Here is my TL;DR of this article. PHP is bad we all know this and accept it. Facebook has made it better by keeping most of the syntax and chucking everything else out the window. Run your stuff on HipHop ( unless you need extensions in which case your OOL )
Also, it's a little obscure for languages like PHP where we're unused to making architecture/implementation distinctions, but if HHVM is good then PHP is good. It runs the same core language as php.net. To the extent we don't, it's likely to be a bug these days. I think HHVM is a better implementation of that language than php.net, but I am biased, and that isn't the point of the talk. We're also chipping away at running other popular programs, extensions and all: http://www.hhvm.com/blog/?p=875
Edit: transposed sentence
I've heard this argument before, but it's important to realize that Facebook was able to use standard PHP up until the point when they had roughly 500 million users. Unless your site has a half billion users you can't compare your use case to Facebook's.
As far as I can tell, only 3 is obviously something that only affects whether you can use the language once you have a certain number of users. The first two are really about changing the language.
As a matter of fact Facebook would probably have run into the same problems if they had used Ruby or Python. These problems are problems of massive scale most of us will never face. Twitter had problems running on Ruby/Rails and i bet theres a case to be made for Python too. All this says is that at the scale level of facebook you will encounter the limits of dynamic typing scripting languages, but its not a problem with PHP per se and also not a problem that should hold anyone back from choosing php/ruby/python because its premature optimization.
>At this point we almost need to stop saying facebook programs in PHP
Also, your TL;DR is a flat out lie.
I like the idea of opt-in typing for PHP via Hack which you can enter by beginning your PHP code with <?hh — Facebook have essentially taken everything that is wrong with PHP, every complaint that someone has ever published in a blog post or bug report, forum or IRC channel and built it into an improvement of the language.
PHP isn't going anywhere. It might be one of the oldest web languages, but I think the PHP space is starting to get better with Facebook's contributions to the language, Laravel 4 being a solid PHP framework and we can't forget that most Yahoo! products are built using PHP as well (even the recently acquired Tumblr is coded in PHP). Flickr! is probably one of their biggest PHP applications.
Event hough Facebook appear to have resolved the many complaints and problems of PHP, I am sure people will still find a way to complain about the language that powers most of the web...
Despite this, there is nothing in PHP that prevents you from doing the thing you want to do, however you want to do it. As projects become larger and involve more time and people, the fine grain of line syntax fades out of view, and all that is left is the large scale design decisions, which are similar in any language. And this is what ultimately determines the technical success or failure of software.
To be honest, PHP is really just simpler, less hassle, and if you know what you're doing things come out structured well. Just stick to classes (Including statics! There shouldn't be a define() anywhere.), use namespaces, use composer (I've come to really like it), and use a coding standard.
I would. For every job, a proper tool. If my project is client-side heavy and only needs a thin layer between the client-side and the database, I'll pick PHP. The code I would write in PHP would be minimal and I would get it up and running very quickly.
If I'm writing something substantial on the server-side, then yeah, you may want to consider something else.
Doesn't make me want to give up python or node, but these are strong points in PHP's favor.
At the end of the day, every program is a stream of bits too. That doesn't diminish the importance of programming languages as a tool for reasoning, managing complexity and avoiding common mistakes.
As the industry shifts from deliver something that sort of works to deliver something with these assured characteristics, programming languages designed around enforcing desired qualities will be of immense value.
> Another good point is the efficiency of a developer working in PHP.
Compared to what? Depends on the developer and problem domain.
> The language is easy, it's so easy to be a PHP master after a few years working in the language.
You can master any language after a few years.
> It's easy to find super-talented PHP developers compared to any other language.
Data?
As for php encouraging shitty programming, a good bit of that is that so many more people program in php because its easier to get started with. This does not mean that just because php attracts shitty programmers that it doesn't have more or many awesome programmers than languages such as python.
It should be quite obvious to anyone by now that when it comes to shitty programming, language is negligible factor once a language has hit the mainstream.
But I'm pretty sure 5 to 10 years from now someone manages to argue that Ruby is crap, Rails is to blame for encouraging a generation of developers to write bloated controllers full of spaghetti code, and that this attracts shitty programmers incapable of understanding software architecture.
Instead of relying on actual reusable building blocks, you're expected to build specific versions of ruby interpreter and libraries for every project.
Imagine having to cope with just ever so slightly different (but certainly incompatible) philips screws whenever you want to affix one physical thing to another.
Or much worse what are the odds that if I'm an average developer and am picking a random feature from each language's standard library, making care to read the docs before using it in my application that I've still introduced a bug? (Consider that maybe I'm dealing with things that were considered strange and new when most of PHP is still from - like character encodings - particularly character encodings that differ from the system I'm running in).
Most languages can be CGI-style executed by an httpd with shared-nothing, but can also start up and be a long-lived stateful daemon. I don't have to decide between putting a square peg in a round hole or throwing my code away to learn something entirely new if I realize I need the latter part way through a project.
PHP comes with a excessively large (but strangely CGI/HTTP/HTML/SQL-obsessed) standard library littered with footguns, and for most of its life has not had a common pattern for reusable modules, and has not had a good bundler for shipping reusable modules or making working with C extensions easy - and as such few people bother reimplementing functionality from core outside of what's been provided there (which is all set in hard clay), and when they are forced to tend to do so in (plain-ole-interpreted) PHP and don't generally package it up for reuse outside their own projects - a practice much more common outside PHP-land.
Case in point (goddamn strlen, even): https://api.drupal.org/api/drupal/includes%21unicode.inc/fun...
Some of that is changing in recent history (as in well after other languages figured these problems out) with PSR (design for reuse) and Composer (bundler) but it's slow moving and the latter still won't compile C extensions yet: https://github.com/composer/composer/pull/498
Plenty of this could be solved in PHP, some of it already is if you have the luxury to work with a tiny subset of PHP projects, but the practice in PHP seems to still mostly be to have it piss in your face and believe that it's raining. People are in a rut of tradition or simply don't expect their tools or libraries to be good - and I've spent the last 6 years working with PHP (several products, several teams) and wondering where I can get some of the Koolaid that my colleagues are drinking.
Why? What difference does that make as a programmer using it? If another language is more modular, and lets libraries handle things that are baked into php, isn't that a good thing?
> As for php encouraging shitty programming, a good bit of that is that so many more people program in php because its easier to get started with. This does not mean that just because php attracts shitty programmers that it doesn't have more or many awesome programmers than languages such as python.
Maybe not, but it makes it harder to hire the good ones.
You have things like Rubymotion(to build iOS and Mac apps), which I'm really liking. Opal which translates Ruby to Javascript. You can build Android apps with Ruboto. You can run Ruby the JVM and call Java libraries. You can run Ruby on the .NET runtime(Iron Ruby). You have a really good Web framework called Rails. Most other PHP frameworks just copy Rails, so why not just use the source. You can build games for iOS using Joybox(library for Rubymotion).
So from a business prospective we chose Ruby because we can do pretty much everything in Ruby. We rarely have to use anything else. From command line applications, to web, to iOS, to Android, to reporting, etc.
PHP, well, you can output HTML, or JSON.
http://blog.samuellevy.com/post/41-php-is-the-right-tool-for...
Please stop complaining about how horrible PHP is if you don't use it or have. intentions to replace it.
Having worked with clients that publish thousands of articles of content per month the best solution for the job at the end of the day is still WordPress. Have a client that needs an online store? Magento (both of which are built in PHP).
Development shops don't have time to custom build CMS's and eCommerce solution because their clients don't give a shit what language or framework their site is built in.
Show me a CMS built in ruby, python or javascript that comes anywhere near WordPress and I'll gladly switch. Unfortunately it just doesn't exist. Like you said, PHP has its place and until something better comes along stop complaining.
PHP means access to easy to install, ready to go software, which meets 95% of the needs of small businesses. I would love to see that in python, or anything else, but it simply isn't there. The most widely used python CMS? Plone. It's massive, hard to maintain, and far from easy to install or host.
I've been on and off working on systems like WordPress for pyramid/python for a while, but it's a massive project. One day I might finish it...
I use php since v3 as well, when I joined College back in 2001, in my first programming class, the professor told me PHP was cr@p when I told him that was the language I was more proficient with. I didn't listen to him... PHP was paying my bills since before I joined the College.
I feel like so much of the bias towards PHP is either an unfair comparison (language to 'rails') or a bad taste left in the mouth because the person worked with a nasty domain specific language like Wordpress, Drupal, Magento, etc.
PHP is like pop music; there is a lot of it and 'true' artists think it's beneath them. Nevertheless the public demands and craves it, and most of the big web applications that are open source run on PHP.
If you feel like PHP is a blight on the world, by all means go out there and disrupt the community by launching something that gets widespread adoption the way PHP software has.
Several years ago I was told to use Magento on a project. Great, Magento is a mature PHP app and I'll get to see some great PHP code. Nope, I was horrified by what I saw and dreaded coming to work everyday and having to deal with that mess of a system.
I have a hard time getting behind a language that everyone uses but no one uses well.
Just look at MoinMoin's source and see how much more elegant it is than MediaWiki.
> either an unfair comparison (language to 'rails')
Why is that unfair?
> a bad taste left in the mouth because the person worked with a nasty domain specific language like Wordpress, Drupal, Magento, etc.
If that's how PHP is used in practice then it's fair to complain about PHP.
Because PHP isn't actually used like that. Most engineers use frameworks (like Symfony, Zend, Yii, Cake, Laravel etc.) or at least components of these frameworks if they work on something very complex. NIH is a thing of the past.
> If that's how PHP is used in practice then it's fair to complain about PHP.
If shitty developers use a language then it's fair to complain about said language? Really?
I don't choose my music by popularity, and won't try point you to popular repositories. You need to look at your needs, and decide what works for those needs. If that is php, that is great. No need to look further. If php doesn't cut it for you, you will have to decide what you need and find a solution that works for that.
All the same, if you're not inheriting a legacy codebase, I don't think there is any reason to use a LAMP stack on a greenfield project that you will be creating tomorrow. There are just too many better alternatives out there.
> Facebook’s PHP Codebase
> x * 105 files
> y*107 LoC
> 10 releases per week
> Anecdotally, good engineers are astonishingly productive in PHP
...Fuck it, I'll rail. It's 2013. Do yourself a favor. Use something better than a horribly inconsistent glorified cgi script.
Speaking anecdotally, I got exposed to PHP before I did to Python. I tried Python after hearing how much more amazing than PHP it was. I understand why people say that now, because Python has a "flavor" that I suspect most programmers find more pleasing. I also learned another thing: I am not more productive in Python than PHP.
PHP, like JavaScript, is a language constructed out of good parts and bad parts. They both suffer from the same ailments. It is painfully easy to construct code examples of their horribleness, there are mountains of bad code floating around the internet, they lack essential facilities like strict typing, many facilities that they do provide should be carefully avoided, and the overall flavor of the language is just plain weird. However, PHP, like JavaScript, allows you to be remarkably productive.
JavaScript got out of the doghouse when Douglas Crockford wrote his book and converted the JS community to the jslint style of programming. JavaScript didn't change, but the perception and practice of it did. I think PHP needs a similar champion who is willing to say: PHP can be a good and proper language, provided you use it correctly, and btw here is a tool that tells you whether you're doing that in your code.
I am a PHP programmer, and to your high and mighty attitude I say: screw that. There's nothing wrong with being a PHP programmer.
I think the only reason PHP is still relevant is because it's so damn accessible (kinda like w3schools), every shared hosting provider under the sun gives you apache+php, and when you're starting learning web programming shared providing is the way to go.
Why do you say php and Javascript suffer from the same ailments? They suffer from a few of the same ailments, like a crappy/confusing stdlib (although you don't see mysql_real_escape_string in javascript's API) and funky invisible type coercions. Lack of true OOP in javascript, though confusing to beginners, is a design feature as far as I'm concerned, prototyping gives you the tools to implement OOP however you like. But javascript has had a known design pattern from the beginning, which is very powerful and useful once you learn it. I strongly doubt a (another?) phplint at this point would change anything.
As for the "anecdotally" slide, I read the last statement as a conclusion of the previous stats, which didn't make any sense to me. Either I am completely misreading it or you are taking the phrase "anecdotally" far too literally.
1) State => because endpoints have no persistent state
2) Concurrency => because there is no concurrency model
3) Transparency => (1) + (2) + fast reload = easy to understand
These combined give the language nice programmer "ergonomics" (Keith's terminology). It also limits the collateral damage any particular change to the codebase can have which allows Facebook to more confidently deploy multiple times a week.
Remember also that a large part of the reason why facebook won over its competitors (friendster and myspace) was technology. Both myspace and friendster had trouble scaling up their featureset at the same time as their userbase, whereas facebook pulled it off relatively well. It's hard to know without inside knowledge whether PHP had anything to do with that, but it obviously didn't prevent facebook from winning.
I'll be the first one to take a swing at PHP, but Facebook has done some awesome things with it. I used to program in PHP and it does have some really nice bits...I mean, it's hard to fathom not waiting for my container to start anymore and go back to the days of save/reloading.
Cool. Nice link, OP.
You can do a lot with meta-programming in PHP. For example, you can write your own array type if you are so inclined and use it anywhere you would use an array. Here's an experimental library that showcases the meta-programming abilities: https://github.com/jsebrech/php-o
PHP is the dream of a one-man team that gets paid by the hour. Get contract, slap something together that makes the client willing to pay, throw it all away and do it again when the client wants a change.
$productid = "0x4zz5";
print $productid + 4;
If not, then PHP doesn't work. End of story.
Implicit type conversion is evil, and I don't see how PHP's sin of favouring string -> number over number -> string is any worse than, say:
// Javascript
console.log(+(+!![]+(+[]+[]))); // outputs the number 10
// C, Java
float celsius, fahrenheit1, fahrenheit2;
celsius = 100;
fahrenheit1 = celsius * 9 / 5 + 32;
fahrenheit2 = 9 / 5 * celsius + 32;
assert(fahrenheit1 == 212); // OK
assert(fahrenheit2 == 212); // Oops! It's 132. What happened?Of course, it is better to manually convert.
I wish I could use static typing too, but when I can't I use vars that are somewhat intuitive.
Its just baby garden. Im sorry.
PHP will be Seriously if will use major Erlang features: processes, pattern matching, atoms, lists, tuples
Tuples need because they more simple for understand and matching then lists and strings. Tuples can simple converts to lists and back. Tuples more effective with memory.
Only one class can implement tuples now its SplFixedArray. But there bugg when you call createFromArray in own custom class derived from SplFixedArray. Also with small count uts slow.
Try test Erlang and see his power. I hope you think will too, that PHP needs with Erlang features.
ouch