A lot of people are too proud to be associated with PHP. I am ready to admit that know nothing about the language except that a lot of people make cool things with it.

My favourite PHP product at the moment is BookStack (https://www.bookstackapp.com/), a really good wiki. I run an instance for my family and it's great.

But there are loads of things. And I notice that many of the sites I like using...are built on well maintained PHP stacks.

▲ nusl 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

PHP is a very pleasant and straight-forward language to work with. I enjoyed my time working with it, though I did also see quite a lot of very poor code.

I think the danger with PHP is more its ability to easily cause *very bad things*.

This would partially be poor training (my University literally taught PHP with SQL-injectable examples), and I think the language itself making it very easy, such that less-experienced developers using it - most of them, early on - don't realise what's wrong until it's gone wrong.

With PHP being such an early tool online, and the above properties existing, it earned a reputation for being insecure and bad.

▲ Cthulhu_ 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

At least in my experience, the early years of PHP was lacking more enterprisey users; back then there was a small revolution when RoR came out and introduced the MVC pattern to a lot of (web) developers, who didn't have as opinionated a pattern / architecture up until then.

During that same period, there were a lot of mediocre tutorials and documentation online, including on the PHP website itself which allowed people in comments to post code examples, but as far as I know there wasn't a lot of moderation on those.

And finally, a lot of people ended up writing their own frameworks and the like, because they could. But also because there weren't any or not many good and widely adopted frameworks out there, that came later with first Zend Framework and then Laravel, the latter being the de-facto standard nowadays.

▲ ale42 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> I think the danger with PHP is more its ability to easily cause very bad things.

Is there any language where you can't?

▲ homebrewer 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It's like walking on minefields with very different "mine densities"; when using something stricter, you would have one mine per acre, with PHP you would have ten.

For the longest time the language had been developed with this mentality that it's okay to continue running if something broke, that it's better to print out something than to do nothing and bail out.

Which means that for things to run reliably, you have to write very defensive code that checks everything you can think of. Which is probably a good idea with any language, but I find that old PHP requires much more of this.

Thankfully, they've been changing that over the past decade while still maintaining decent compatibility with old code. I just recently finished porting a pretty large project (~2 mil SLoC) from the ten year old 5.6 to the currently latest 8.4, and it's been pretty painless. The only things that broke were those that were never actually properly implemented and worked by pure chance.

▲ jojobas 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Probably not, but not most languages are not inviting to do them.

▲ s1mplicissimus 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Give me an example where PHP invites developers to do terrible things and I'll show you 2 other popular languages that invite equally bad or worse things :)

Or as Bjarne Stroustrup put it: There's two types of languages: The ones people complain about and the ones noone uses

▲ greiskul 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The @ operator of php. In languages like Java, to silently catch all exceptions and do nothing with them requires at least some boiler plate.

PHP has an operator for something you should never do in a sane codebase.

You know that python wants good good to look good?

PHP was written in a way that makes bad code look good. And if we want Software Engineering to be a serious field that evolves, we have to be able to be honest with ourselves. It is a bad tool. Good programmers can even write good programs with bad tools. Doesn't mean you shouldn't avoid bad tools given the option.

There probably is a "PHP the good parts". But Javascript actually had a pretty nice core, and an utility of being in all web browsers that no other language could replicate. What niche does PHP have where it brings more value there other nicer languages can't be used instead?

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bawolff 17 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

> The @ operator of php. In languages like Java, to silently catch all exceptions and do nothing with them requires at least some boiler plate.

The @ operator doesn't get rid of exceptions it get rids of "warnings" which are basically built in log messages.

It used to get a bad wrap for also silencing fatal errors, but it stopped doing that a while ago.

The @ operator is something that should only be rarely used, but it is no way comparable to catching exceptions and doing nothing with them. There are sane uses for it.

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onli 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You absolutely can use @ in sane codebases. And you give the example yourself: In other languages you often enough see that boilerplate where thrown exception is discarded, because there is no sane reaction to some edge case and you just want the program to continue, because you know it will work anyway. And that's @.

Note though that @ was already neutered in some earlier recent PHP releases.

	▲	djxfade 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		This. One common use case for the @ operator, is when "destructuring" array members into variables. In some cases, you can't know if the member will be available, but it's not important if it's missing. In that case, you can silence the warning. $array = ['apple', 'pear']; @list($mainFruit, $secondaryFruit, $tertiaryFruit); Since I suppress the warning that would occur due to the third member not being present, the program will continue executing instead of halting.

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s1mplicissimus 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The claim was "PHP invites bad code" - but your point is for "bad code can be written in PHP" which is really not the same thing. A quick google for the @ brought up https://stackoverflow.com/questions/136899/suppress-error-wi... where the highest voted response is ~"NO, don't use it please". No use case I've come across during the past 10 years has required or even nudged me in the direction of @. It's an ancient relic that the whole community considers a no-no. I'd be curious if you really want to argue that this state of affairs "invites" using the @.

▲ Yokolos 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

You can do crazy things in every language. However, in a language like Java, the crazy things are more conceptual (factory for factory of factories) and not basic things like what does == mean or problems with weak typing and implicit conversions. A lot of the issues with PHP can be avoided in modern PHP using things like strict_types=1, but most of the time, we don't get to work with projects using best practices. And I'd rather work with a bad Java project than any bad PHP project (which I have had the misfortune of maintaining).

▲ babuskov 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Funny that you picked == as an example when == is very counter intuitive in Java and is one of the common pitfalls for beginners:

    String a = new String();
    String b = new String();
    a = "test";
    b = a + "";
    
    if (a == "test")
    {
        // true
    }

    if (b == "test")
    {
        // false
    }

    if (a == b)
    {
        // false
    }

Just like PHP, you have to read the docs to use it properly.

	▲	philipallstar 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		This is a decade-old PHP defence fallacy. No one says other languages have no problems, so "disproving" that is the fallacy. PHP just has far more problems and footguns. Maybe now it has fewer, but still. Far more.
	▲	3 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		[deleted]
	▲	Yokolos 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		So you're going to ignore the rest of what I wrote? I'll just assume you agree with me and the rest of my comment, but you don't want to admit it. Works for me.

▲ etothet 23 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I’ve made my living amd career off of PHP and I enjoy its modernization.

Coding in PHP can be a lot like playing the guitar or writing poetry: many people can do it, but it’s easy to do very badly.

▲ rob74 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I'd take PHP instead of JS/TS + framework-of-the-day on the backend anytime. Ok, PHP is usually also paired with a framework (cough Laravel cough), but at least there the situation is more stable, not to mention more mature. Unfortunately, I'm not the only one making the decisions...

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kijin 3 hours ago | parent [-]

PHP is a reasonable choice if you care about writing something that will still work out of the box 10 years from now.

But of course this assumes that you work with a team that can see a year ahead, let alone 10.

	▲	dgb23 17 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		PHP has introduced breaking changes, deprecations etc. in a somewhat rapid fashion. PHP doesn't prioritize stability, but language features and cleanup. It's an impressive technical endeavor that has its merits, but comes with a tradeoff. Within the last 10 years, the language itself broke twice. And that's not counting the ecosystem on top of it. Common frameworks, libraries etc. tend to break relatively often as well. There are languages that are _much_ more stable and reliable than that.

▲ ThatMedicIsASpy 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

https://github.com/AzuraCast/AzuraCast

AzuraCast because I like learning by looking at code and hosting my own radio/music

▲ bawolff 24 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> My favourite PHP product at the moment is BookStack (https://www.bookstackapp.com/), a really good wiki.

Another wiki that uses php is Wikipedia.

People like to shit on php but it powers some of the largest sites in the world.

At the end of the day, programming language doesn't matter much. You can be a good programmer in any language and a bad programmer in any language.

▲ nake89 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> A lot of people are too proud to be associated with PHP.

How so?

	▲	type0 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Vanity, it's "PersonalHomePage" language