[customguy]

> People seem to shy away from criticism.

What actual criticism of PHP is anyone shying away from?

PHP got bashed for such a long time, while simply nothing steps up to do what it does better. Something that, for example, is available on every webhost you can just throw files at, where all (meaningful) config and state can be in those files.

[xp84]

I used to really love the dead-simple ease PHP brought to server-side dynamic web stuff too. But when shared cpanel type hosting was orders of magnitude cheaper than anything else, that was a way bigger deal. Today you can deploy a node.js app (all the same “just a script” advantages of PHP) to a half dozen places for free, and for the next step up, a smallish instance at Hetzner, DigitalOcean or whatever, where you can just run any arbitrary container, costs less than those shared hosting once did.

Why do I bring up containers? Because part of why PHP was so dope in this way was the way you can just define 1 file per endpoint and drop it in public_html, and have no server setup to do. Running say, Rails or ASP.NET or a Java site back then meant doing… a lot more, to your server.

But with Docker, you can just steal a good Dockerfile template from someone else, and it’s just like 3-4 simple files for you to manage for a simple Sinatra (Ruby) or node.js version of the “one-off PHP file” things.

[customguy]

But I don't want to manage 3-4 files, I want to manage zero files. I don't want half a dozen hosts, I want hundreds of thousands. It's not about costs, I really mean the simplicity and pervasiveness. PHP apps that are simple (in that they don't require any "rare" modules to be enabled) can easily be written to not run in relative folder structures, you can move them around like .exe files if you will. Not "like moving an exe file and then just updating a few lines in this file over there", that is a completely different thing for me.

edit: Granted, I agree that if you want to do all sorts of things on the internet, maybe PHP is not the right choice. But for simple, dynamic web things that I want to just make and then run like this forever, that I can work on but don't have to? PHP and vanilla HTML and Javascript are where it's at for me, hands down. Everything else I know is either too new or seems to have constant churn or issues. That you hear nothing about PHP other than complaining it's "outdated" or whatever from the outside -- always "why are you using this?" never "why oh why am I using this?" -- is because it just hums along, IMO. I like it better than Python, and I kinda view it as in that class.

[mschuster91]

> Today you can deploy a node.js app (all the same “just a script” advantages of PHP)

You still need to build a router and a web server in said nodejs script. And manage everything, including taking care that requests don't accidentally mutate global state.

PHP in contrast is stateless. Way less bs to take care about.

[Pay08]

I've always thought that the core idea of PHP, the intermixing of code and HTML is an incredibly elegant solution to a very difficult problem. But at the same time, the language itself does suck (although I won't discount the improvements it has made). I would really love for there to be an entirely reimagined PHP from the ground up, and to hell with backwards compatibility or availability.

[customguy]

> I would really love for there to be an entirely reimagined PHP from the ground up, and to hell with backwards compatibility or availability.

I'm halfway onboard :) That is, personally I do like that PHP is kinda "boring", it's just a programming language that mostly looks like other curly brace languages that can basically do anything I ever need to do with strings out of the box. And I like that PHP, while also adopting more advanced programming concepts, stays nice with all the simple stuff. I like the stewardship, you might say, although I don't pay any attention to it. New PHP versions always either have things I don't understand, don't care about, or really like. The performance goes steadily into the correct direction, too.

I'm sure people who know more about programming and the version history will disagree about something, but for my "low-tech" usage, it's actually one of the few happy places of computing. Not happy as in exciting, more like working in a modeset garden, without stuff blowing up constantly, and salesmen posing as flowers.

But I still would love to see and try out "takes" on that, or on what other people like about it. At least to start with, I guess it would just need to be be somewhat painless to use with with Apache, NGINX, or come with a webserver built-in. Then people can use that locally and on servers they fully control, and if it's really good, and really good with resources, basically a painless additional thing to add, web hosts might adopt it etc.

[krapp]

There was. It was called Hack[0]. Among other things it had XHP built in so you could write HTML natively (as opposed to concatenating strings) and define your own templates easily[0]. It even handled escaping. It really improved on a ton of PHP's flaws.

Unfortunately newer versions of PHP killed it and it's dead now, and even more unfortunately while PHP absorbed a lot of features from Hack, native XML was not one of them. There was even going to be a Hack version of the Composer package manager but that never got finished AFAIK. Distros stopped supporting it. I think I still have my half-finished attempt at a Hacker News fork in Hack sitting around on a hard drive somewhere. I can't even find an environment to run it in anymore.

[0]https://docs.hhvm.com/hack-overview/

[1]https://docs.hhvm.com/hack/XHP/introduction/

[chuckadams]

XHP was a modified PHP before Hack came about, but only Hack supports it now. XHP did have a longer reach though: JSX is its direct descendant.

[krapp]

Making it an extension rather than default was a mistake on PHP's part. 99% of PHP is being run on shared servers and most people cant recompile it, and most of the rest just won't.

Having a language whose entire purpose is to be a templating language for HTML have no concept of what HTML is, is just ridiculous. You have to use a templating framework that rolls its own ad-hoc DSL and parser to manage context just to make PHP do what it should be able to do safely and sanely out of the box.

It doesn't matter now, since "web dev" is whatever JS vibe-coded nonsense Claude shits out and no one cares anymore, but ye gods it could have been so much better.

[chuckadams]

It was never any kind of official extension, it was an outright fork of PHP (it changed the grammar) and FB never really attempted to push it to core, or really engage with PHP's core dev process in any way. PHP came about in the era of server-side includes, and expecting it to have grokked the DOM structure out of the box is just hindsight.

Anyway, I don't even think about server-side rendering anymore, and for the last few days have had Claude "shitting out" Vue components that replace legacy Bootstrap 3 components with html5 alternatives for my PHP app to use via Inertia.js. The axe-grinding is not helpful to either of us.

[krapp]

> PHP came about in the era of server-side includes, and expecting it to have grokked the DOM structure out of the box is just hindsight.

Obviously not from the beginning. But by the time template frameworks like Twig came around it should have been possible. If it can be done at runtime it's possible to build into the language proper. And I'm specifically talking about the time when PHP 7 started taking other features from Hack.

I'm not grinding an axe here, i'm just stating an opinion.

[hparadiz]

Lol to true. Who even uses twig or smarty anymore hesitantly raises hand