[No PHPun Intended] A Brief History of Web Development
Yep, PHP is turning 30 this year! Wondering if "PHP is still relevant?" Ever since we have been hearing that PHP is dead. It was “dead” 10 years ago, 5 years ago, and “is dead” today. But somehow - it isn’t. Anyway... happy birthday!
PHP will remain alive as long Wordpress is still being used.
But let's not forget that the WordPress codebase is absolute dogshit.
And not an example of how to write proper modern PHP.
Let's be honest though. The early PHP versions were absolute dog shit. And the definition of how not to design a programming language. That said, that never stopped anyone in web development from using it apparently. No clue what modern PHP looks like, apparently it's better now.
Was not intended as programming language. The name literally stands for Hypertext PreProcessor. It was meant to be a script injector for HTML back when the internet was still fun.
Then it got out of hand and PHP didn’t evolve fast enough to be a web technology leader, but never ceded the position of old trusty workhorse, and still powers a significant part of websites.
I somewhat know the history of PHP and how it came to be. And that it was just a personal project that suddenly got big. So I don't blame the creator. But that still doesn't make it a good language.
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OOP programming in PHP is pretty fun, keeping up with it's deprecations and vulnerabilities is not
Modern PHP is better because it's modern. Which early version of a programming language was good? I've used a lot of them, and by modern standards, I think dog shit is a somewhat appropriate description for most of them.
It's one of a plethora of scripting languages from the '90s which were designed to be the antithesis of "fail fast" and kept going no matter what.
I guess what with C/C++ being the Mainstream Option at the time, not having to deal with a strict compiler must have felt like freedom. As someone who has had to maintain, cleanup and migrate ancient PHP code, I call it folly. That mindset of "let the programmer just do whatever and keep trucking" breeds awful programming practices and renders static analysis varying degrees of useless, which makes large-scale refactoring hard to automate which is just amazing when your major versions aren't even remotely FUCKING BACKWARDS COMPATIBLE.
PHP's original design is just fundamentally atrocious. It became popular in large part because unmaintainable code is usually someone else's problem.
A language that I would definitely use for server-side rendering and that was already good from its first stable release is Go. It was thoughtfully designed and lends itself really well to static analysis, while still being easy to write and decently performant.
It's been about 20 years since I've touched PHP. So i don't remember all the problems i had with it.
But some language from those times were at least consistent with itself and clearly more thought-out. Even though they might miss some of the nicety we've come to like nowadays. Of course for web development there weren't many better choices back then.
But I'm heavily skewed towards non-oo, static typed, explicit languages so PHP was probably never for me.
IMHO the killer feature was mod_php. Writing server-side website logic was stupid easy with that. I think if it weren't for that, php wouldn't have been nearly as popular.
I quit using it like 10 years ago, but I'm happy with what I did with it and got from it.
I've never heard of a programming language that people don't consider shit
When I was using Ruby (some Rails, but mostly Sinatra, for little web apps and api serving) Laravel was coming up in PHP shops. Which was just trying to be Rails running on PHP from what I could tell.
There were others before that, like CakePHP, but all I remember about that of all the bugs my coworkers dealt with. I was strictly a front end dev back then.
No clue what modern PHP looks like
Like worse C#.
In PHPs defense, it keeps evolving in positive, meaningful ways. If you are up to date with it, it’s quite sophisticated and enjoyable. Doubly so if you use a framework like Laravel.
Most memes or jokes referencing a direct problem in PHP, are old or made by people who haven't touched the language in a decade(version 7 was in 2015, and it removed/fixed a lot of issues and added needed features).
There's also the huge looming thing that a lot of programmers forget: Websites like Wikipedia run on PHP, not to mention the amount of WordPress and similar websites are out there. Which means it will keep going strong. And for a while Facebook also used quite a lot of it, to the point where they made a rudimentary compiler instead of rewriting parts in more efficient languanges.
Also, most of the websites are made with WordPress, which... take a guess, yes, it runs on PHP!
(even though WordPress is a bad example because it's written in a horrible and ancient way)
... or even Symfony.
I'm still confused why laravel is more popular. Symfony is so much nicer to use and maintain
PHP 8.4 is pretty good, TBH. You absolutely CAN write great code with modern PHP. ... Shame that most PHP I touch is legacy code that's at MOST PHP 7.4 - which is EOL since November '22 and has to be upgraded or replaced. 😬
Yeah last time I used it was with a laravel monolith and actually it wasn't that bad.
Yeah, if you add tons of extra rules and tools, it can become almost as pleasant as the main Python or Ruby experience.
Almost.
Where I live, I still see people in a horse-drawn wagon. So, I guess horse-drawn wagons never died? It's only used for tourists and weddings, but that counts, right?
According to Tiobe, PHP was the programming language of the year in 2004. In 2010 it was number 3 in the top 10 programming languages. It's now out of the top 10 entirely. There really isn't a language that has completely disappeared. Mainframes are still programmed using COBOL, Scientists are still using FORTRAN, even Lisp, which has been around since the 1950s, is still going strong.
Maybe Actionscript counts as truly dead, since it was tied to Adobe Flash, and Flash is truly dead?
I have a lot of bad memories of PHP. It was, for a brief time, the main language I used, but it was so ugly and inconsistent. The only thing I loved about it, at the time, was that it wasn't Visual Basic. As bad as PHP was, at least I wasn't making web pages in that pile of hot garbage. But, I never felt joy writing something in PHP. At best it was a slog. At worst it was like pulling teeth.
Just about every other language has given me moments of fun. Original Javascript was a mess, but it already contained scheme-like features. It was sold as being an interpreted version of Java, but it had features that Java wouldn't have for at least a decade. C is a brutal and unforgiving language, but as long as you're not working with strings, it's great to have such low-level control over everything.
Maybe PHP has evolved like other languages, but I still am not interested in trying it out. Everything it was good at can be done better by other languages, and those are languages that give me joy, not pain. I hope it keeps dropping in the rankings so that people aren't exposed to it as one of their first languages.
Yeah, I think this is a more fitting meme to be about Java, because despite all the java is dead articles it's still like one of the top most used language, if anything is a serious backend service it likely runs on Java.
Java is a better fit. It hasn't fallen in popularity the way PHP has. But, I'm not convinced that serious backend services mostly use Java. It's one of the languages used, sure. But, I don't know if it beats C/C++ or Go. Apache's C. Nginx is C. Kubernetes is Go. Docker is Go.
I think Java has a niche with certain kinds of business logic applications, and those are pretty common. I would guess that in a typical set of interactions with a Google product, or a Meta product, or an AWS product, some parts of the traffic will be handled by services written in Java. But, others will be C/C++ or Go. There will probably also be some parts of the process that are PHP or Ruby or Python, and a lot of Javascript.
There are still Amish and Mennonite communities who use horse-drawn wagons and farm implements their whole lives.
Not really meant to be an argument to your point, just interesting to know.
It's definitely cool to see when you get into Western Pennsylvania, for example.
Laravel brought life back to PHP for me. It's elegant. I feels like speaking.
And PHP 8 is light-years away from the garbage I grew up on.
I took a look and threw up in my mouth a little. That's not how backslashes should be used.
Instead of writing their frontend templates in PHP via Blade, many developers have begun to prefer to write their templates using React or Vue.
So... the only thing that PHP is really good for should be replaced by React or Vue Javascript / Typescript?
To each their own, but for me that's a no.
I wouldn’t even say that Flash is truly dead, thanks to emulators like Ruffle. You can still make a movie or game in Flash MX 2004, which is freely available now, and have it run in the browser. That said, last I looked (years ago) only AS2 was supported, so AS3 might be well and truly dead (rip my first language).
There really isn’t a language that has completely disappeared.
How about that shit where a "program" was a bunch of patch cables plugged into various sockets? That shit is gone, man.
my entire way of reasoning about programming languages changed when i read on article about how hating on php was misogynistic. i clicked on it because it just sounded like yet another ragebait, but it made sense.
basically, since php is simple, and integrated with html, the vast majority of php devs started out as designers who later got into code. since php has always been a mess, nobody wanted to build mainstream tooling for it except the people actively working with the language. this means that mainstream ideas about language and tooling design didn't percolate down to php like it has done to most languages. so php devs, when exposed to tooling the rest of the world takes for granted, are usually overwhelmed because not only is there a lot of it, nobody in php-land uses tools like that. so they get called bad devs of a bad language. some of them, who really like to code, push through this massive difficulty spike, while others just assume that "actual programming" is too hard and go back to design, even though tooling usage has little to do with your skill as a programmer.
the kicker, of course, being that web design has more women than most other dev specialisations.
Is disliking something that (allegedly) is more popular with women than the average thing of its category anti-woman, even if no part of the complaint involves the user or their gender? The majority of users is likely still male anyway.
not directly, but trash-talking it and gatekeeping "real programming" from the language most likely to be used by women is not exactly conducive to improved equality in the profession.
i realise now that i didn't explicitly mention my point in the first post, so:
When did PHP become more popular with women what is going on here lol
Is disliking something that (allegedly) is more popular with women than the average thing of its category anti-woman, even if no part of the complaint involves the user or their gender?
According to my sister-in-law, yes. I don't like Taylor Swift's music and apparently that makes me a misogynist.
In the start of my career I felt that there was a sentiment around web dev that it's not "real" programming in a way. Not sure if that's the case any more seeing as the majority of modern develoment is for web platforms.
I've never heard the idea that PHP is a language used by web designers who migrated to coding, but it kind of makes sense. How PHP works, where everything is just HTML until the <?php tag comes in, made it so attractive as a way to add some spice to static pages. I cut my teeth on PHP and moved on to other languages later, so it makes sense that it would function as a gateway drug of sorts, also resulting in it not getting the attention from seasoned experts that other languages benefit from.
Calling dislike of PHP misogynistic feels like a massive stretch.. but maybe it's not considering how the designer/programmer divide also has a massive gender disparity. PHP has its problems, tooling being just one side of it, and its nature as a designer-friendly language makes it easy for elitists to mask their bigotry behind "objective" arguments that PHP is bad.
i think the wording of the original article was intentionally inflammatory, but "the purpose of a system is what it does". if shit-talking php causes women to leave the profession, it doesn't really matter what the intent was.
The main issue with PHP is that it’s designed for a pre AJAX web. Before when there was a real distinction between backend and frontend. The idea with PHP is that the server code is responsible of generating HTML on the fly.
Server code generating HTML is icky in modern web development.
Server code generating HTML is icky in modern web development.
There's been a big uptick in interest around SSR lately, so maybe not.
What's actually icky is making a website an SPA, duplicating business logic in the back and front, when it could perfectly be served as a server side rendered HTML.
What absolutely no. Server side generated code is still king in the right hands. Why have client lift all of thay when server side html rendering basically costs nothing. Even strong js driven front end you can still add much through server side by providing proper hydration paths. Good devs take advantage of both worlds but server side is incredibly powerful today.
AJAX everything is icky. It's part of what's made browser tabs take more RAM than a typical desktop had in 1998.
I exercised all client side JavaScript from an app I maintain. It's fast, clean, and the back button always works. I just checked on one of the more complicated pages, and according to Firefox's memory profile, it takes about 2.6MB of RAM.
Where PHP really goes wrong is mixing HTML and code by default.
I believe the huge mistake in HTML wasn't having some sort of element-level addressability.
People went insane over "the page flashes for 15ms because we have to reload the header and footer and it doesn't look NAAATIVE!" and the response was to SPA/AJAX everything, inviting a huge Turing-complete nightmare of possibilities when 95% of what peopleneed would be delivered with < form action="blah" replace_with_response="#foo" >
That and a dearth of native widgets-- a < combobox > and a < menu > that worked like the system menus might have kept JavaScript as the sick oddity it should be.
I like prerendering :(
That tracks, without any background in coding php is very simple to get into. I'm not a woman, but as a personal anecdote I've never done anything outside some self-taught hobby-level web designing requiring html and js, and I only know some php because it's what was easiest to learn by myself to get the stuff I wanted done.
I've looked into actual programming languages a couple times, but I never get far since I don't need them for anything and all the tutorials start super boringly and won't tell about the possibilities you could potentially do; it's assumed you already know. With php I just knew what I needed and did some web searches and found the answers, and that kinda spiraled into leaning along the way. There's no way to do that if you don't even know where to start
Everyone in this thread: PHP sucks because it was bad when I last used it 20 years ago.
It's still bad nowadays, and it's the main language used on pretty much every system of several state level secretaries in Brazil. My colleagues work with it daily (I don't program, thankfully) and they're not exactly fond of it. Legacy systems, man
Backend devs: JS sucks because I never learned it actually
I mean it does suck, but it sucks less than anything else we have.
PHP is far from "least bad language". Nowadays it is an ok language, one of many. You can also write ok code in it. The main issue is that it's really easy to write horrible shit that just barely works and will break when you look at it wrong. In fact without a lot of knowledge and experience that is the code you will probably write.
There are much better languages for any webdev niche you can think of, and some that are just better for webdev overall (e.g. Elixir). The reason PHP is still relevant is mostly huge legacy codebases that require a lot of engineering power to maintain (because PHP is not a good language for maintenance).
The way I look at it is that PHP is the C++ of webdev (but slightly worse).
Dangit. That's me too, I just saw your comment before posting one myself 😅
Ah yes, the language that picked strlen as the hash function for its hashtables.
Javascript is living proof that your language doesn't need to be good to be used.
I tripped over this one in Delphi the other day.
undefined
function AnsiStartsText(const ASubText, AText: string): Boolean;
function AnsiEndsText(const ASubText, AText: string): Boolean;
function AnsiContainsText(const AText, ASubText: string): Boolean;
Too late to change it now
Can you elaborate on this?
Waaaaaaat
I also like T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM
PHP will never die. As long as code is written there will be PHP developers there to claim it's good now.
Just like COBOL
Happy 44th birthday IPv4! 🥳
this is perl erasure
also php didn't cause the internet to suck; overreliance on javascript (and js based frameworks) did. there's a reason that modern internet is so slow and clunky and it's not php. at least php has the capabibility to improve over time not degrade.
Well, at least PHP isn’t as bad as JSP.
Or TSP (trisodium phosphate) - which you can't even make websites with, but it's great for cleaning oil spots off the driveway.
I laughed pretty hard at this while also unexpectedly learning how to clean up a mess I made changing the oil in my car on a particularly windy day recently!
Well, now, that's useful, but we shouldn't fail to mention good ol HCl, muriatic acid colloquially for this purpose, also great for cleaning oil stains from a driveway!
jsp answered the question, "What if Java was like PHP but with more Java?"
jsp deserved to die.
We heard you liked garbage collection so we put garbage in your language.
Replaced the P in LAMP with Python when I started building webpages again a few years ago, and never looked back. Such a vastly more pleasant experience.
Python is a natural evolution for web development, especially once you're past the fundamentals. For someone with no scripting background, PHP is easier to approach. The syntax is more direct, and basic debugging doesn't require any setup. An error happened on x line is the default behavior.
Python's logging system can be tricky to configure properly if you're unfamiliar with the factory and error level handling. Those green people don't have any idea where to put the log or how to let the web server talk to it safely.
It's the little bs like refusing for years to include switch, then when they finally give, they just refuse to allow fallthrough. It's like they said, fine, but it's got to work slightly differently and we don't like the name... it feels childish.
All things considered, Python has a richer ecosystem and deeper long-term potential. But there's something to be said for how quickly a basic PHP site can be spun up and debugged with minimal knowledge with minimal friction. And that's why it's still around so much today.
I agree that PHP was easy to pick up, but I already knew several programming languages and was quickly shooting myself in the foot with the extremely overbuilt, redundant, and buggy builtin functions. At the time, though, it was either that or ASP, so I chose the lesser of two evils.
To segue, switch statements aren't inherently necessary for a mature programming language; I think that addition was partially to mollify the growing userbase (not a good reason), but on the other hand it's really just structured pattern matching wearing a hat that says "switch" on it ... though again, that's something which could fairly trivially be achieved with a list comprehension. It's not like you're getting the machine-code-level optimizations that a C compiler could churn out for a proper switch statement.
It's true that the fuckers that stayed in PHP now are getting paid insane amounts of money to maintain systems? I've heard they are the new cobol people.
I doubt that the pay is insane yet. There are a lot more PHP devs than COBOL devs. About half of the web still runs on PHP. It's true that COBOL runs about half of the financial world, but PHP is less than 30 years old whereas COBOL programs are relics from decades earlier, and generally only get updated minimally if the systems around them change.
Maybe 25 years ago i build my first website for a paying customer ( my dad). I decided to go for php which was new to me at the time.
I figured it would be too risky ( even back then) to have PHP generate dynamic pages so instead I had php generate static html.
So whenever website needed updating , for example a new folder with images was added, you could just load the admin.php and it would generate gallery pages for you.
Would probably still work 25 year later if wasn't eventually replaced with some WordPress or something
for many websites, this is the ideal way to do it
makes it order of magnitude more secure
And performant. And accessible. And compatible.
Array_filter and array_map having the arguments swapped pisses me of so much.!
This person phps
bro ive been doing fullstack js dev for severals years to then realize php is superior💀
W-what? Did you used js as backend? How was performance?
It's very rare that the backend language significantly affects performance. In 99% of apps you could have the most optimized backend written directly in machine language, and you'd just shave off milliseconds.
That's because in web development most of the latency comes from i/o (network requests, database access, file access), not from computation being slow.
Happens a lot - my (quite small) shop was using NestJS for backends and my boss is way more experienced and wise than me. I unintentionally caused us to switch over to Python, which probably sounds as silly as JS to many, but - we deliver dope shit, on time and on budget 🤷♂️
Thanks to web browser development, there has been quite a lot of focus/investment into JS runtime optimizations. Since the server-side runtime environments use those same JS engines, performance tends to be quite good.
From my experience as a user? Not great if you are using a popular app
The only reason php is still alive is Facebook
WordPress?
Well better late than never.
PHP forever.
It should be rewritten in rust, any way.
✍️ we need PHP interpreter written in Rust, noted
Yup! Every time we add a new technology, the old does not go away. We just have more (gestures wildly) everything.
When picking a career specialization, don't abandon all the old stuff. Some of it makes a lucrative career after others have moved on (HPC, COBOL, on-site servers).
Js is dead use php!
Magic quotes were the single biggest mistake I've ever seen any language standard make.
Those haven't existed in PHP anymore for a very long time.
ASP.net web forms were ahead of their time. I miss them every time I have to use modern js frontends.
Geez did they build that page with asp? Is janky-scroll a default setting?
The page scrolls normally for me.
Still broken as designed.
Last week I found the code for the first website I created, way back in the mid 90s. The server-side part was written in Perl.
php is too mainstream, give ruby a reason to exist.
ruby has so many better reasons to exist beyond that.
since v3 it performs just as well if not better than Python.
it has a well documented and lush library of gems that still work even if they are 15 years old.
ruby gets a lot of shit because everyone ties rails in, which has improved, but is still slow as shit compared to other orms.
yeah rails is literally the only thing giving ruby a bad name, it's terrible. Ruby is a beautiful, amazing language, and then people shit all over it because of Rails. I literally had someone complain that ruby is a horrible language, I asked them what they meant, they listed off all rails things, then I showed them the language and they were like "this isn't what I was using...".
in any case I think you really should only use ruby for very small scripts or programs. Nothing enterprisey at all.
Ruby is as dead as PHP.