Who on this thread was saying what's old is new? 100% of what you said has also been lobbed at PHP recently and I've heard similar complaint about PERL and MS-SQL (that I remember well) and I'm sure others (one of those Delphi product too)
Thanks for the correction. Sometimes new things feel like they've been around for an eternity ;-)
I absolutely agree with you, that's basically why I wrote the comment. Just looking at their PHP code, you can sometimes see very clearly in what language people were thinking at the time. Some people try to emulate Java, JavaScript, even C or C++ sometimes. It's always horrible.
Is that new? I don't remember it from my php days. Although I'll freely admit those days were a long long time ago so "new" for me may actually be pretty old.
I have a hard time thinking of PHP as "old". :) C is old. FORTRAN is old. And I'd argue that PHP's terrible reputation isn't because it's old, but rather because it's primitive. It has all sorts of nasty coupling between layers, and encourages bad programming habits. On the other hand, something like 75% of the world's websites run on it, so it can't be that hard to find PHP programmers.
The article compares PHP now to PHP in the past. But programmers should not do this, they should compare PHP to other languages and their ecosystems, and conclude that it is not fit for a greenfield project.
The new libs'n'tools are nice; good to see them showcased. But the bottom line for any developer should be to avoid it --like Perl-- for any from-scratch code. This is a legacy language now.
Yeah, that's why I said "I think ..". Your statements were in the tone of stating facts, hence my rebuttal.
Anyway, I think your dismissal of the newer languages is very premature. PHP took a long, long time to get where it is. 10 years ago you would have been saying "Perl has WON!!!"
The funny thing about #4 is that php has been making a lot of progress on that exact front. Register globals has not only been deprecated but removed. Mysqli is now the default means of talking to dbs. Meanwhile, you see very fundamentally similar issues in, say, rails not getting the attention they deserve because everyone assumes rails is well engineered.
I don't mean to defend php overly much. However, it can't be ignored that progress is being made at making php better.
The point isn't that those choices are older and therefore worse, it's that there are now more choices. They should be able to say why they went with PHP over something else that was available at the time they started.
I’m sorry, but you’re 5 to 10 years behind the times, and I say that as a non-bandwagon-jumping old guy. Plain PHP these days is almost always a mistake, there are new (and proven, stable) tools that provide significant benefits without any real downsides.
This pretty much applies to many other languages too. As new constructs get added but old ones are not deprecated or even removed.
Then again, removing language constructs is a sure-fire way not to get any adoption of the new version (cf. Python 3).
In my case, it's not old Perl idioms that stick around, it's old PHP idioms. Like Perl, PHP too has moved forward, especially with 5.3. But because the old code continues to work ad-infinitum (how many years did it take for PHP 4 to die? Right. It's still alive, even though most PHP4 code runs unaltered in PHP5), nobody is taking advantage of the new features.
While I can understand this in public projects (you want to be as broadly compatible as possible), for private projects, I certainly would want to use the latest and greatest as it helps both keeping the code clean and future-proof it.
Here in the office, we've introduced the concept of a raptor incident (http://xkcd.com/292/). We use this to denote old idioms being used and general lazyness-related code smells.
We are counting the raptor free days and whoever causes a raptor incident will get the the accumulated stack of post-its with incrementing numbers counting the raptor-free days.
It already helped tremendously at keeping people concerned about their output.
Actually, I think it's very clear there were just a lot of bad dev practices happening across the different technologies. Classic ASP on Impact Data, PHP on the main Billabong site and current day .NET on the store. Clearly bad things were done on all.
However, some of those basic injection flaws in classic ASP would not have been possible on a more modern technology stack be that from Microsoft or other. A 5 year old version of PHP also isn't going to do you any favours. Newer frameworks are simply better at saving you from yourself - but that doesn't excuse the sloppy practices.
Because a lot of devs where marketing against PHP the last decade or so. To be fair, PHP 7 and 8 are really changing the game, it isn't the same language it was a decade ago.
Amen. Look back 10 years ago and we were having the exact same discussions about mod_perl, php, and java servlets. Nothing has really changed except perhaps for an increase in the number of regurgitated comparisons.
It really pains me that there are so many utter misunderstandings about modern PHP from people that used it years ago and have no clue about the current landscape, even in this thread.
Yes, the PHP core api is still a bit messy due to backward compatibility, but everything else it pretty awesome really. Please take a closer look if you haven't touched PHP in years, before you talk it down.
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