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by Pesthuf 648 days ago
JS has done the impossible: It made me kinda appreciate PHP. I still despise PHP for its many design (it wasn't actually designed, it just happened) failures, but I've yet to see an application running on a single server with PHP, Apache and MariaDB run slower than "modern" JS slop that needs half a cluster to run the dozens of random object DBs and caches JS devs insist on using prematurely where the application takes 20 seconds to load a simple page because the fully decoupled frontend needs to load and execute 500MB of JavaScript and that JavaScript then loads the data in 50 sequential XHRs because the API dev found a "loadAll" endpoint to be premature optimization.

...I envy TypeScript, though. I wish PHPDoc was more powerful... I just want ADTs.
2 comments
duskwuff 648 days ago
> ...I envy TypeScript, though. I wish PHPDoc was more powerful... I just want ADTs.

You can get a lot of the way there with static analyzers like Psalm (psalm.dev). Annotate your functions/classes with detailed types in PHPDoc, and it'll verify that your code behaves consistently with those types.

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Krei-se 647 days ago
Haha, thanks so much for this level-headed reply. PHP is really great to speed up your backend while not resorting to low-level c or rust. And many people will be able to read the code.

I had some modern "AI"-frontend that slowed my browser down to a crawl because i wanted to click a button. Vanilla Typescript and a bundler is enough overhead for me, most dynamic comes from fetched xml - i don't need a framework for that.

Typescript makes a lot of fun because it forces you to use clean interfaces and think about your design decisions - you cannot "write down" code like in PHP and i think that's great, but for a backend i will still resort to a database / shell env with php and some transformations and call it a day. It starts in 50ms and my TS-bundle is 500KB. That's ok i guess. The functionality is on par with modern pages hurling megabytes of code in my browser and taking ages and lots of promises to respond.

No wonder they all need kubernetes ....

I tried to befriend frontend-frameworks like React but the moment i saw i had to use hacks just to handle empty arrays i stopped reading and resort to write my own stuff for the frontend use case.

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