[No PHPun Intended] A Brief History of Web Development
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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!
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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!
PHP will remain alive as long Wordpress is still being used.
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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!
PHP forever.
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PHP forever.
It should be rewritten in rust, any way.
::: spoiler Spoiler
/s
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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!
Still broken as designed.
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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]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.
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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!
ASP.net web forms were ahead of their time. I miss them every time I have to use modern js frontends.
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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!
Magic quotes were the single biggest mistake I've ever seen any language standard make.
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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!
Yup! Every time we add a new technology, the old does not go away. We just have more (gestures wildly) everything.
When picking a career specialization, don't abandon all the old stuff. Some of it makes a lucrative career after others have moved on (HPC, COBOL, on-site servers).
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ASP.net web forms were ahead of their time. I miss them every time I have to use modern js frontends.
Geez did they build that page with asp? Is janky-scroll a default setting?
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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!
It's old and ugly, the worst tool you can use for anything, and unkillable.
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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!
my entire way of reasoning about programming languages changed when i read on article about how hating on php was misogynistic. i clicked on it because it just sounded like yet another ragebait, but it made sense.
basically, since php is simple, and integrated with html, the vast majority of php devs started out as designers who later got into code. since php has always been a mess, nobody wanted to build mainstream tooling for it except the people actively working with the language. this means that mainstream ideas about language and tooling design didn't percolate down to php like it has done to most languages. so php devs, when exposed to tooling the rest of the world takes for granted, are usually overwhelmed because not only is there a lot of it, nobody in php-land uses tools like that. so they get called bad devs of a bad language. some of them, who really like to code, push through this massive difficulty spike, while others just assume that "actual programming" is too hard and go back to design, even though tooling usage has little to do with your skill as a programmer.
the kicker, of course, being that web design has more women than most other dev specialisations.
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my entire way of reasoning about programming languages changed when i read on article about how hating on php was misogynistic. i clicked on it because it just sounded like yet another ragebait, but it made sense.
basically, since php is simple, and integrated with html, the vast majority of php devs started out as designers who later got into code. since php has always been a mess, nobody wanted to build mainstream tooling for it except the people actively working with the language. this means that mainstream ideas about language and tooling design didn't percolate down to php like it has done to most languages. so php devs, when exposed to tooling the rest of the world takes for granted, are usually overwhelmed because not only is there a lot of it, nobody in php-land uses tools like that. so they get called bad devs of a bad language. some of them, who really like to code, push through this massive difficulty spike, while others just assume that "actual programming" is too hard and go back to design, even though tooling usage has little to do with your skill as a programmer.
the kicker, of course, being that web design has more women than most other dev specialisations.
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.
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my entire way of reasoning about programming languages changed when i read on article about how hating on php was misogynistic. i clicked on it because it just sounded like yet another ragebait, but it made sense.
basically, since php is simple, and integrated with html, the vast majority of php devs started out as designers who later got into code. since php has always been a mess, nobody wanted to build mainstream tooling for it except the people actively working with the language. this means that mainstream ideas about language and tooling design didn't percolate down to php like it has done to most languages. so php devs, when exposed to tooling the rest of the world takes for granted, are usually overwhelmed because not only is there a lot of it, nobody in php-land uses tools like that. so they get called bad devs of a bad language. some of them, who really like to code, push through this massive difficulty spike, while others just assume that "actual programming" is too hard and go back to design, even though tooling usage has little to do with your skill as a programmer.
the kicker, of course, being that web design has more women than most other dev specialisations.
The main issue with PHP is that it’s designed for a pre AJAX web. Before when there was a real distinction between backend and frontend. The idea with PHP is that the server code is responsible of generating HTML on the fly.
Server code generating HTML is icky in modern web development.
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my entire way of reasoning about programming languages changed when i read on article about how hating on php was misogynistic. i clicked on it because it just sounded like yet another ragebait, but it made sense.
basically, since php is simple, and integrated with html, the vast majority of php devs started out as designers who later got into code. since php has always been a mess, nobody wanted to build mainstream tooling for it except the people actively working with the language. this means that mainstream ideas about language and tooling design didn't percolate down to php like it has done to most languages. so php devs, when exposed to tooling the rest of the world takes for granted, are usually overwhelmed because not only is there a lot of it, nobody in php-land uses tools like that. so they get called bad devs of a bad language. some of them, who really like to code, push through this massive difficulty spike, while others just assume that "actual programming" is too hard and go back to design, even though tooling usage has little to do with your skill as a programmer.
the kicker, of course, being that web design has more women than most other dev specialisations.
That tracks, without any background in coding php is very simple to get into. I'm not a woman, but as a personal anecdote I've never done anything outside some self-taught hobby-level web designing requiring html and js, and I only know some php because it's what was easiest to learn by myself to get the stuff I wanted done.
I've looked into actual programming languages a couple times, but I never get far since I don't need them for anything and all the tutorials start super boringly and won't tell about the possibilities you could potentially do; it's assumed you already know. With php I just knew what I needed and did some web searches and found the answers, and that kinda spiraled into leaning along the way. There's no way to do that if you don't even know where to start
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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.
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.
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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.
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.
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The main issue with PHP is that it’s designed for a pre AJAX web. Before when there was a real distinction between backend and frontend. The idea with PHP is that the server code is responsible of generating HTML on the fly.
Server code generating HTML is icky in modern web development.
Server code generating HTML is icky in modern web development.
There's been a big uptick in interest around SSR lately, so maybe not.
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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.
When I was using Ruby (some Rails, but mostly Sinatra, for little web apps and api serving) Laravel was coming up in PHP shops. Which was just trying to be Rails running on PHP from what I could tell.
There were others before that, like CakePHP, but all I remember about that of all the bugs my coworkers dealt with. I was strictly a front end dev back then.
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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.
