[trhway]

seems the article ends up with what was first done decades ago in PHP - separation of presentation and business logic. Btw i don't understand all this animosity toward PHP, especially given that pretty much all the modern web development is basically PHP-like, in spirit if not in actual implementation.

[vorpalhex]

> i don't understand all this animosity toward PHP

Most PHP code is terrible. That's not really PHPs fault - it's capable of producing very nice programs with beautiful behavior.

As a language, it suffers a bit from being older and it was internally very inconsistent for a long time. For a long while, it's package management and practices were way behind the curve. Many people who program in PHP learned it as a first language, hacked together programs in it, and probably used hack together libraries and tooling.

PHP can be used with grace, but most people don't have that experience with it.

[farrisbris]

> Many people who program in PHP learned it as a first language, hacked together programs in it, and probably used hack together libraries and tooling.

This describes me very well, and i don't think i'm alone. When i look back at my(very early, first language) PHP code it looks horrible. A lot of it is just copy pasted code from random websites telling me that that it does what i wanted it to. Which is a pretty good description of me at a young age trying/learning to program by internet. I don't use PHP today, and i really don't want to, but i suspect that is in some part due to me struggling with stuff i never understood when i was doing it and developing a distaste for it looking back at my bad code from that time without realizing it could be done differently/in a way fairly close to what i do in my current work-language. I just wanted to make my WoW dkp page work and searched the internet when wondering how to and ended up writing really bad code. It still worked pretty good and i had fun doing it but i never considered writing PHP again once i moved on.

[yani]

For what use case is PHP better than other languages?

[jstewartmobile]

Rapid development of performant get/post web interfaces. Ruby is nice but runs a lot slower. Python is better in a general-purpose sense, but every file will have a preamble of includes for things that are just built-in to PHP.

As a general purpose language, PHP is weak. As a web-form DSL, it's great!

[icedchai]

Most PHP is actually the opposite... Many PHP scripts, especially those from decades ago, are a mix of HTML, database calls, and business logic all in the same file.

[flukus]

And now we have JSX and this is considered good again.

[jstewartmobile]

Jumble code and markup together in PHP, and you've only got one language to put on your resume.

Jumble code and markup together in JSX, then you can put JavaScript, ECMAScript, React/Vue, npm, node.js, babel, and possibly webpack on it.

[kevincennis]

Can you explain what you mean by "pretty much all the modern web development is basically PHP-like"?

I'm not necessarily disagreeing. I just don't really get what you mean by that.

[yani]

Just give yourself time to write and maintain PHP code for over one year and you will find the answer. PHP does not have a debugger nor a test runner nor a profiler built in. Someone will say use xdebug and phpunit and etc.. well I want tools that ship with the language and are not slow like phpunit...