[No PHPun Intended] A Brief History of Web Development
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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, if you add tons of extra rules and tools, it can become almost as pleasant as the main Python or Ruby experience.
Almost.
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You meant WordPress, not PHP.
Joined at the hip.
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stands for
not: stood for
The P in PHP stands for PHP.
PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor.
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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.
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.
Wow, that really is a light weight! What exercise do you have your code perform to get such impressive results?
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The P in PHP stands for PHP.
PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor.
Okay, that makes sense.
PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor.
But what does the first P there stand for?
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Okay, that makes sense.
PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor.
But what does the first P there stand for?
Oh sorry, that P actually stands for “PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor”.
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Oh sorry, that P actually stands for “PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor”.
Thank you for clearing that up.
“PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor”.
But do you happen to know what the first P there stands for?
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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.
I am an advocate for LKPPR (Linux, Kubernetes, Postgres, Python, React). Doesn't roll off the tongue that well.
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I am an advocate for LKPPR (Linux, Kubernetes, Postgres, Python, React). Doesn't roll off the tongue that well.
LicK PaPeR
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jsp answered the question, "What if Java was like PHP but with more Java?"
jsp deserved to die.
We heard you liked garbage collection so we put garbage in your language.
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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.
It's one of a plethora of scripting languages from the '90s which were designed to be the antithesis of "fail fast" and kept going no matter what.
I guess what with C/C++ being the Mainstream Option at the time, not having to deal with a strict compiler must have felt like freedom. As someone who has had to maintain, cleanup and migrate ancient PHP code, I call it folly. That mindset of "let the programmer just do whatever and keep trucking" breeds awful programming practices and renders static analysis varying degrees of useless, which makes large-scale refactoring hard to automate which is just amazing when your major versions aren't even remotely FUCKING BACKWARDS COMPATIBLE.
PHP's original design is just fundamentally atrocious. It became popular in large part because unmaintainable code is usually someone else's problem.
A language that I would definitely use for server-side rendering and that was already good from its first stable release is Go. It was thoughtfully designed and lends itself really well to static analysis, while still being easy to write and decently performant.
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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.
Wow, that really is a light weight! What exercise do you have your code perform to get such impressive results?
No JavaScript, just HTML and CSS. Basically no images. The heaviest page dumps 50 rows of logs in a table.
It's admittedly a fundamentally simple frontend, but we all know of frontends with a simple job and a not so simple frontend.
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ruby has so many better reasons to exist beyond that.
since v3 it performs just as well if not better than Python.
it has a well documented and lush library of gems that still work even if they are 15 years old.
ruby gets a lot of shit because everyone ties rails in, which has improved, but is still slow as shit compared to other orms.
yeah rails is literally the only thing giving ruby a bad name, it's terrible. Ruby is a beautiful, amazing language, and then people shit all over it because of Rails. I literally had someone complain that ruby is a horrible language, I asked them what they meant, they listed off all rails things, then I showed them the language and they were like "this isn't what I was using...".
in any case I think you really should only use ruby for very small scripts or programs. Nothing enterprisey at all.
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Thank you for clearing that up.
“PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor”.
But do you happen to know what the first P there stands for?
Personal Home Page, so the whole thing written out is:
Personal Home Page Hypertext Preprocessor
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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!
Where I live, I still see people in a horse-drawn wagon. So, I guess horse-drawn wagons never died? It's only used for tourists and weddings, but that counts, right?
According to Tiobe, PHP was the programming language of the year in 2004. In 2010 it was number 3 in the top 10 programming languages. It's now out of the top 10 entirely. There really isn't a language that has completely disappeared. Mainframes are still programmed using COBOL, Scientists are still using FORTRAN, even Lisp, which has been around since the 1950s, is still going strong.
Maybe Actionscript counts as truly dead, since it was tied to Adobe Flash, and Flash is truly dead?
I have a lot of bad memories of PHP. It was, for a brief time, the main language I used, but it was so ugly and inconsistent. The only thing I loved about it, at the time, was that it wasn't Visual Basic. As bad as PHP was, at least I wasn't making web pages in that pile of hot garbage. But, I never felt joy writing something in PHP. At best it was a slog. At worst it was like pulling teeth.
Just about every other language has given me moments of fun. Original Javascript was a mess, but it already contained scheme-like features. It was sold as being an interpreted version of Java, but it had features that Java wouldn't have for at least a decade. C is a brutal and unforgiving language, but as long as you're not working with strings, it's great to have such low-level control over everything.
Maybe PHP has evolved like other languages, but I still am not interested in trying it out. Everything it was good at can be done better by other languages, and those are languages that give me joy, not pain. I hope it keeps dropping in the rankings so that people aren't exposed to it as one of their first languages.
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for many websites, this is the ideal way to do it
makes it order of magnitude more secure
And performant. And accessible. And compatible.
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php is too mainstream, give ruby a reason to exist.
Ruby is as dead as PHP.
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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]Last week I found the code for the first website I created, way back in the mid 90s. The server-side part was written in Perl.
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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.
wrote on last edited by [email protected]Most memes or jokes referencing a direct problem in PHP, are old or made by people who haven't touched the language in a decade(version 7 was in 2015, and it removed/fixed a lot of issues and added needed features).
There's also the huge looming thing that a lot of programmers forget: Websites like Wikipedia run on PHP, not to mention the amount of WordPress and similar websites are out there. Which means it will keep going strong. And for a while Facebook also used quite a lot of it, to the point where they made a rudimentary compiler instead of rewriting parts in more efficient languanges.
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Well, at least PHP isn’t as bad as JSP.
Or TSP (trisodium phosphate) - which you can't even make websites with, but it's great for cleaning oil spots off the driveway.
