Hacker News Reader

Comment by spiderfarmer | Hacker News Reader

I think the “bad rep” is coming from developers that stopped developing themselves.

I've written PHP off and on since the .php3 extension was a thing, and I can say that PHP very much deserved the bad rap it had for some time. It's evolved beyond most of that, but a lot of that is due to the composer ecosystem making up for it while the behavior of many builtins remains beyond repair. Which is fine, every language has baggage and warts. PHP's warts are sometimes heinously ugly, and they're on full display in many legacy codebases, but modern PHP is something I actually find to be fairly pleasant to develop with, far more than Go or vanilla JavaScript.

The most under appreciated thing about PHP is the fact that after 20+ years I can still develop in PHP and never had to learn a JS framework, Rust, Go, Ruby, Java or .NET.

?? you can write JS without having to learn a framework. They exist in PHP too such as Symfony. This constant complaint about frameworks seems less about the framework and more about having to learn to work with people which is partly why the framework abstraction exists.

I think the biggest problem is that the main way to use it is as a HTTP response handler, whereas other languages are more general purpose. So when a developer wants to develop themselves outside of a HTTP response handler, they need to switch languages.

Of couse it can be argued that PHP can be used outside this one way as well, but even e.g. https://symfony.com/doc/current/mercure.html is using golang.

I've thrown together quick and dirty CLI scripts with PHP, just because it's the language I know best. It works fine.

A lot of it came from the rather harmful "php a fractal of bad design" article that used to get posted everywhere despite being highly inaccurate and out of date. Thankfully its fairly rare to see someone daft enough to still try using it in a discussion. PHP's come a very long way since then.

What is inaccurate about it? Maybe it is out of date now, but when I first read it about a decade ago, when I did a fair amount of PHP development, I had personally encountered most of the issues mentioned in there.

I've heard that PHP has improved a lot since then, but I don't see how you could really fix all the inconsistencies, global state, and "oddities" without a lot of breaking changes and really making it into a different language.

PHP should learn from JS where you have to abandon frameworks every two years.

> What is inaccurate about it?

It's been debunked so many times over the years, I'm afraid I don't have the energy or desire to do it again when it's really not needed if you're far out of the php ecosystem that it really won't make a difference. Suffice to say the PHP it is talking about is nothing at all like modern PHP.

Sure PHP has improved since that was written, but I'm pretty sure it was accurate when it was written. And I suspect that it was probably a contributing factor in some of PHP's improvements since then.

It was accurate when it was written, but within a couple of years of that it wasn't yet it was still constantly used. Thats where it became damaging, people not grasping how inaccurate it was yet still kept pushing it as a current understanding of the language.

The essay was largely accurate when it was written in 2012. We are living in the grim dark far future of the year 2026, and PHP has now addressed many of the issues it raised.

No. Bad rep comes from developers who used other languages and never looked back.

So they stopped developing in PHP am I right?

I did PHP for 15 years. Modern PHP looks good but I still wouldn't go back.

What is even "modern php"? It has the same warts than it had back in the day, last i looked nothing is fixed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com