Comments on: Tim Bray on PHP

By: WayneM

WayneM — Fri, 23 May 2008 02:47:41 +0000

I am inclined to agree - I never bothered to learn PHP because every book that I saw about it was all spaghetti code and how to quickly hack together garbage; not one I have seen actually showed proper design practices and how to use them, it was all for the “script kiddie” types and stunk of Classic ASP. The few open-source things (phpBB, Wordpress) that I’ve looked at to try and customize were cesspits of code hacked together, with tons of includes and random-looking pages that didn’t do anything but call other pages. It was a nightmare. Maybe if there were some decent books geared towards using PHP as a competent professional and not as a hack, the language wouldn’t have such a bum rep.

By: Adil

Adil — Wed, 08 Mar 2006 22:27:55 +0000

I started learning PHP on the first day of my job. It was pretty much procedural then. But six months on, i solve all my PHP challenges using OO principles.

PHP is easy to learn and gives you room to grow. The idea of making it harder to get good code is baseless. You can write bad code if you want to, and you only get better when you FEEL how bad your code really was ( 1 month into maintenance).

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Fri, 03 Mar 2006 18:16:28 +0000

I may be missing the whole point of this discussion, and if so, please accept my apologies. This is just the opinion from one the huddled masses who are not “professional” programmers.
The closest I have been to programming was years ago in high school using BASIC on an Apple II and a bit of HTML here and there since then.
We took a foray into the world of e-commerce (a dismal failure for reasons not applicable here) and chose a platform using PHP/MySql, which led to integrating a PHP/MySql CMS for an online group, due to the theoretical simplicity with which a “non-professional” could utilize them.
We looked at other options (PEARL, ASP, ect.), and I could not seem to wrap my brain around them (Which was my fault, not the frameworks).
Had PHP not been “easier”, we would never have been able to sort out the mess created by the “professional” programmers who were touting their work and receiving rave reviews from other “professional” programmers, while most of the required fixes were done by those who were not “professional”.
So the idea of making something harder to keep out those who are not “professional” seems, IMHO, a bunch of garbage from those who desire the appearance of competency through obfuscation.

By: BerislavLopac

BerislavLopac — Thu, 02 Mar 2006 15:11:01 +0000

So tell me what a real programming is, and also what a real language (ok your words were full-fleged language) is?

And this is the important difference: “real” and “fully-fledged” are orthogonal. I actually should have phrased it differently: PHP as a language currently has only one implementation (OK, two: CGI and CLI), and it’s quite limited in scope: you can’t keep your objects in memory, for example.

This doesn’t mean that PHP is not a real programming language; it just means that it is (currently) limited in its scope.

By: ChrisConn

ChrisConn — Thu, 02 Mar 2006 14:44:37 +0000

BerislovLopac wrote
Oh, don’t get me wrong—PHP includes a scripting language, with quite a powerful syntax in later versions, but it’s definitely not a fully fledged language.

Well then define what a language is.
My personal opinion is that a language is merely a way for one person to communicate with another person or thing.
Every programming language that exists today serves a purpose that it was designed for, and typically is expanded to broaden it’s appeal.
Someone I knew once said that I wasn’t doing “real programming” because I was coding in MapBasic. Well, what is real programming? One can go from microcode, to assembly, and all the way up to the scripting languages that we have today. As a matter of fact, one can do molecular coding now (OK not everyone) :)
So tell me what a real programming is, and also what a real language (ok your words were full-fleged language) is?

By: Andrew

Andrew — Thu, 02 Mar 2006 08:18:37 +0000

Look I am in a shop with a number of PL/SQL and Java programmers, and I consistently develop a quick working (and maybe dirty) solution to most of our web applications problems in PHP, way before the other guys. I am not a better programmer, I just choose to use a tool (PHP) that is doing what it was designed to do – Web based programming.
Want to bang a nail?… use a hammer not a saw!
PHP’s biggest success is its power and versatility within the web environment. Just coz it is easy to use does not mean it is shallow or superfluous. It just means it is the best tool for the job.

By: WebDevGuy

WebDevGuy — Sat, 25 Feb 2006 11:45:32 +0000

This is an example of industry heavy-weights taking on what I proposed earlier - make security part of the framework.

The big push just starting to get some press now is to make security built in, NOT an afterthought. Not left up to the programmer to decide. Built-in.

By: dwclifton

dwclifton — Wed, 22 Feb 2006 22:23:54 +0000

Missing the point. Sensible defaults are always better.

Point? It was a weak stab at humor.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 22 Feb 2006 18:22:55 +0000

So we should make PHP harder to keep the non-programmers out ?!? To me there’s something deeply wrong in that thinking.

I couldn’t agree more. There is a lot of high-quality open-source PHP code out there, and it’s easy to find. Wikipedia is running on top of it, and Yahoo! swears by it–that’s proof-positive of the potential for high-quality development with PHP.

And it seems strange to me that a truly experienced programmer would complain about the low quality of some PHP code (as if there’s not a good degree of low-quality Java, C++, Perl, etc. code), as if they don’t have the ability to separate wheat from chaff. I just say “boo hoo hoo” to these lazy programmers.

Yes, the ease of picking up the basics of PHP doesn’t turn somebody into a professional programmer overnight, but if a true professional doesn’t know where to find top-notch reusable PHP code, then they simply aren’t looking.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 22 Feb 2006 15:38:53 +0000

function h($s, $q = ENT_COMPAT, $c = ‘ISO-8859-1′) {
return htmlspecialchars($s, $q, $c);
}

Missing the point. Sensible defaults are always better.