[No PHPun Intended] A Brief History of Web Development
-
In the start of my career I felt that there was a sentiment around web dev that it's not "real" programming in a way. Not sure if that's the case any more seeing as the majority of modern develoment is for web platforms.
I've never heard the idea that PHP is a language used by web designers who migrated to coding, but it kind of makes sense. How PHP works, where everything is just HTML until the
<?phptag comes in, made it so attractive as a way to add some spice to static pages. I cut my teeth on PHP and moved on to other languages later, so it makes sense that it would function as a gateway drug of sorts, also resulting in it not getting the attention from seasoned experts that other languages benefit from.Calling dislike of PHP misogynistic feels like a massive stretch.. but maybe it's not considering how the designer/programmer divide also has a massive gender disparity. PHP has its problems, tooling being just one side of it, and its nature as a designer-friendly language makes it easy for elitists to mask their bigotry behind "objective" arguments that PHP is bad.
i think the wording of the original article was intentionally inflammatory, but "the purpose of a system is what it does". if shit-talking php causes women to leave the profession, it doesn't really matter what the intent was.
-
What's actually icky is making a website an SPA, duplicating business logic in the back and front, when it could perfectly be served as a server side rendered HTML.
-
Was not intended as programming language. The name literally stands for Hypertext PreProcessor. It was meant to be a script injector for HTML back when the internet was still fun.
Then it got out of hand and PHP didn’t evolve fast enough to be a web technology leader, but never ceded the position of old trusty workhorse, and still powers a significant part of websites.
Personal Home Page
-
What absolutely no. Server side generated code is still king in the right hands. Why have client lift all of thay when server side html rendering basically costs nothing. Even strong js driven front end you can still add much through server side by providing proper hydration paths. Good devs take advantage of both worlds but server side is incredibly powerful today.
-
Yep, PHP is turning 30 this year! Wondering if "PHP is still relevant?" Ever since we have been hearing that PHP is dead. It was “dead” 10 years ago, 5 years ago, and “is dead” today. But somehow - it isn’t. Anyway... happy birthday!
It's true that the fuckers that stayed in PHP now are getting paid insane amounts of money to maintain systems? I've heard they are the new cobol people.
-
Yep, PHP is turning 30 this year! Wondering if "PHP is still relevant?" Ever since we have been hearing that PHP is dead. It was “dead” 10 years ago, 5 years ago, and “is dead” today. But somehow - it isn’t. Anyway... happy birthday!
Happy 44th birthday IPv4! 🥳
-
Let's be honest though. The early PHP versions were absolute dog shit. And the definition of how not to design a programming language. That said, that never stopped anyone in web development from using it apparently. No clue what modern PHP looks like, apparently it's better now.
No clue what modern PHP looks like
Like worse C#.
-
not directly, but trash-talking it and gatekeeping "real programming" from the language most likely to be used by women is not exactly conducive to improved equality in the profession.
i realise now that i didn't explicitly mention my point in the first post, so:
- shitting on other people's jobs is bad.
wrote on last edited by [email protected]So PHP may be trash, but don't treat the people using it like trash? Makes sense to me.
-
wrote on last edited by [email protected]
I believe the huge mistake in HTML wasn't having some sort of element-level addressability.
People went insane over "the page flashes for 15ms because we have to reload the header and footer and it doesn't look NAAATIVE!" and the response was to SPA/AJAX everything, inviting a huge Turing-complete nightmare of possibilities when 95% of what peopleneed would be delivered with < form action="blah" replace_with_response="#foo" >
That and a dearth of native widgets-- a < combobox > and a < menu > that worked like the system menus might have kept JavaScript as the sick oddity it should be.
-
AJAX everything is icky. It's part of what's made browser tabs take more RAM than a typical desktop had in 1998.
I exercised all client side JavaScript from an app I maintain. It's fast, clean, and the back button always works. I just checked on one of the more complicated pages, and according to Firefox's memory profile, it takes about 2.6MB of RAM.
Where PHP really goes wrong is mixing HTML and code by default.
-
Yep, PHP is turning 30 this year! Wondering if "PHP is still relevant?" Ever since we have been hearing that PHP is dead. It was “dead” 10 years ago, 5 years ago, and “is dead” today. But somehow - it isn’t. Anyway... happy birthday!
php is too mainstream, give ruby a reason to exist.
-
It's old and ugly, the worst tool you can use for anything, and unkillable.
You meant WordPress, not PHP.
-
it's what html was designed for. there's nothing icky about it. with htmx et al the serverside web is coming back in a big way so we can finally drop this react stuff.
Now it was a great while ago I wrote anything in PHP. What icks me is the separation of concern. It has a tendency to cause code that’s concerned with logic and rendering at the same time. The act of moving a button can interfere with the logic, and it obfuscates how the entire website looks like.
Maybe there’s better coding practices to ensure better separation of concern in PHP.
-
Yep, PHP is turning 30 this year! Wondering if "PHP is still relevant?" Ever since we have been hearing that PHP is dead. It was “dead” 10 years ago, 5 years ago, and “is dead” today. But somehow - it isn’t. Anyway... happy birthday!
Well, at least PHP isn’t as bad as JSP.
-
Yep, PHP is turning 30 this year! Wondering if "PHP is still relevant?" Ever since we have been hearing that PHP is dead. It was “dead” 10 years ago, 5 years ago, and “is dead” today. But somehow - it isn’t. Anyway... happy birthday!
Maybe 25 years ago i build my first website for a paying customer ( my dad). I decided to go for php which was new to me at the time.
I figured it would be too risky ( even back then) to have PHP generate dynamic pages so instead I had php generate static html.
So whenever website needed updating , for example a new folder with images was added, you could just load the admin.php and it would generate gallery pages for you.
Would probably still work 25 year later if wasn't eventually replaced with some WordPress or something
-
Yep, PHP is turning 30 this year! Wondering if "PHP is still relevant?" Ever since we have been hearing that PHP is dead. It was “dead” 10 years ago, 5 years ago, and “is dead” today. But somehow - it isn’t. Anyway... happy birthday!
And I still don’t know what the first P stands for.
-
Maybe 25 years ago i build my first website for a paying customer ( my dad). I decided to go for php which was new to me at the time.
I figured it would be too risky ( even back then) to have PHP generate dynamic pages so instead I had php generate static html.
So whenever website needed updating , for example a new folder with images was added, you could just load the admin.php and it would generate gallery pages for you.
Would probably still work 25 year later if wasn't eventually replaced with some WordPress or something
for many websites, this is the ideal way to do it
makes it order of magnitude more secure
-
Yep, PHP is turning 30 this year! Wondering if "PHP is still relevant?" Ever since we have been hearing that PHP is dead. It was “dead” 10 years ago, 5 years ago, and “is dead” today. But somehow - it isn’t. Anyway... happy birthday!
Replaced the P in LAMP with Python when I started building webpages again a few years ago, and never looked back. Such a vastly more pleasant experience.
-
And I still don’t know what the first P stands for.
If you go by the initial acronym, it means personal iirc
-
If you go by the initial acronym, it means personal iirc
stands for
not: stood for
