What to Look For in PHP 5.4(jburrows.wordpress.com) |
What to Look For in PHP 5.4(jburrows.wordpress.com) |
Beyond that, PHP simply isn't particularly elegant (mostly since it was never really designed to be a programming language), and we all know it.
Other than that, I rarely see any relevant criticism, let alone constructive criticism.
Hate isn't inherently negative. You can hate evil, etc.
However, if you hate a programming language ... there's really something wrong with you. It suggests a very sheltered life. There are far more important things in life that deserve your hatred.
I am depressed that eaccelerator seems to be fading away - they removed their shared memory functions for their build with 5.3 support.
In my experience eaccelerator is slightly faster and more stable than xcache. As a bonus, when it did have working shared memory functions (under php 5.2) it has session handler support so sessions are done completely in memory (added: without any additional code or modification)
It is unbelievably easy to build session support for other op-code caches. Here is my code for APC:
if(extension_loaded('session'))
{
function ses_open($path, $name)
{
return TRUE;
}
function ses_close()
{
return TRUE;
}
function ses_read($id)
{
return (($GLOBALS['session'] = apc_fetch($id)) ? $GLOBALS['session'] : FALSE);
}
function ses_write($id, $data)
{
if(!isset($GLOBALS['session']) || $GLOBALS['session'] != $data)
{
if(apc_exists($id))
{
apc_delete($id);
}
return apc_store($id, $data);
}
else
{
return TRUE;
}
}
function ses_destroy($id)
{
unset($GLOBALS['session']);
return apc_delete($id);
}
function ses_gc($max)
{
if(
($apc = apc_sma_info())
&&
($apc['avail_mem'] / ($apc['num_seg'] * $apc['seg_size'])) < 0.25
)
{
return apc_clear_cache('user');
}
else
{
return TRUE;
}
}
ini_set('session.save_handler', 'user');
session_set_save_handler('ses_open', 'ses_close', 'ses_read', 'ses_write', 'ses_destroy', 'ses_gc');
}
eaccelerator's session handler (was) simply built in and requires no modification, just add the one-word setting to your php.ini
... and it will remain that way for a long, long time.
I'm guessing this is at least some of the reason for that behaviour.
You can force it to work in the absence of a collision by using a __call override. An example of which can be seen here: https://github.com/TomNomNom/Talk---New-stuff-in-PHP-5.4/blo...
I'm going to assume it's a backhanded insult and chuckle along.
UPDATE Can you please stop down voting. I'm not hating on Php, read my other comments below.
The development server seems like the only good thing about it.
Traits looks like a silly implementation of multiple inheritance mixins, with a 'use' keyword that doesn't really fit in with the language itself. And the whole 'insteadof' thing looks weird. It will lead to hackish code for many people, encouraging weird monkey-patching.
The author says "when stored in an array", then proceeds to use "$functions['anonymous']". That's not an array. Sigh. I know PHP likes to call them that, but I just find it weird that they would continue to insist on mis-naming two of the fundamental data types of computer science.
The introduction of closures can only be a good thing, and a lot better than the passing of a string name of a function as a callback argument from before.
As usual though, it's expected that most servers and frameworks won't get the update for some time, due to whatever backwards incompatible changes have been made.
I know it's all the rage to hate on PHP these days, but even giving an objective look at the state of the language, given the thriving ecosystems of its competitors, makes it look to me like something I would never touch.
1) You're hijacking the thread with something unrelated and better suited for some online research or sites like SO
2) According to your questions you're not investigating PHP, you're looking for C# in disguise/in another set of clothes.
Regarding MVC frameworks, try Yii - http://www.yiiframework.com
PHP isn't just orders of magnitude slower than JIT-ed or native compiled languages, but it has no affordances for that fact. There's no standard way to run code in the background. Zend won't start working on one either, because they sell a jobs queue as part of their Zend Server product.
Frankly, a JIT-ed PHP is the only feature I need. I appreciate the syntactic sugar added in the last few revisions of PHP, but honestly, I'd trade every new feature since PHP 5.2 for a bit more speed. With stuff like closures and traits it seems like they're working on the easy stuff instead of the necessary (but hard) stuff.
Thanks for the Yii link.
In this specific case, I don't think it's a good idea to do C#/ASP.Net in PHP and vice versa. Most PHP hosting environments do have a compile-once-run-many-times paradigm by virtue of opcode caching. The advantage over a typical Java or .NET app server is that you can change files and they get automatically recompiled on the fly. So for all intents and purposes, PHP is usually running a piece of in-memory compiled bytecode.
There are many MVC frameworks for PHP, for any interpretation of "MVC" you might want. I'm sure you can find one that's closely modeled after ASP.net, but again I'm not sure this is a productive undertaking in principle.
> ...due to whatever backwards incompatible changes have been made.
PHP is normally very good that way, does anyone know of any backwards incompatible changes that have been made?
> I know it's all the rage to hate on PHP these days, but even giving an objective look at the state of the language, given the thriving ecosystems of its competitors, makes it look to me like something I would never touch.
Yes you're right, it is quite fashionable to hate PHP and has been so for the ~10 years I've been using it, but who cares it gets the job done (a language for the pragmatists not the purists).
But they're not arrays. JavaScript and Lua do the same thing, allowing you to assign numeric or hashed keys on objects (or tables in Lua), but they don't call them Arrays, because they aren't. Arrays have expected behavior and implementations. So do hash maps. It's fine to amalgamate them, just give it the right name.
> PHP is normally very good that way, does anyone know of any backwards incompatible changes that have been made?
I haven't looked at any in this version, but recently there was an article (I think on HN) complaining about severe ABI changes that required all compiled modules to be recompiled, leading to adoption problems.
> Yes you're right, it is quite fashionable to hate PHP and has been so for the ~10 years I've been using it, but who cares it gets the job done (a language for the pragmatists not the purists).
I used PHP for many years as well, and for that reason I don't think it's a language for the pragmatist at all. It's not expressive enough, it encourages bad coding, and it doesn't have an ecosystem comparable to Ruby, Python, or even the amazing one Node.JS has managed to garner in the past year or so.
As for traits, sure but as with all things it depends on who will use them. Some will make a mess out of them, while other will use them properly. Just as with any other feature in any other language. Please stop using this tiered "reason" for why PHP is bad. It's just doesn't hold water.
* array? yeah, it's called like that. it could even be named "fridge" or "smartass".
* due to the new release process php BC is guaranteed for non major versions. adaption will be fast.
* thriving ecosystems don't matter, PHP is just one possible piece in the toolchain.
The 'use' keyword already exists in PHP for use with namespaces; it's pretty common for C-based languages to overload common keywords.
As far as I'm aware, there are no backwards incompatible changes in this release and servers have been tracking the most recent PHP versions much better these days.
Also, array[1] is the correct terminology.
No, you choose to label someone else's opinion as "hate" because it lets you dismiss it and throw out baseless insults at those people with less risk of getting taken to task for it. You told other people (theoretical people at that) what they think, and then told them there is something wrong with them and they lead sheltered lives. How incredibly arrogant.
OK.
PHP has a very nice feature where you can automatically prepend (and append, if you want) a file to all requests. Create a single file, modify your php.ini, done.
I am not telling you that eaccelerator isn't amazing. I am showing you how to get around problems you may run into if you end up using a different op-code cache.
PHP's arrays combine both vectors and associative arrays, but both numerically indexed arrays and associative arrays are types of arrays, are they not?
Arrays have expected behavior and implementations. So do hash maps. It's fine to amalgamate them, just give it the right name.
Whether associative arrays use hash maps underneath is an implementation detail, not fundamental to the interface PHP provides to [associative] arrays.
I would love to explain to my boss when I introduced some bad code into our repo: "But the PHP made me do it!". Really, if you can't use a tool without blaming it for when you use it badly, well...
Heck, even Play! might change your mind about Java.
In the PHP world, there's a huge number of choices/options out there, and finding something that fits your style can be a challenge (because, until you know your style, you don't know what fits).
http://www.reddit.com/r/php would probably be a good place to ask these questions too.
That aside, PHP is plenty fast as long as you avoid Zend and design your apps correctly for what you're doing. Lots of bad stuff out there giving PHP a bad name, like Magento.
Those frameworks and ORMs that you claim as a panacea are generally obfuscatory at best (Symfony2, which is a brilliant example of what you can do with PHP and a cautionary tale of designing a system that makes sense to twelve people, ever) to downright maliciously bad (CodeIgniter, get the hell out of my universe and take Joomla with you).
If you can muddle along with glacially inefficient frameworks (often with APIs that make core PHP seem not all that terrible for a time) and ORMs (personally, I don't use an ORM for anything, and credit where credit's due, PDO is actually a very reasonable solution), more power to you, but some of us (hi) have already been to that dance and realized it wasn't going to work for us. So I do criticize PHP on many fronts, from its psychotic language decisions to it's slapdash internals and it's blatant encouragement of idiotic programming practices. (You can say "nobody in their right mind would use that," but the existence of crapfloods of shitty PHP--hello, Wordpress--suggest that either that's not the case or the biggest PHP projects out there are run by lunatics.)
If I end up writing PHP, invariably I end up grabbing Silex and building the useful bits on top of that. While doing so, I continually wish it was a language where imposing actual application structure wasn't essentially actively discouraged; the outright necessity of shit like call-by-name loses what little error-checking you can otherwise get and the solution to any data storage problem seems to be "MORE ARRAYS!". PHP is a tool where a sufficiently advanced developer finds themselves fighting it as much as using it, and that is a shame. Because it doesn't have to be willfully obnoxious. It just is.
I mean, I went back to Java for my own projects, over continued bashing at PHP. That is a low bar. (But, to be fair, Play makes Java tolerable.)
the outright necessity of shit like call-by-name loses what little error-checking you can otherwise get
I'm sorry, but I use PHP everyday, and I rarely find myself needing to use call-by-name, except when it is required by internal functions. Many internal PHP functions that manipulate arrays do require the arrays to be passed by reference, but this doesn't prevent unit testing or error checking at all. I can't find any validity in this complaint and am assuming it is more problem of your coding style than an error inherent in PHP's language design.
the solution to any data storage problem seems to be "MORE ARRAYS!"
Brilliant observation. This is because arrays in PHP do double or even triple duty. They can be simple number-indexed arrays, they can be associative arrays, and they are internally implemented as hash tables, so they can also act as hash tables. Is your problem a semantic one or one of functionality?
PHP is a tool where a sufficiently advanced developer finds themselves fighting it as much as using it, and that is a shame.
Sorry I can't be as advanced as you.
Count me in as someone who took a look at the frameworks and said "no thanks". I think where the frameworks fail is that they always feel the need to go OO. PHP's design is pretty procedural in essence, because it's not a lot more than an HTTP wrapper with some useful procedures you can call. If you wrap that in an OO layer, by necessity you have to complicate things. I've found the best use of objects in PHP is in support of procedural request handler code. The only framework I use is ZF, because you can easily use it without buying into the whole MVC and routing paradigm.
PHP doesn't encourage bad programming practices. It simply doesn't encourage good ones. That isn't just semantics, either.
There are times when you need to break the rules. They're rare, but they're there. PHP is a language which leaves you that option. If choose to use that optional frequently, then you have nobody to blame but yourself.
We see the same thing with JavaScript and C++ (to a lesser extent) because some developers are simply afraid that a less experienced programmer might commit the sin of using the "bad parts", as if Python and Ruby transform careless career programmers into artisans.
Huh? The article in question demonstrates otherwise, note they just now fixed one of the problems with anon functions, a relatively new feature. PHP continues along the path of adding "features" randomly and without even understanding the purpose behind the feature, and so you get half-features that kinda work and don't really solve any problem in the context of PHP, but were just added so they could check off "some feature we don't understand" on the feature list.
>Other than that, I rarely see any relevant criticism, let alone constructive criticism.
In the context of PHP, I think "you should use a better language" is as constructive as you can really get. There's nothing wrong with warning new web developers that PHP is worse than every other language that lives at the same sort of level (perl, python, ruby, pike, etc).
This is not how features get added to PHP. Please spend some time on the PHP mailing list if you would like to know how it works.
Getting a bit off topic here, but one of the biggest performance killers I've seen is PHP devs writing Really Awful SQL(tm). Even beyond stuff like failing to use PDO and prepared queries to avoid SQL injections, if you look around you'll find tons of just really abysmal SQL. Typical problem: someone is using an oper in SQL that forces MySQL to not use indices. This absolutely kills performance and you typically won't notice it as a developer unless you're pre-populating your database with a large "real-world" dataset and doing proper performance testing.
edit: at least they're not intended to create "binaries". you can probably mess around with APC and make php look and behave like a compiled language. but you won't gain any notable speed improvements beyond the on the fly caching.
edit2: you can store php projects in a jar like file, caller phar. http://php.net/phar
>because you can easily use it without buying into the whole MVC and routing paradigm
As much as I think the zend framework is terrible, you can pick and choose whatever bits of it you like and ignore the rest. There's no working around assumptions or anything, it is just a normal way of using the framework.