PHP 5.4.0 released

Posted Mar 2, 2012 21:49 UTC (Fri) by Kit (guest, #55925)
In reply to: PHP 5.4.0 released by HelloWorld
Parent article: PHP 5.4.0 released

I probably poorly worded it, but I wasn't wanting simply a list of languages (which would be every other language not named 'PHP'), but of actual, substantiated reasons why PHP is bad, and the other language isn't. And for clarification, saying things like "it's missing some random function that's only the right choice in some specific cases" is an awful reason IMO.

PHP 5.4.0 released

Posted Mar 2, 2012 22:22 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (3 responses)

It was discussed many times. PHP is completely build around violation of Rule of Repair - that's what makes it “suitable for non-developers” and that some thing also means it's turing tarpit.

It's much easier to create half-working prototype in PHP, but to create production-quality code you need not only fight the task at hand but you need to somehow curb this insane tendency to “help you”… by adding security holes to perfectly valid algorithm.

Think about it: how many things may fail if the result of sort() is not, in fact, sorted? Regular expressions are pretty fundamental - yet PHP screws them, too. And so on.

PHP 5.4.0 released

Posted Mar 3, 2012 0:03 UTC (Sat) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054) [Link] (2 responses)

It's funny, I dislike PHP too, but I'm very familiar with it and use it all the time (imposed for reasons I mentioned elsewhere). And while I can think of many stupid things about PHP, the things you mention would be at the bottom of the list at most, and in some cases I don't even see them.

- Rule of Repair violation. The only place I really see this is in the fact that it's a loosely-typed (and dynamically-typed) language with implicit conversion. While these attributes certainly annoy programmers used to a different type of language, there's nothing inherently wrong with them.

- Turing tarpit. Not even close; in fact it's more of a kitchen-sink language, with everything thrown in with little regard to consistency.

- "help you by adding security holes". Very true, but most of this can be avoided with proper php.ini configuration (though the existence of such a thing is itself a big problem) combined with a "good parts" approach to the language. This is where a novice really causes havoc with PHP, and why I cringe at its common "non-programmer" uses.

- Regular expressions. OK, so they don't perform as well as they could. So what? If you want performance you're looking in the wrong place anyway, and if you're coming from Perl and want a little more speed you just need to use regexes a little less.

All that said, I do think PHP deserves quite a bit of ridicule. It's the most wildly inconsistent language I've ever seen taken seriously, didn't gain anonymous functions (sorta) until the last major release (despite having array-transformation functions that need that sort of thing), and only now is getting a sane array syntax. My years doing Ruby instead were great (except for deployment/sysadmin), and these days I'm much happier when I can do Javascript (including some server-side) than when I'm doing PHP.

PHP 5.4.0 released

Posted Mar 3, 2012 1:00 UTC (Sat) by elanthis (guest, #6227) [Link] (1 responses)

> Rule of Repair violation. The only place I really see this is in the fact that it's a loosely-typed (and dynamically-typed) language with implicit conversion. While these attributes certainly annoy programmers used to a different type of language, there's nothing inherently wrong with them.

1) Identifiers magically turn into strings, mostly I believe because function handlers have just been strings until relatively recently.

echo FOO; // prints FOO

2) Magic quotes. Yes, they're finally gone, but the fact that some dork put them in there in the first place proves that said dork had no business designing, implementing, distributing, and promoting a language.

PHP 5.4.0 released

Posted Mar 3, 2012 14:56 UTC (Sat) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054) [Link]

Ah yes, #1 is probably PHP's worst remaining sin. Luckily I don't encounter it a lot, but it did bite me not too long ago.

I loosely put magic quotes in the "help you by adding security holes" category. I'm glad they're finally gone, but I agree that their existence says nothing good about the language designer, or at least the language's aspirations beyond "Personal Home Pages".

PHP 5.4.0 released

Posted Mar 3, 2012 2:42 UTC (Sat) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link] (8 responses)

These things have been discussed over and over again, there's no point in repeating these arguments here.

But please, answer me one question: what is PHP actually better at than the alternatives I've pointed out? Because I can't think of anything.

PHP 5.4.0 released

Posted Mar 3, 2012 11:19 UTC (Sat) by ggiunta (guest, #30983) [Link] (7 responses)

PHP is not a comp-sci guru language. It's an engineer's language.

1. It's easy
2. It's powerful
3. It's fast enough for most tasks

About 1:

Developers moaned about language inconsistencies since about forever, but the fact is that this is not a big problem as some think it is.
Q: Is it find(haystack, needle), or find(needle, haystack)? A: I do not care. I can not remember syntax of all functions in the language anyway, not to mention frameworks, but the online documentation for that function is one click away. And if I'm using an IDE, I get a tooltip to tell me.

I can pick up most php libraries / frameworks out there, plug them in my app, and if I find a problem debug it and patch it in half an hour. This might be true for other languages, but definitely not Java or Perl.

Loose typing is actually a good choice 99% of the time when writing an app. When writing a framework/library it's probably the opposite. But how many developers are writing apps compared to frameworks?
Think about the function validatePassword(string $p1, string $p2) versus validatePassword($username, $password)
. Which one is typesafe? Which one is gonna be abused by the caller?

Heck, even the choice not to have private/protected/public members in classes (for php4) really makes sense in the context of an application. How many times are you going to subclass a class which is specific to the business-logic problem at hand? If you're not going to subclass, all the time you spend thinking about this particular aspect is wasted.

Making the language clean up for yourself at the end of every web page means that things like global variables, generally despised in other languages, are not a bad practice anymore. Purists yell when they see it, but it's only because they have not yet understood the scoping implication of the one-page-one-scrip approach.

About 2:

Want to hack a bit of script in an html page? super fast.
Want to code purely oop? can be done.
Like lambdas and closure? Can be done too (ok, not the best implementation out there, but still...)

About 3:

I like my hashes to be as simple as arrays. I rarely mix them up - depending on context (or the value of the variable at hand) I can figure out which one of the two is in use. So my array construct is slower than in any other known language. Thing is, for making websites the page speed is nowadays wasted mostly 1-in frontend rendering of all the js and css, and 2-in the db query or nosql fetch. Array manipulation is gonna be 0.1% of it.

PHP 5.4.0 released

Posted Mar 4, 2012 1:57 UTC (Sun) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link] (3 responses)

Whatever it is, it's not for engineers. Engineers care about maintenance, and PHP isn't maintainable.

PHP encourages spaghetti, encourages bad practices like using string concatenation instead of parameter binding, even encourages the "copy paste" approach to code-reuse. And so on through a litany of maintenance-hostile behaviours.

It has taken long painful years to beat the worst security mis-features out of PHP. It may be decades before the knock-on effects reach the many PHP "applications" (if piles of accumulated PHP may be so-called) that have grown up while such mis-features existed.

PHP 5.4.0 released

Posted Mar 4, 2012 12:59 UTC (Sun) by DG (subscriber, #16978) [Link] (1 responses)

PHP is maintainable - if you set about it in the right way using good software engineering practices - code style guidelines, unit tests, reviews, CI etc.

I'm not sure why you think PHP encourages copy+paste coding more than any other language. If it does, it's probably because of it's low barrier to entry which results in some less skilled/proficient people writing it.

PHP 5.4.0 released

Posted Mar 4, 2012 15:41 UTC (Sun) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link]

PHP is maintainable - if you set about it in the right way using good software engineering practices - code style guidelines, unit tests, reviews, CI etc.

Anything is maintainable if you're investing enough care and effort. People are maintaining large assembly language programs, after all. The real question is whether maintaining something in PHP or assembly language is worth the trouble when there are lots of other approaches that let you achieve the same level of maintainability with less effort (while probably also improving all sorts of other quality metrics to boot). In the case of assembly language, most people have figured out for themselves what they prefer, which is why there are much fewer large assembly language programs around than there used to be.

Having said that, PHP is great. It is the best thing since the invention of sliced bread. Everybody should be using PHP all the time. It would make us Django people look so much more competent and efficient by comparison.

PHP 5.4.0 released

Posted Mar 4, 2012 17:45 UTC (Sun) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link]

IME proper engineering is not harder to do in PHP than in other languages; and some things like, you know, serving web pages is actually easier. I have not worked with Python or Ruby frameworks though; only with Java frameworks which grow more byzantine by the year. But people are even suggesting Scala here, so I guess their tolerance for the bizarre must be quite high.

PHP 5.4.0 released

Posted Mar 4, 2012 16:26 UTC (Sun) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link] (2 responses)

About 1: PHP isn't easier than Python. And no, weak typing is *not* a good idea, ever. It only makes things easier that are trivial to begin with, in the best case you save a few casts here and there. On the other hand, it encourages people to write code that'll work just fine as long as the input is what the programmer expected it to be, and fail catastropically when it's not.

About 2: embedding Python (or Ruby or Perl) is trivial using modules such as Spyce. And of course, Python has had lambdas, closures and proper OOP for way longer than PHP.

About 3: there's no sensible reason for mixing up arrays with dictionaries, they're simply different things. That doesn't imply that one is harder to use than the other (as can be seen in Python).

So sorry, but I don't buy those arguments. IMO, PHP does nothing better than the alternatives I've listed, and you haven't proven otherwise.

PHP 5.4.0 released

Posted Mar 5, 2012 9:07 UTC (Mon) by ggiunta (guest, #30983) [Link] (1 responses)

And you have not proven in any way that "all the alternatives" you mentioned above are better than php, either - esp. Perl...

But to each its own, I guess

PHP 5.4.0 released

Posted Mar 5, 2012 12:40 UTC (Mon) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link]

> And you have not proven in any way that "all the alternatives" you mentioned above are better than php, either - esp. Perl...
Perl has had *everything* for years that is "new" in PHP 5.4. Same thing with the 5.3 release. Plus it has proper Unicode support which PHP lacks to this day.
Also, I am not the one who started this discussion by asserting random stuff like PHP being irreplaceable, Kit is the one who should explain why he things this is so.