[No PHPun Intended] A Brief History of Web Development
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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.
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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.
I agree. A lot of people who mock PHP know almost nothing about it but they know they're supposed to hate it because all the cool kids do.
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LicK PaPeR
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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.
Python is a natural evolution for web development, especially once you're past the fundamentals. For someone with no scripting background, PHP is easier to approach. The syntax is more direct, and basic debugging doesn't require any setup. An error happened on x line is the default behavior.
Python's logging system can be tricky to configure properly if you're unfamiliar with the factory and error level handling. Those green people don't have any idea where to put the log or how to let the web server talk to it safely.
It's the little bs like refusing for years to include switch, then when they finally give, they just refuse to allow fallthrough. It's like they said, fine, but it's got to work slightly differently and we don't like the name... it feels childish.
All things considered, Python has a richer ecosystem and deeper long-term potential. But there's something to be said for how quickly a basic PHP site can be spun up and debugged with minimal knowledge with minimal friction. And that's why it's still around so much today.
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LicK PaPeR
Replace Postgres with Valkey, then it's LicK ViPeR
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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.
Laravel brought life back to PHP for me. It's elegant. I feels like speaking.
And PHP 8 is light-years away from the garbage I grew up on.
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I am an advocate for LKPPR (Linux, Kubernetes, Postgres, Python, React). Doesn't roll off the tongue that well.
Get that fucking JavaScript out of here
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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.
wrote on last edited by [email protected]I doubt that the pay is insane yet. There are a lot more PHP devs than COBOL devs. About half of the web still runs on PHP. It's true that COBOL runs about half of the financial world, but PHP is less than 30 years old whereas COBOL programs are relics from decades earlier, and generally only get updated minimally if the systems around them change.
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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.
that just sounds like what i hear from react devs.
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Oh sorry, that P actually stands for “PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor”.
"Recursive Backronym"
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So PHP may be trash, but don't treat the people using it like trash? Makes sense to me.
lift people up instead of pushing them down. we don't make fun of the language someone is using, we help them get better.
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Python is a natural evolution for web development, especially once you're past the fundamentals. For someone with no scripting background, PHP is easier to approach. The syntax is more direct, and basic debugging doesn't require any setup. An error happened on x line is the default behavior.
Python's logging system can be tricky to configure properly if you're unfamiliar with the factory and error level handling. Those green people don't have any idea where to put the log or how to let the web server talk to it safely.
It's the little bs like refusing for years to include switch, then when they finally give, they just refuse to allow fallthrough. It's like they said, fine, but it's got to work slightly differently and we don't like the name... it feels childish.
All things considered, Python has a richer ecosystem and deeper long-term potential. But there's something to be said for how quickly a basic PHP site can be spun up and debugged with minimal knowledge with minimal friction. And that's why it's still around so much today.
I agree that PHP was easy to pick up, but I already knew several programming languages and was quickly shooting myself in the foot with the extremely overbuilt, redundant, and buggy builtin functions. At the time, though, it was either that or ASP, so I chose the lesser of two evils.
To segue, switch statements aren't inherently necessary for a mature programming language; I think that addition was partially to mollify the growing userbase (not a good reason), but on the other hand it's really just structured pattern matching wearing a hat that says "switch" on it ... though again, that's something which could fairly trivially be achieved with a list comprehension. It's not like you're getting the machine-code-level optimizations that a C compiler could churn out for a proper switch statement.
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Laravel brought life back to PHP for me. It's elegant. I feels like speaking.
And PHP 8 is light-years away from the garbage I grew up on.
I took a look and threw up in my mouth a little. That's not how backslashes should be used.
Instead of writing their frontend templates in PHP via Blade, many developers have begun to prefer to write their templates using React or Vue.
So... the only thing that PHP is really good for should be replaced by React or Vue Javascript / Typescript?
To each their own, but for me that's a no.
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I agree that PHP was easy to pick up, but I already knew several programming languages and was quickly shooting myself in the foot with the extremely overbuilt, redundant, and buggy builtin functions. At the time, though, it was either that or ASP, so I chose the lesser of two evils.
To segue, switch statements aren't inherently necessary for a mature programming language; I think that addition was partially to mollify the growing userbase (not a good reason), but on the other hand it's really just structured pattern matching wearing a hat that says "switch" on it ... though again, that's something which could fairly trivially be achieved with a list comprehension. It's not like you're getting the machine-code-level optimizations that a C compiler could churn out for a proper switch statement.
I personally feel that giving the growing user base things they want is probably the most prudent reason. Constantly refusing to provide simple constructs that are available everywhere else It's not a good look. In the open source world if you do that shit enough you end up getting forked.
The context and ease of switch in a functional programming layout is a rather clean implementation.
Otherwise you end up with the crap like they're pulling with flask were you just make an unnamed, unindexed number of functions. Can you sort and organize your functions and make everything clean? Sure you can. Does it happen by default? Almost never.
You can walk up to someone else's switch and see what the options are. The code flows through that simple construct and it's very easy to understand someone else's work.
I load up someone else's flask endpoint, It's just this multi-page stream of consciousness.
You don't need switch, But there's a reason why so damn many people ask for it. Before they agreed to include "match", They said just to use getattr and write your own switch.
