Isn’t Wordpress powering like 40% of the internet? PHP isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.
For me the weirder part of that meme is Python in 2022?
12 years after we learned Flask. 19 years after Django, which also was apparently hot 2 years before it was released.
Its like the C of web, it’ll be a hundred years to kill it
Maybe all the AI stuff?
IMO, Ruby is a better Python than Python. It’s simpler, has a cleaner syntax, and if you want to do funky stuff metaprogramming can allow you to do cool, and sometimes unspeakable things. Python has great library support, and slowness and Rails did make Ruby unpopular for a bit, but I would love to see a Ruby resurgence that wasn’t to do with Rails, because it is truly a lovely language to use.
Hell, I would say that in 2023, it’s easier/faster to get something set up and working in Rails than it is with frameworks like Symfony, Express, ASP.NET, etc.
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There are literally dozens of us.
Ruby feels a lot like writing poetry. Especially with microframeworks like Sinatra.
Python feels more like writing JS/ECMAScript without any punctuation.
Then again I cut my teeth on Actionscript (1 ugh, 2 ooo, and 3 nice—oh the iPhone doesn’t support it…), so my opinion is probably pretty worthless.
Python feels more like writing JS/ECMAScript without any punctuation.
I don’t know Ruby enough to judge, but I’ll have to say, hard disagree on this particular statement for me. JS to me feels like a bastardized C with some functional-inspired syntax tacked on top, while Python feels like writing English.
Optional parens on function calls, implicit returns, curly brace procs with args in vertical bars 🙃
I’d wager that most people haven’t used Ruby in anger, so don’t really have the comparison. Those that have used it have probably only used it in a Rails context, which IMO is a fairly limited environment to really play with Ruby.
I definitely love the language, but the ecosystem, library support, and some of the companies that jumped on the initial Rails bandwagon can be extremely backwards and resistant to change in tech.
Yeah, and node was skipped for some reason.
Django (python framework) is almost 20 years old.
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Was this supposed to be a joke?
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This just isn’t true though lol, python is one of many.
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I think python is actually the oldest on that list… ??
Can you elaborate on the python part? I’m not a programmer ( I don’t work in the field but I studied programming in high school) but I see python mentioned everywhere, is the language obsolete?
It’s not obsolete, it’s very good, still is. Just that Flask and Django both built on top of Python. So if it’s like late 90s or early 00s. Definitely before either Django / Flask. Python isn’t the new and thing of 2022.
In 2020 it was used at least in part on over 80% of websites according to w3techs.
There are two kind of programming languages:
- The ones everyone complaints about
- The ones nobody uses.
PHP is amazing
If you’re thinking of PHP version less than 8 you need to have another look
Totally stateless. Uncached server side rendered response times in double digit milliseconds.
Types
Extremely battle, highly tested frameworks.
Excellent tooling for tdd, bdd, static analysis, automated browser testing, coding standards and auto fixing. Even fully automated refactoring for things like package upgrades (Rector)
Regular, solid, releases bringing updates and fixes
Arguably one of the best package management systems, Composer. And only one, none of this constantly changing tooling that some other ecosystems seem to do
Properly open source platforms to power all kinds of web projects from e-commerce, CRM, social, scraping, analytics, monitoring, API, CMS, blogging
Basically if your target is server side web stuff then it’s really good
Or, you can continue to demonstrate how out of touch you are by continuing with the old “PHP bad” jokes if you want!
Uncached server side rendered response times in double digit milliseconds.
Thirst thought, that sounds slow. But for the use case of delivering html over the Internet it is fast enough.
Get this man some water.
Double digit milliseconds sounds slow to you?
For a bit of templating? Yes! What drives response times up is typically the database or some RPC, both of which are out of control of PHP, so I assume these were not factored in (because PHP can’t win anything there in a comparison).
Anything under like 100ms load is instant to the user, especially a page load. It’s a balancing act of developer experience vs performance. To split hairs over milliseconds seems inconsequential to me. I mean, PHP requires $ before variables! That’s the real controversy :p
Anything under like 100ms load is instant to the user, especially a page load.
True, but it accumulates. Every ms I save on templating I can “waste” on I/O, DB, upstream service calls, etc.
If it’s stateless and nothing is kept in memory, can you have a connection pool?
If you run it in old-school CGI mode, no, because each request would spawn a new process. But that’s nowhere near state-of-the-art. So typically you would still have a long-running process somewhere that could manage a connection pool. No idea if it does, though. Can’t imagine that it wouldn’t, however, since PHP would be slaughtered in benchmarks if there was no way to keep connections (or pools) open across requests.
Extremely strong functional programmer support, too!
On the note of testing, Pest is still one of the best testing options I’ve seen across a variety of langs.
What’s wrong with version 8?
Dude was saying that 8 is good, but people still think of version 5 when talking about PHP. Not recommended to still use in 2023.
Even 5.3 was good enough.
4 was hilariously bad though
I’d say 5.4 was when it publicly got great - but yea, a lot of ground work for that was in 5.2/5.3
On the opposite - version 8 is great.
It’s hard to justify using anything other than JS or if you wanna be fancy, Web Assbly, for the FE.
Any other front end language involves generating Javascript from your language, which inevitably ends up with you making a weird Frankenstein project that mixes the two.
I’d rather just use stuff like Webpack or Vite to compile my JS front-end out of JS (or TS) from the start. It always ends up being a cleaner result.
My backend though can be whatever the fuck I want it to be.
But if you ever think dynamically compiling/transpiling a JS front end on the fly on demand is a good idea, instead of simply just delivering static pre-compiled/transpiled pages, you’re part of the problem for why the web is so slow and bloated.
It’s wild how crazy of projects people will build that take 3 entire seconds to just deliver a 500kb static form that doesn’t even need angular to do anything. They turn a couple hundred kb into several mb for no useful reason, it’s wild.
On that last bit. I agree with you, but people are getting paid to produce, and since they probably just know angular, they use angular everywhere.
I prefer html personally :x
But yeah, I mostly blame the project managers that encourage this behavior, it’s wild how much overengineering goes into basic stuff like making mostly static websites.
Same, plain old HTML, and if I need some reactivity then Stimulus. And if need even more reactivity, then VueJS / Alpine. If the form can’t be submitted via a regular submit button, it infuriates me.
To my understanding, you can’t really use WebAssembly for the frontend - it doesn’t support manipulating the DOM, so you still need to offload a lot of the work to JS. It’s an uncontested language when it comes to web frontend.
It does support it, it’s just slower than JS. WA is faster in other aspects though, so frameworks that compile to WA (like the Rust framework Leptos) still end up being faster than a lot of JS ones.
I find that the only reason for SSR existence is to be able to just move a JS frontend to the backend for SEO/client performonce reasons with almost no effort. If the frontend really needs to be highly interactive then yeah, a FE framework makes things easier. But then you are locking yourself to using JS in the backend. Voluntarily locking yourself to use an objectively bad language.
Then there are the react/angular/other people, who build everything in these frontends.
I really hope tools like htmx gain traction, since it looks like a model able to solve the current JS madness.
I’m not liking htmx, I checked it out, it seemed promising, but it has giant gaping security holes in it so I can’t endorse it.
I have been sticking to using Ejs with html-bundler-webpack
The combo is lightning fast and gives me a solid usability of html partials so I can modularize my front end in re-useable chunks.
It compiles to the static site fast for iterative development, it has everything I need baked in for common needs (minification, bundling, transpiling, cache busting, integrity, crossorigin, tree shaking, etc etx)
I like how it let’s me just focus on actually writing the html + js + css and not have to muck around with thirty boilerplate steps to just make the app run.
If I need a lot of reactivity I’ll use vue or angular but I so so rarely need that.
And now with the template element, half the time reactivity can just be done with those.
Only time I actually need react/vue is when I have to frequently mutate/delete in the DOM.
But if I purely am additive, adding things to the DOM, template elements are plenty.
Could you elaborate on the htmx security holes? I only know about xss attacks, and for those it’s trivial to sanitize in the backend.
I too gravitate towards just templating for static or simple interactivity, but for pages that need SEO and interactivity I’m still wondering what’s a good solution that doesn’t involve SSR and a js framework. For a recent project I had I generated the html in php and sent a lot of pure js for dom manipulation
Htmx has a bunch of logic that basically completely bypasses Content Security Policy stuff, as it has its own pseudo baked in “execute inline js” logic that executes arbitrary javascript via attributes on html elements.
Since this gets executed by the HTMX logic you load in from their library, it effectively allows an attacker to arbitrarily execute js via manipulating the DOM, and Content Security Policy won’t pick it up because HTMX parses the attribute and executes on behalf of it (and you have already whitelisted HTMX in your CSP for it to function)
Result: It punctures a giant hole in your CSP, rendering it useless.
There’s technically a flag you can flip to disable this functionality, but its via the dom so… not reliable imo. If I could pre-compile HTMX ahead of time with that functionality completely disabled to the degree it doesnt even get compiled into the output .js at all, then I would trust it.
But the fact all the logic is still technically there in the library I have loaded and I am purely relying on “this flag in the dom should block this from working, probably”, I don’t see that as very secure.
So until that gets fixed and I can compile htmx with webpack or vite in order to completely treeshake that functionality right the hell out of my output, I aint gonna recommend anyone use it if they want an iota of security on their site. It’s got literally baked in security bypasses, don’t use it.
Hell Id even just be happy if they released a “htmx-lite” package I could use, that just doesnt have that functionality baked in, thatd be enough to make me consider it.
PHP isn’t dead. It’s just smelled that way for decades.
This was nearly a decade ago. I worked at a small app company (5-10 developers) for a bit that used Ruby on Rails for our product. The product was in active development, but was available to customers so it was “done”. We were hiring a senior level dev to oversee the team and we interviewed this guy (maybe in his 40s?, a but older than most people in tech) and he said his first order of business if hired would be to refactor the entire code base to php. I don’t think he was joking. I’m not sure why he interviewed.
Is there anything serious still running on a Ruby codebase nowadays? In PHP however…
GitLab is Ruby at least, I don’t immediately remember any others but there probably are some
Github too or a least when you look at the github enterprises source code
What can they do tho?
Since the beginning, GitHub.com has been a Ruby on Rails monolith. Today, the application is nearly two million lines of code and more than 1,000 engineers collaborate on it daily
- GitHub
- Gitlab
- Airbnb
- Shopify
- Hulu
- Zendesk
- Basecamp, obviously
I know of a bunch of less famous ones, but those are a few of the bigger ones that I’m aware of.
Only people supporting legacy regret.
Ruby was never good. It just got memed enough to make it way into some medium business
Does Redmine count as serious?
Isn’t Mastodon Ruby?
This is an irritating meme.
Were people saying PHP was dead in 1995, the year it was released? I guess maybe?
But who was suggesting abandoning PHP for Django in 2003, two years before the latter was publicly released? I suppose the person who made this must’ve read that Django development started in 2003 and gone with that; most of these years correspond with when the respective project started.
So, the reason Perl (which remained more popular for web development than PHP or any of these things into the early 2000s) isn’t on the list must be because it actually predates PHP.
But then what is up with Python in 2022?
I also appreciate that you’re supposed to learn Django 19 years before you learn Python.
Flask too
Yeah, plus PHP was very popular circa 2011-2016 and laravel was loved by many around that time and beyond. It’s always been a useful language.
I’m sure there are a lot of reasons why PHP is better than Python for the backend, but I created an app wirh Symfony 5 and then an app with Django 4.
Symfony is so weird compared to Django. With Django I can just sit down and get things done. Symfony always seems to have some quirks which are mostly due to PHP (and me not knowing how to program in PHP).
That said, PHP hosting is so much easier and cheaper, this probably is important for smaller projects.
You don’t need a framework for PHP. That’s the beauty of it, you don’t need anything. You cannot build a website with Python without a framework.
I know this answer is flippant and dickish, but:
python3 -m http.server 80You don’t need a framework for either, but it makes working with both much easier!
Sure but don’t cry when someone injects some js in your website or drops a table, because you didn’t sanitize every input completely.
Ah, little Bobby Drop Tables.
Django is pretty nice, yeah. We also have good compiled webapps, with go and rust. Gitea for example uses go.
Isn’t all hosting containerized at this point? Is hosted, language specific servers still a thing?
I’ve been out of the market for a while now and just run everything as containers on aws and gcp
Isn’t all hosting containerized at this point?
No. Not even close.
Many older projects don’t get migrated to containerized infrastructure and smaller businesses don’t want the overhead it creates to run a single app/webpage. Plain LAMP with FTP access is still the most common way to host I think (and thus the cheapest if you consider the amount of work that would need to be invested to containerize).
Interesting. I never really realized how it was more my path changing than the entire industry.
The industry is surely changing, but “the industry” is mostly geared towards enterprise, because it’s where the money is. But the large amount of webpages are not enterprise pages but personal blogs, small businesses etc.
Lets just say that Python was a language that was never supposed to be used for anything production related. PHP’s memory management and multi threading capabilities are WAY more solid and less prone to leaks than Python 's.
As someone that used PHP professionally for literal decades, the PHP hate is so meme-y.
Its biggest problem is that it allows you to do some truly cursed things. The same can be said about other languages, but PHP really doesn’t do much to set you up for success, especially as a new-intermediate coder.
With opcache, it became fast enough for basically most web backends, and as a language overall it does seem to be evolving and shedding off some of the crap that used to make it truly horrible in the hands of a new person. At least the type-juggling stupiderrors
Now I mainly use go and python (only because I have to on this one), and I would put Python and PHP on a similar level of “fuck this language” moments
cries in variable variables
For the backend? Why? I could see PHP being better for the front end considering it’s basically a templating language already, and setting up Python on a webserver is much more complex, last I tried.
PHP is a server-side language, how do you plan to use it for the front-end? Good luck with that!
Oh, I see what you mean. I thought you meant output HTML and templating vs server side logic, but yes, obviously I know the difference as the only front-end language is JavaScript and derivatives.
I’m more used to the terms ‘server-side’ and ‘client-side’ btw. Obviously PHP is server-side. But not all server-side is backend in my view. I consider backend to be application logic and things like database access. Templating can be done on the server or the client, and that’s front-end.
I like how 3 of them, across almost 20 years, boil down to “learn Python”. When’s that dude gonna die??
2022: learn python
Who said that, exactly?
The dude trying to push Django in 2003
This year is finally the year of Python, I can feel it!
I’ve been waiting so long for people to realize they should be using the second best language at everything.
2023 is the year qbasic comes back i can feel it
Symfony, Laravel & other PHP based frameworks are going strong. PHP isn’t going away anytime soon.
django and flask are python btw and people wanted to learn python or perl from like 15 years ago, the popularity of python 2 and its “Issues” led to robust dev on python 3, not to mention it being a default for many linux distros since a long time ago
What is dead may never die
