> But I am also kind of "the right tool for the job" proponent. Now is PHP the right tool to build Desktop Apps?

If you work in a largely PHP shop and want a quick internal tool to solve some business need or something, sure.

I mean, you are completely right. Those are very valid points. But this still sounds sorta fun to me, I like crazy projects :)

>> why do I need a Laravel app underneath anyway?!

I don't know much about nativephp/electron/desktop ui's, but I would guess Filament is a pretty decent reason.

Good point, building a desktop app with filament would probably be quite fast!

NativePHP solves the distribution problem, I’d say that’s precisely why it exists. Plus Laravel + Livewire is incredibly fun and fast to build with.

php years ago was a great lang...

The fact that is less popular now, being replaced as the "new shiny" by JS and Python as gotten alot of new devs out of the space which is what caused the vast majority of the negative press around php, it was never the language, but the fact that is was very approachable and very forgiving for new devs so alot of them did stupid things

> it was never the language

That's just, not correct. I programmed web sites primarily in PHP back in the PHP3-5 days (and have had some jobs and contracts since, in PHP7+).

PHP, pre-5.3ish, was a bad language. It had terrible design decisions, a polluted global space, bad default configurations, weird scoping rules, function/objects with massive security holes that the developer had to patch around (the MySQL functions, being notorious) and a terrible object model. PHP5-5.3 did a lot to fix that, and 5.3+ became a usable language. PHP7 finally did a ton of work to clean up the global environment, deprecate and toss out old/buggy libraries, clean up the ABI and improve performance. They also reworked the object model completely. It is now a genuinely decent language. But it was not "always great".

It wasn't great, but it was available and that is what got it to levels of popularity that other language eco-systems can only dream of.

Laravel has a dedicated marketing page specifically targeted towards JS-first developers:

https://laravel.com/frontend

Besides echoing the sentiment that PHP ~3-5 was definitely NOT a good language, I don't know what you mean by new shiny. JS is like 6 months newer than PHP and python is like 4 years older.

The age of the lang is not the point, the popularity / adoption of it is.

Lost of things are created and never get exposure for decades after their creation

Reply on news.ycombinator.com