WingNews logo WingNews
top | item 45990664

(no title)

darkamaul | 3 months ago

PHP's evolution since PHP 5 has been substantial, and I think this is a real problem. As someone who learned the language years ago, the pace of change (generics, attributes, match expressions, typed properties) makes modern codebases genuinely difficult to follow.

I suspect this affects many developers who cut their teeth on PHP but haven't kept up. The language has become a different beast, which is a strength for the community but a barrier to re-entry.

discuss

order

gramakri2|3 months ago

IMO, newer PHP is still very readable. I programmed with C++ for a decade, but I can safely say that I cannot understand a modern C++ code base anymore.

idoubtit|3 months ago

Are the new features really readable? I have no idea what this code from the OP is meant for:

    #[SkipDiscovery(static function (Container $container): bool {
        return ! $container->get(Application::class) instanceof ConsoleApplication;
    })]
    final class BlogPostEventHandlers
    { /* … */ }
As a side note, even PHP's official wiki cannot highlight correctly the multiline attributes behind a "#". See https://wiki.php.net/rfc/closures_in_const_expr

johnisgood|3 months ago

I think PHP is way better now than it used to be. Learn PHP 8 and you are good to go.

erickf1|3 months ago

Until two years later the same thing is said about PHP 9, 10, 11. Constant change is not good.

segmondy|3 months ago

It's a real problem with almost all software today, nothing ever gets done. they just keep piling unto it no matter how great it was. the idea of simplicity as a goal and feature is lost on this generation.

tim333|3 months ago

Simplicity may often get ignored but I think it's been a big reason for Python's success which has gone from about #10 on the TIOBE language list to #1 since when I started learning it, which was probably around when the XKCD "everything is so simple" cartoon came out. (https://xkcd.com/353/)

danaris|3 months ago

I dunno; I started with PHP 5 (actually, I think I started in late PHP 4), and I've only been happy with the changes as it's evolved.

The only one that's caused me any significant stress is the deprecation of the old `mysql` DB interface; I had to refactor a whole bunch of code for that, since I'm maintaining a codebase that's been in continuous use & development since 2001.

The additions to PHP since 5 add more things you can do, but they don't really change the simple things you can do to first learn PHP. You can still just create a .php file and start interspersing HTML and <?php script tags with basic operations.

woodrowbarlow|3 months ago

but would you even be considering re-entry if it hadn't improved dramatically?

jm4|3 months ago

To be fair, that’s true of many languages and programming domains. The web, in particular, is one where you have to keep pace or end up out of the field.

Java and C# are a couple other popular languages where the same is also true.

ivolimmen|3 months ago

Most likely this can be said about a lot of languages, most languages are being maintained and improved. I am an hired expert in Java and I needed to explain some new languages features to some colleagues that have been introduced recently, I only mention them if they actually improve readability though. I think PHP might be slightly different than other languages as a huge amount of people use this to create their first website as a hobby.

pjmlp|3 months ago

This is true for most languages though, compare C# 14 with C# 1.0, Java 25 with Java 1.0, C 23 (plus common compiler extensions) with K&R C,....

deaddodo|3 months ago

C hasn’t changed all that much, and someone who coded in C99 would take about 30mins to catch up to a modern C23 codebase’s changes. Famously so, as conservatism to change is the main friction in the community for about two decades now.

If you pull out examples of the earliest C, sure, it looks weird. But that C was already obsolete in 1989. Since then, it’s had a minor iteration (e.g. five-eight additions/modifications) every decade-ish (99, 11, 17, 23). Has it changed? Sure. Can it be compared to the iteration and speed of things like C#, Java, C++, etc? No way.

ffsm8|3 months ago

I think he's thinking more along the lines of PHP 5-8.5

That version 1-latest is understandingly highly different, but these are all decades old languages, which barely changed for some time, but are now all introducing new syntax.

Which I think makes sense, but it's obviously going to leave 9-5 devs behind that don't particularly care for coding and want to invest as little time as possible into their language knowledge.

Capricorn2481|3 months ago

I work on projects from PHP 5.6-8.4 and I can't say it feels that different. It's mostly just type differences.

But PHP 5 was released 21 years ago and is unsupported. Companies using it are putting their customers at risk.

tehbeard|3 months ago

You can still write php 5-esque slop and have it run... mostly (some particulars like the half dozen ways of interpolating a variable into a string have been paired down, some extensions left in the dustbin, but the fundamental "shit out a script and run it" capability still remains doable).

non of the "modern" things are particularly taxing to teach someone with more than two braincells. If they don't understand them then they haven't kept up with ANY programming trends in the past decade and are best placed infront of the TV with an iPad than left to mess with the possible critical infrastructure of a business.

phplovesong|3 months ago

PHP has no generics? I read somewhere that is was "too hard" to get right in PHP land, mostly because of how primitive the typesystem is.

deaddodo|3 months ago

It has nothing to do with being “too hard”, and everything to do with not making sense to the type system. PHP is weakly-typed and heavily reflection-based (so everything is aware of it’s and each other’s type at all times).

Adding generics to PHP would make CS fundamentalists somewhat happy, but do nothing to change the fundamental design of PHP nor offer any of the traditional benefits that generics offer to strongly-typed and compiled languages. And would be a massive headache to implement, while bulking an already heavy VM implementation.

senfiaj|3 months ago

You are probably talking about this: https://stitcher.io/blog/generics-in-php-3 . If I remember correctly, the author claims it will either cause runtime overhead or extreme memory overhead. The best solution is to introduce a typed superset of PHP like TypeScript was done for JavaScript.