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by ChrisMarshallNY 2159 days ago
PHP is a very robust, debugged, proven, workhorse language, with millions of pages of documentation, tens (probably hundreds) of thousands of seasoned developers, huge libraries and communities of support, decades of experience, strong, universal, server support, and is used on a lot of "big pipe" servers.

Like C++, it's not going anywhere, anytime soon; despite all the kvetching about it.

That said, I don't especially like the language, but I knew that I needed to use it, if I wanted to design an infrastructure system that I could throw over the wall to be taken over by a bunch of other people.

I was right.

There's that old urban myth about the fancy space pen, vs. the pencil.[0]

[0] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-n...
1 comments
cutler 2159 days ago
In many ways I preferred PHP4. Can't stand all the pseudo-Java in PHP5+.
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spoopyskelly 2158 days ago
You can still (mostly) code in PHP4 style and ignore all the new cruft and syntactic sugar they added over the years. And you get the performance boost of 7.x for "free".
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cutler 2158 days ago
Yes, I suppose what really worries me about the "Modern PHP" movement how it looks down on anything that isn't Java-style OO. Procedural PHP is now considered to be some kind of unwashed Cinderella. I cringe when I look at a typical PSR-compliant page of PHP with its K&R braces, blank lines between each line of code and fanfold doc comments. You're lucky if you get more than a handful of lines of business logic on a screen.
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ChrisMarshallNY 2158 days ago
I never learned Java until late in my career (when I learned up on Android). I started as an EE, and my programming has been primarily self-taught.

PHP is a kind of crappy OO language, but it is sufficient. I think Java is a better language, for OO. PHP 7+ is lot better than it was, before 5.

A lot of Java programmers came out of school, and started to create PHP chimeras. I feel as if that results in unnecessarily complex code. Things are complex enough, without applying UI-style MVC to server backend systems.

I wrote PHP for around twenty years, starting off procedural and mixed into HTML pages, to OO-based pure PHP systems.

I stopped a couple of years ago. This was my final PHP project[0][1]. It was sort of a "dissertation." No one is actually interested in using it, but it was developed in order to practice my architectural skills. It's a pretty intense system.

[0] https://riftvalleysoftware.com/work/open-source-projects/#ba...

[1] https://github.com/RiftValleySoftware/basalt/tree/master

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