[No PHPun Intended] A Brief History of Web Development
-
Most developers are also not going to create a "serious backend service". Most are making a random website, or chaining together a few "business logic" items. I think we're just talking about different levels of "serious backend service". Like, if you mean someone making a website for the biggest industrial machinery company in the fortune 500, but it's all B2B stuff and so it handles at most hundreds of QPS, then I think you'll find a lot of Java there. I just think that for the biggest B2C companies in the world that handle hundreds of thousands of QPS, it's not exclusively Java.
I'm not trying to say Java is bad or anything. It's just that it has a few quirks (like garbage collection) that start to matter when you're getting eye-watering levels of traffic. So, for the most serious of the "serious backend services" I think you see Java, but you also sometimes see C/C++ and Go.
What if those chains handle thousands of massages per second?
Serious backend is indeed a stretchy term. And I agree with that point b2b java is common. But our b2b backend handles multiple thousands of massages per second. I find the bottleneck to be MySQL and RabbitMQ.
I think it makes sense for a serious backend to have load balancing and nginx cache and horizontal scaling. I reckon QPS doesn't matter as much as you think it does.
I still don't think that java would be considered niche. I rather think that C or C++ would be considered niche. It takes longer to develop, and is not memory safe so I don't think that most backend systems should consider it.
-
Ah yes, the language that picked strlen as the hash function for its hashtables.
Javascript is living proof that your language doesn't need to be good to be used.
I tripped over this one in Delphi the other day.
function AnsiStartsText(const ASubText, AText: string): Boolean; function AnsiEndsText(const ASubText, AText: string): Boolean; function AnsiContainsText(const AText, ASubText: string): Boolean; -
Just for the sake of being contrary, I know that there are still machines running on punch cards in some army-related places, where not changing anything is mandatory. I wouldn't be surprised if hot-wiring is also still there somewhere, it's just mostly running without changes.
The original Moog synthesizers used patch cords (in fact that's why a synthesizer instrument sound is still called a "patch") and I'm sure somebody somewhere is still fucking around with one of those.
-
Modern PHP is better because it's modern. Which early version of a programming language was good? I've used a lot of them, and by modern standards, I think dog shit is a somewhat appropriate description for most of them.
Early Kotlin and early Swift were good.
-
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!
wrote on last edited by [email protected]this is perl erasure
also php didn't cause the internet to suck; overreliance on javascript (and js based frameworks) did. there's a reason that modern internet is so slow and clunky and it's not php. at least php has the capabibility to improve over time not degrade.
-
In PHPs defense, it keeps evolving in positive, meaningful ways. If you are up to date with it, it’s quite sophisticated and enjoyable. Doubly so if you use a framework like Laravel.
PHP 8.4 is pretty good, TBH.
You absolutely CAN write great code with modern PHP.
...
Shame that most PHP I touch is legacy code that's at MOST PHP 7.4 - which is EOL since November '22 and has to be upgraded or replaced.
-
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!
Array_filter and array_map having the arguments swapped pisses me of so much.!
-
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!
Js is dead use php!
-
Everyone in this thread: PHP sucks because it was bad when I last used it 20 years ago.
wrote on last edited by [email protected]Backend devs: JS sucks because I never learned it actually
-
I mean it does suck, but it sucks less than anything else we have.
wrote on last edited by [email protected]PHP is far from "least bad language". Nowadays it is an ok language, one of many. You can also write ok code in it. The main issue is that it's really easy to write horrible shit that just barely works and will break when you look at it wrong. In fact without a lot of knowledge and experience that is the code you will probably write.
There are much better languages for any webdev niche you can think of, and some that are just better for webdev overall (e.g. Elixir). The reason PHP is still relevant is mostly huge legacy codebases that require a lot of engineering power to maintain (because PHP is not a good language for maintenance).
The way I look at it is that PHP is the C++ of webdev (but slightly worse).
-
The only reason php is still alive is Facebook
WordPress?
-
So why did Facebook build that whole system of converting C++ to PHP or whatever they did? Was it because they didn’t understand the savings? Or when you scale that high, the savings really are significant? Were there savings?
Edit to subtract: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HHVM is what it eventually turned into, and apparently it showed significant improvements even above the previous system.
Probably because someone said it was a good idea in a meeting.
-
Array_filter and array_map having the arguments swapped pisses me of so much.!
This person phps
-
Javascript is living proof that your language doesn't need to be good to be used.
I tripped over this one in Delphi the other day.
function AnsiStartsText(const ASubText, AText: string): Boolean; function AnsiEndsText(const ASubText, AText: string): Boolean; function AnsiContainsText(const AText, ASubText: string): Boolean;Too late to change it now
-
In PHPs defense, it keeps evolving in positive, meaningful ways. If you are up to date with it, it’s quite sophisticated and enjoyable. Doubly so if you use a framework like Laravel.
Yeah last time I used it was with a laravel monolith and actually it wasn't that bad.
-
I think I agree with you, and I also think you probably know better than me, but - Python couldn't become what Python became without doing this exact thing very deliberately, bordering on obnoxious at times. Fundamentals or "initial state" define the characteristic strengths and weaknesses for a language, but what to add and what not to, as well as "why" and "how", over time determine the true shape and user experience (lacking a better word there) of a language.
Despite its reputation, in my view Python has always been far more opinionated about how to do things than most give it credit for.
Yeah, I don't take exception with most of their choices, and to be perfectly honest PHP has historically made a number of really bad choices and refused to fix horrible bugs.
I just feel that providing the handful of tools that have been available since C and keeping them with the same name and the same argument position only makes sense.
If people aren't cloning Python commands for their design sensibilities. When they ask for a creature comfort that doesn't affect performance, It should be more strongly considered.
-
FastAPI ftw, fight me! Lol jk Django is cool and useful and serves a different need, quite well from what I understand.
Lol I've used both, FastAPI is nice too! I think my ideal situation would be FastAPI's endpoints/routing, combined with Django's ORM and DRF's automagic serializers/viewsets.
-
Probably because someone said it was a good idea in a meeting.
There is absolutely no way that’s true lol
-
There is absolutely no way that’s true lol
Its the most true thing you'll read all day.
-
PHP will never die. As long as code is written there will be PHP developers there to claim it's good now.
Just like COBOL
