Wednesday, February 22. 2006I hated php back when it was cool
This is a short smug entry, written in the "Yeah, well I liked them before they even had a record deal" style associated with trend snobs. Except in this case, its the opposite, I am claiming that I hated something back when it was cool. Thanks to blogging my opinion earlier, I even have proof! PHP should stand for Pretty Huge Problem. Links keep popping up on del.icio.us, reddit.com, and digg.com about various peoples newfound gripes with PHP. It seems that a lot of ex PHP evangelists have moved to Python, or J2EE or more likely Ruby On Rails, and as such have 'seen the light'. All of a sudden mixing code and HTML is a bad idea, a language with a 'safe mode' is not so cool, lack of backward compatibility is a flaw, and languages with inherent security flaws aren't soo hip. 
Aristotle Pagaltzis makes an interesting point when he says how PHP suffers from a lack of initial design. (you can read his post later). Basically PHP seems to have started out as a pet project, and had its features battered on with a staple gun, rather than included in the design. Funnily enough, many of the "big" php applications seem to suffer from this problem. What starts out as "my cool forum" or "my easy to use wiki" soon has features added in an ad hoc fashion leaving the code very difficult to maintain. They are still good applications but become increasingly difficult to work with. As the language isn't exactly object orientated, refactoring isn't as easy as the gang of four would have you believe. This seems to be hurting the languages reputation with an inevitable PHP backlash now in full swing. What I am wondering is how severe will the rails backlash be? Java experienced a big one, Web 2.0 experienced a massive one, AJAX is about to undergo one, already on the JoelOnSoftware Forum, Rails is gearing up for one. It seems new technologies for the web are like fat children on see-saws. 
Big Fat Joe 2.0 gets on the see saw and has his own way for a long time, and no would dare say that there is anything wrong with him, in fact Fat Joe is probably the biggest thing to happen to the internet since Tim Berners Lee. Then slowly the dissenters get together and reliase their combined weight trumps Joe, and all of the sudden the backlash is on. AJAX sucks, web 2.0 is a load of crap, , Web standards don't solve anything, blah blah blah. Only when both children actually sit down and stop screaming does the opinion reach any merit. Maybe people should wait a little before evangelising, and wait a little more before before criticizing too. I'm counting the days until someone turns around and says, "omg rails didn't live up to its promises, it's actually worse than php" You might laugh now, but the backlash will come, only the severity is undecided. Linkage
In slightly more ironic news, Serendipity, the PHP based weblog that I use, has recently turned 1.0. Well done to all the team. Oh, and I do realise the AJAX sucks article is a spoof post, but read it and a have bit of think. How many of those points can you actually argue against, and by argue I mean address and nullify the point, not just point me to adaptivepath and google maps, and say "duh Des!!!" Comments
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You've got to fix your links man. I find it ironic you've mentioned "web standards don't solve anything" and yet you fail to create a valid link so that your visitors can follow your sources of inspiration.
Sorry about that Josh, the links are all working fine for me. I don't see what the problem is. I realise that the weblog software rewrites all links to go through its exit.php script, in an attempt to track exits or something. If this isn't working for you (and I can't understand why it wouldn't be), then just mouseover the link and you'll see where it should go.
When I said "web standards don't solve anything", I wasn't voicing my own opinion, I was referring to the minor backlash against web standards when a couple of designers decided to go "against the flow". My own opinion is that web standards are fundamental in proper web design.
Well, I don't know if I'd go so far as to call PHP a dead horse, but if that's how you feel Mara...
"Aristotle Pagaltzis .. says.. PHP .. had its features battered on with a staple gun, rather than included in the design."
Let him try Visual Basic. for example the DOM of Excel. Beside that, the PHP engine has been overhauled completely twice. "many .. php applications .. soon [have] features added in an ad hoc fashion leaving the code very difficult to maintain." Blame the coder, not PHP. "This seems to be hurting the languages reputation with an inevitable PHP backlash now in full swing." Where? Is this the Fox Channel style, saying "may people say..." when they want to bash whatever subject they have a personal problem with?
Arakrys,
First, take up Aristotles points with Aristotle. I don't think he was saying that VB was any better or worse, he was addressing points with the PHP language. And at what point did I say that PHP was to blame for the applications it is written in, What I said was that I find it interesting how the big php applications seem to suffer from the same problems that Aristotles pointed out about PHP itself. Finally, when I say there is a backlash, I am referring to the amount of blog posts I see on reddit.com , del.icio.us and digg.com about programming in PHP, and why people don't like it now. They are all recent posts, and they are all popular stories, that is what I would call a backlash. I have a personal gripe with PHP, but I reference 4 other very recent stories that also problems with the language. It's not like I didn't back up my claim. I agree that you can write crap code in any language, and I agree that most of the time you should blame the coder, not the language, but there are problems with PHP. Real Problems. Compatibility, security, etc. As for who do you blame, I think this author sums it up nicely. http://www.gadgetopia.com/post/4555
Ok i should reply on their rants, not on your overview. It's just that the arguments used are so .. easy. And the sites you refer to share most of the shallow complaints, several of which are outdated with PHP5, or even PHP4.10. It shows me that the blogging community you visit is running out of ideas.
"but there are problems with PHP. Real Problems. Compatibility, security, etc." Security? You mean if a coder does not check user input before he feeds it to sql, or a system command? Or what else are you referring to? "As for who do you blame, I think this author sums it up nicely. http://www.gadgetopia.com/post/4555" Seeing all the classes he recommends (bulky Pear, limited template engine Smarty) i wonder if he is more upset about needing those projects than about PHP itself. That said, i DO agree there is a lot of crappy code out there. PS strange, the reply links did not work after i reacted, something with the url?
In the post I linked in my last comment, the author was defending the language. He was saying that basically in other modern languages ( i.e. C#, J2ee, RoR etc) an awful lot of what is believed to be "common sense" is built into the language. There are restrictions on what you can do, for example the language can prevent an XSS attack by not allow you to present an untreated string to the user. PHP has all these abilities, I believe, but they are not built into the language, they are optional imports.
So when I hear that a new web application is written in PHP, I am inclined to think "is the author dilligent enough to do everything the right way, throughout the codebase", whereas when I hear of a new web application written in C#/.NET/J2EE (I would include Ruby on Rails, but it is so young it is hard to tell), I don't assume its well written, but I am confident that it won't be subject to any of the usual script kiddie attacks. Thanks for reading and commenting Arakrys. Des
PHP has some things wrong with it, I'll admit. But the majority of "security" problems come from people being LAZY. Yes, LAZY. The same exact crap can happen in any language. The fact of the matter is, just because Lazy Fat Ass #34382 doesn't validate his user input before passing it into an SQL statement, doesn't really mean that PHP is "flawed." Rather, it means that #32382 is a Lazy Fat Ass and needs to stop being so goddamned Lazy. I've looked at Ruby, and Rails, and to me, they seem like the "pet projects" of people that want their language to coddle them so they don't have to work through their problems. People touting Rails as some sort of fucking Messiah for The Intarnets are so full of shit it makes me want to vomit my stomach up. Sometimes, web developers piss me off. More often than not, I'm tempted to conclude that most of them are kids that haven't ever had to write software for embedded systems, or complex architectures etc. Some of the stuff people are whining about is so goddamned inane it makes my brain hurt.
I do agree that the backlash for AJAX/Rails/et al is going to probably be a lot bigger than that for PHP. I'll be laughing all the way there.
Congratulations for you article, but... A couple of months ago Java was dead, now its PHP turn and Ruby its the coolest thing in the World. Well probably PHP will not be a perfect tool, but all those guys saying it is hard to maintain big applications with PHP, should go the school again. Or what means big for them?
Look those amazing videos about ROR and must admit they are great marketers. Play its great, but I hope do serious applications will be so easy also. I admire those TV and street sellers that sale you all kind of useless tools you will use once, maybe twice. I discovered some time ago was using VMC model since end of 90s and have no idea about it!!! Creating multilayer applications, multilingual, encapsulating modules in classess, reusing code again and again, displaying thru different devices using Xtemplate class, blah, blah. People love abbreviations and acronyms, even if they don't know what means. Its the way to say, I'm a professional, hear carefully even if you don't understand what I will say you. As other poster stated before, blame coders not language, if they don't know how to do good and secured code. I admit after more than 20 years programming, have to learn a lot about OOP yet, came late. OOP its great, you need OOP right, but you need objects to go to WC? A good programmer will do great things in VBasic and fools will do s...t with Java, Ruby or any other thing. Java is great, Ruby is fantastic, VBasic is incredible and PHP is amazing. Focus in people and you could forget about the language. My 2 cents 
I agree that when poor code is written, you must blame the coder, not the language.
However, programming languages can certainly take steps to ensure that certain problems won't happen. For example, the memory managment in Java means that Java programmers, whether genii or novice are not susceptible to buffer overflow attacks. The syntactic requirements of the Python programming language ensure that unmaintainable one line hacks are extremely rare in the language. The positive attributes of a language *ensure that certain problems won't occur*. PHPs only positive attribute is however, that it is easy to learn. This is a desirable feature in a language, no doubt, but it must come second to other attributes when you are considering your language for building a secure web based application. Thank you for reading Jose. Des |
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My name is Des, I'm the UX Lead and COO of Intercom, a fantastic CRM & messaging tool for web sites and web software. Keep in touch
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Des made some great points and linked to some other great blog entries on all the things that are wrong with PHP in his recent blog entry I hated php back when it was cool and I found myself agreeing with them all but I also have another gripe with PHP
Tracked: Feb 26, 00:41
I've stumbled upon an interesting article this morning called "I hated php back when it was cool", which kind of vocalises some of the gripes I recently developed with PHP. Namely, the language has grown exponentially, but without a structure to tie the language together effectively. I just love the description quoted in the article:Aristotle Pagaltzis makes an interesting point when he says how PHP suffers from a lack of initial design. ... Basically PHP seems to have started out as a pet project, and had its features battered on with a staple gun, rather than included in the design.. Everything is done with a series of functions, most of which have different patterns of behaviour or different parameters depending on what version of PHP your running. This makes coding effective sites an absolute nightmare! My other chief gripe is classes. Despite the recent changes to the whole class handling system in PHP, it's still rubbish, and most of the time, I can't use the improvements that PHP 5 brings because no bugger supports it! To me, when the PHP people get to writing version 6, they need to stop, and quite literally start again . I really mean that - it doesn't matter if the "newer" PHP code is not backwards compatible - it isn't very BC at the moment, and so they should take more time, consider their direction, and plan ahead.
Tracked: Mar 03, 19:52