PHP has matured and has been a nice language for a decade now. But PHP developers havent. Cargo culting “good practice” and lack of creativity plagues the community. Frameworks have become so heavy that you spend more time configuring them than actually adding value. Oh and some still argue over setters and getters.
My experience is that if I join a team of PHP developers, there is a 40% chance of the team being professionals and writing good maintainable code. With Java, .NET and Python I would say 80%. C and C++ around 90%.
> PHP has matured and has been a nice language for a decade now.
And how did it manage that? Python forced people to deal with encodings properly and the result was a lot of pain. You're claiming PHP somehow invisibly fixed the numerous problems of the language without anybody noticing? That "fractal of bad design" blog post, everything described in it has been fixed?
If so I want to learn how they did it. That's some heavy duty language evolution work.
There are breaking changes from 4->5->7->(less so)8
This is why so many basic php web hosts continue to offer older php versions because the old code will not work and why paid projects like cloudlinux hardened php still exists. Just in the last 2 years they finally ended security support for php4 on the hardened php project.
So to explain how it worked, it wasn’t as sudden as python, but the problem areas have been depreciated and removed as php has evolved.
Encodings are a non issue in PHP and the availability of web tools is much wider in php than for python. PHP matured in the sense that it from a wordpress type of hacky language to an almost decent language. It can be used properly if you know what you are doing (ie can scale really well for the web, can be secure, allows for good oop design, can be fast _for the web_, and has a wide range of supported packages, separation of concerns and so on).
> and the availability of web tools is much wider in php than for python.
If that was a metric for language quality, then Javascript would be undeniably the most perfect language ever designed by any intelligent species in the universe, judging by the number of frameworks.
> to an almost decent language
And now I would like to hear a good reason why I should use an "almost decent language", when I can use a decent one instead.
> It can be used properly if you know what you are doing
It doesn't matter what I do, the language still insists of having multiple modes of error handling, a massive amount of builtins all of which sit in my global namespace, it's configuration is still seperated between compiler flags, a system wide ini, and local config. The base deployment mode is still "dump files into folder and let CGI do the rest".
I am not saying that’s a metric of the language’s quality, nor am i saying that python is worse than php.
What i am saying is that the offering of tools has matured in php - instead of a basic template engine like smarty you now have “advanced” templating engines, packages and so on. Python has less packages but that can also he because python packages work better and there is no need for an overwhelming number of packages.
Regarding error handling that’s precisely one of the many issues with php. There are so many ways of doing the same thing that it becomes exhausting. And what many php devs do is they work around these issues either by endless hair splitting debates or a dubious amount of made up design patterns.
You shouldn't use php, i am totally against it. I think it’s as bad as it can affect your mental health. Just saying that by comparison to it’s previous versions it has come a long way.
However it does handle character encoding quite well and you can scale as much as you want to literally. Probably because thats too complex for the average php developer and it was left to core language developers which are pretty competent and experienced.
That hasn't been my experience at all. Although, I do spend more time interacting with the Laravel community (a subset of the PHP community) than the PHP community itself.
I found the (Laravel) community to be more about object-level discussions ("how to do x feature the best way possible") rather than meta-level discussions.
Whether to use them or not. Petty endless debates over their benefits and drawbacks. Literarily for as long as i worked with php devs in all teams there was someone debating this pattern. As php is not strongly typed these can help with data type validation, can perform some logic when setting values, while others say it’s inefficient as thats an unnecessary method call, or that no logic should be performed in them. Some prefer to use magic functions instead of setters and getters others are against it because it makes the code difficult to maintain, some say they should only be used for data entities, others want to use them for every property, some prefer them because you can rename properties while maintaining external accessors, others against then because of consistency, some argue over what naming convention is best, some want to persist data in some type of storage when making updates, some attach observers to them and so on.
Bottom line is that the language being so flexible, unassuming, and swamped by needless features almost everything can be debated the point of exhaustion.
Python, being more straight to the point and not overkilling oop allows for more focus on doing what matters: business logic.
The issue is that there is so much configuration that it’s basically coding. PHP frameworks are all bloat. It would have been much better to abstract things in a way that you actually spend time on features not thousands of configs.
> Note: In the years since releasing Lumen, PHP has made a variety of wonderful performance improvements. For this reason, along with the availability of Laravel Octane, we no longer recommend that you begin new projects with Lumen. Instead, we recommend always beginning new projects with Laravel.
