[No PHPun Intended] A Brief History of Web Development
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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
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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!
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.
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And I still don’t know what the first P stands for.
If you go by the initial acronym, it means personal iirc
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If you go by the initial acronym, it means personal iirc
stands for
not: stood for
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Well, at least PHP isn’t as bad as JSP.
jsp answered the question, "What if Java was like PHP but with more Java?"
jsp deserved to die.
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php is too mainstream, give ruby a reason to exist.
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.
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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.
... or even Symfony.
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Is disliking something that (allegedly) is more popular with women than the average thing of its category anti-woman, even if no part of the complaint involves the user or their gender? The majority of users is likely still male anyway.
When did PHP become more popular with women what is going on here lol
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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.
