[HN Gopher] Taking PHP Seriously (2016)
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Taking PHP Seriously (2016)
Author : ziodave
Score : 65 points
Date : 2020-12-02 21:06 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (slack.engineering)
(TXT) w3m dump (slack.engineering)
| blibble wrote:
| how's PHP's websocket support?
|
| presumably if it's a thread per websocket then they're using
| something else to serve that?
| TazeTSchnitzel wrote:
| There isn't direct support for WebSocket in PHP like there is
| for HTTP requests. But there are WebSocket servers written in
| PHP that work in a similar way to node.js.
| latenightcoding wrote:
| Somewhat unrelated comment, but the fact that PHP got so good and
| most people are still not willing to give it a second chance goes
| to show how hard it is for a language to regain market share
| after people left for greener pastures.
| pvg wrote:
| Forum share, maybe, but it's been and remains an extremely
| popular language.
| andreygrehov wrote:
| Given PHP 8 has been released, does Hack provide enough value to
| consider it as an alternative? My take on it is no, but I'm
| curious about other people's opinions.
| mgkimsal wrote:
| only played around with it briefly a few years ago. my view is
| "probably not unless you've already used it, or have knowledge
| of some specific PHP issue you know you're going to need that
| Hack provides". I think 4-5 years ago, there was a point where
| Hack might have been able to grow out of niche status, but I
| think that time's passed, with the growing community around
| 'modern' PHP and the ecosystem provided via composer and
| frameworks.
| munk-a wrote:
| It is good to keep in mind that this article is more than four
| years old. I would advise against Hack at this point since
| _most_ of the good bits have been integrated into the main PHP
| release - typing is a lot more predictable and enforceable for
| instance.
| andreygrehov wrote:
| Oh boi, my apologize, I missed the "Written 4 years ago"
| part. Good call. Thank you.
| [deleted]
| say_it_as_it_is wrote:
| I thought Slack was running on Perl CGI..
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| paxys wrote:
| The best language for a startup is one the founders know the
| best. Every other discussion will at best make a 1% difference.
| twelvechairs wrote:
| Or the language of any libraries that are useful to build on
| munk-a wrote:
| Close I think - the best language to use is the one you will
| have the easiest time hiring good talent for. If you found a
| startup and all really love and are fluent in COBOL that's
| great but... good luck when it comes time to hire another
| employee.
| nullsense wrote:
| That's making a bold assumption you get as far as hiring.
| paxys wrote:
| If you have a good product new engineers will learn whatever
| language it is in. This very article is a perfect example.
| I'm sure Slack isn't hiring kids out of college with
| extensive PHP experience.
| fiddlerwoaroof wrote:
| This is strange to me because I've taken and succeeded at two
| positions now where I didn't know the language going in.
| polote wrote:
| at best 1% and most of the time -50%
| ransom1538 wrote:
| Fist bump.
| pqb wrote:
| Discussed previously:
|
| * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12703751
|
| * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15262981
|
| PS. Would you mind adding a [2016] in the title? It will show
| readers it is needed to take a historic context to understand the
| article correctly.
| aussieguy1234 wrote:
| This was written 4 years ago. Since then, PHP7 and PHP8 have
| incorporated many of the benefits of HHVM.
| okareaman wrote:
| Thanks for pointing this out. I read this article as "PHP is
| bad, use Hack instead"
| ransom1538 wrote:
| Long live PHP.
|
| 15 years of PHP dev work. Games, mobile apps, health care, etc. I
| have been unemployed for 2 days in 15 years. PHP runs %80 of the
| internet. Talk to anyone at facebook that wears a suit on friday
| -- they code PHP (and very well i might add). I think I will be
| 90 years old hacking on PHP.If you really don't like how the
| arguments are passed just use an IDE. Or get stuck with real
| problems like python (urllib3/urllib2) wtf.
| okareaman wrote:
| I've used a lot of PHP in my life and now feel Go is better
| suited for my needs. My gut tells me Go libs are written by
| professionals, while there is a ton of PHP code written by
| amateurs to contend with. I'll know more once I get further into
| Go.
| hu3 wrote:
| Do they still create new backend code mainly in PHP or have they
| also adopted other languages for new code?
| apeace wrote:
| So the entire argument is that PHP is single threaded and each
| request starts with no state? Am I missing anything else?
|
| I'm trying so hard not to rant here, so I just wanted to confirm
| that those are the only positives he outlines about the language.
| recursivedoubts wrote:
| FTA: _" I claim that PHP's simpler "think; edit; reload the
| page" cycle makes developers more productive._
|
| I agree wholeheartedly with this. I prefer statically-typed
| languages w/ a bit of local inference (I end up in java
| usually, but C# got it right) and I consistently see people in
| my world underestimate the edit/reload workflow. Even a small
| compilation step is enough to break flow and make development a
| chore, once you've worked that way.
|
| As a side note: java not allowing signature changes and
| requiring a whole server restart is absolutely awful. It didn't
| have to be this way: the DCEVM[1] was presented at the 2009 JVM
| Language Summit[2], by Thomas Wuerthinger. He patiently
| demonstrated and explained how his work allowed for hot swap of
| arbitrary class changes, while the Sun guys sitting in the
| audience told him that what he was demonstrating was
| impossible. We ended up using the DCEVM for a long time, but as
| of right now I'm back to restarting my server when I make
| breaking changes. It's a funny world.
|
| -\\_(tsu)_/-
|
| [1] - This is a modern fork of the project:
| https://dcevm.github.io/
|
| [2] - http://wiki.jvmlangsummit.com/Hotswap
| apeace wrote:
| It's hard for me to relate, because I just don't see "edit;
| reload" as being that important.
|
| I think the difference is I write tests. I usually code
| everything while writing/running tests. Then it always works
| the first time I run it, so there's no need for "edit;
| reload".
| recursivedoubts wrote:
| Oh, you were asking about benefits that you can easily
| relate to.
|
| Well, in that case then you'd be in a much better position
| to answer than I am.
| munk-a wrote:
| I really like working in PHP but I'd actually agree that
| edit;reload is a virtue of the language (in the environment
| everyone normally assumes it's running in) that is losing
| value.
|
| This virtue was incredibly valuable to me when I was
| throwing a website together with ducttape and bubble gum
| and it was the only way (that I knew of) to be able to
| clearly and quickly see the results of my changes. With
| tests in the picture I think it loses a lot of that value -
| it still has some since nobody likes writing front-end
| tests but most of your code changes should be "proven" by
| some level of automated test coverage.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _I'm trying so hard not to rant here_
|
| Not that hard, there's a bias showing.
|
| First, those things you've mentioned are nothing to sneer at,
| are actual very good decisions (even if accidental) for a
| webserver-centric language.
|
| They enable even naive developers to achive good scalability
| and isolation, and make fast development/debug cycles trivial.
|
| Second, PHP has been improved by leaps and bounds from the days
| of 4, to the point of being a totally different language - all
| of the above points are already made in TFA.
|
| Most arguments against it are moot today, or only apply
| superficially to the standard library, not the language (order
| of arguments, and so on).
|
| Plus, it is speedy too, post 6, and especially post 7 (and
| there's a whole new JIT in 8). In any case, it has constant
| work on speed and memory reduction.
|
| And of course it has a huge ecosystem of libs, projects, and
| frameworks, including not available anywhere else projects like
| Wordpress.
|
| And the standard library (warts included) between JSON, DB
| drivers, LDAP support, SMTP, etc., is one of the most complete
| ones this side of Python, and perhaps even fitter than Python's
| for typical web development work.
|
| Plus the deployment model is one of the best. Copy your files
| to a directory. Done. Add a redirect instruction to your server
| if you want to make it more fancy...
|
| For third party libs, composer is up there with any major
| package dependency/install solution.
|
| And for the core libs, plugins, etc installation is handled
| perfectly by the standard package managers in all Linux distros
| (and probably Windows too), and is even easier with MAMP, WAMP,
| etc for local development. Trivial to dockerize too if that's
| your thing.
| throw_m239339 wrote:
| > PHP has been improved by leaps and bounds from the days of
| 4, to the point of being a totally different language.
|
| No, most of bad parts are still here, all the stdlib
| inconsistancies and co are still here. Just because add more
| functions to a language doesn't change the bad design
| decisions at its core. The weird mix between dynamic typing
| and Java style rigidity (without most of its benefits) didn't
| go away.
|
| What makes it a different language since PHP 5? more type
| guards? no, it's still a templating language.
| munk-a wrote:
| Those strange naming choices definitely still have a cost
| but a lot of effort has been invested in documentation and
| alternatives to lessen their cost.
|
| The mixed typing is... honestly, it's amazing. You really
| need to try it out for yourself in PHP7 or 8 - you can lean
| on really strict type checking in your application, go the
| old route or generally adhere to strict typing and relax
| that for entry points and library calls.
|
| Lastly, PHP has come down hard and actually introduced
| backwards compatibility in a few key places to address some
| of the biggest WATs, I've been pretty impressed by the
| balance of the language stewardship.
|
| It does definitely have warts, but there are warts on
| everything that people actually use in industry.
| zug_zug wrote:
| IMO it's such a good thing about PHP that I think other stacks
| should follow that model (I assume ROR does).
|
| I think it's a superior model to the long-running application.
| Unless your company has 0 developers in it who make a memory
| leak, or make a fatal uncaught exception.
| fuzzy2 wrote:
| Hm. This is this and that is that. It is perfectly possible
| to write a stateless service hosted in a stateful process.
|
| In fact, the popular PHP-FPM way to host PHP does just that.
|
| If you want to take it to the extreme, there's always CGI, of
| course.
| pentium166 wrote:
| Ruby on Rails lives inside a long-running application server.
| In development, it has dynamic class loading and will reload
| on file changes, but in production an app can have a lengthy
| startup time. It does have the memory problem, but I have
| never seen the server crash outright as a result of an
| exception while handling a request.
| glaucon wrote:
| You might have missed this bit - "Did Facebook, Wikipedia,
| WordPress, Etsy, Baidu, Box, and more recently Slack all
| succeed in spite of using PHP?"
| IshKebab wrote:
| They didn't provide any real arguments that the answer is
| anything other than "yes".
|
| Plenty of languages have support for hot reloading, which
| means you can just edit, save, refresh exactly the same as in
| PHP, with the added benefit of not having to use PHP.
| nickthemagicman wrote:
| PHP after 5 is great. I guess from PHP 7 on things changed pretty
| significantly.
|
| Combine it with Laravel and nginx, and you've got an enjoyable
| stack in my opinion.
| Superfrag wrote:
| "For instance, 123 == "123foo" evaluates to true (see what it's
| doing there?), but 0123 == "0123foo" is false (hmm)."
|
| Can anyone explain this to me? I know if a string starts with the
| number, PHP takes the number part and throws the rest, so
| "0123foo" should be 0123 for the comparison, so why is that
| false?
| tsm wrote:
| Edit: I was wrong. 0123 is octal, not decimal
|
| [Incorrect original post: 0123 evaluates to the integer value
| 123]
| [deleted]
| mam2 wrote:
| So ?
| bugfix wrote:
| 0123 (octal) != 123 (int)
| civilized wrote:
| But the integer part of the string "0123foo" is also 123
| munk-a wrote:
| Not quite - 0123 is the octal value 123 which happens to be
| 83 in decimal. Numbers starting with a 0 in PHP are assumed
| to be in octal but I this isn't the case for strings[1] - to
| add to confusion "123foo" == 123 => true but "0123foo" = 0123
| => false.
|
| 1. https://3v4l.org/hAoL2
| [deleted]
| ed25519FUUU wrote:
| > _Slack uses PHP for most of its server-side application logic,
| which is an unusual choice these days. Why did we choose to build
| a new project in this language? Should you?_
|
| We already know the painfully obvious answer to this question
| even if it's not listed in the "reasons": because the technology
| decision makers were comfortable with PHP and they _wanted_ to
| use it.
| mgkimsal wrote:
| is this terribly different from many other choices made by
| other companies?
|
| "Whew... we're all totally psyched with node, and all have
| experience with it, know how to solve problems with it... but
| we're going to commit to Django. We don't _want_ to, but we 're
| going to."
|
| Does that exchange ever happen? I've seen the opposite - almost
| every tech stack I've seen at small and medium sized companies
| was primarily the result of the few decision makers who had
| experiences (good or bad) with specific tech which influenced
| their decision to use X.
| asamarin wrote:
| Article written in 2016, mind you
| zapt02 wrote:
| A bit sad that despite Slack being (or being built) on top of
| PHP, there is still no official PHP SDK four years later.
| rabuse wrote:
| This seems to be an unpopular opinion in the tech world, but I
| honestly enjoy working with PHP. It's such a simple, robust
| language, and you can use it in many different ways, depending on
| what you're building (OOP, scripting, microservices, etc).
| mgkimsal wrote:
| I'm with you. 10 years ago I was doing moderate 'shell
| scripting' type stuff in PHP - if I needed to scan a dir, parse
| some files, etc. PHP seems usually far more useful than trying
| to shoehorn the problem in to bash. And... writing shell
| scripts in Java ain't ever going to be a thing.
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