
Taking PHP Seriously - Mahn
https://slack.engineering/taking-php-seriously-cf7a60065329
======
VintageCool
When they describe performance improvements of HHVM over the existing PHP
interpreter, are they comparing HHVM to PHP 5.6 or PHP 7? There were some
incredible performance improvements going from 5.6 to 7, and most of the HHVM
hype that I see doesn't acknowledge this.

[https://wiki.php.net/phpng](https://wiki.php.net/phpng)

~~~
danielharrison
I'm on the move do don't have any sources for you, but from what I understand
php 7.x benchmarks pretty close to HHVM. I wouldn't be surprised if 7.2/3
surpasses it.

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devwastaken
As someone who's dabbled in PHP for various ancient frameworks such as
Mediawiki and Wordpress, I'm unsure why people knock on 'php' itself. The
frameworks I just referenced may not be that great, and may require a lot of
work to make it acceptable. But outside of that, there's a huge amount of
development theory in the frameworks used to actually build your own websites,
such as Symfony. I mean, take a look at the quick guide
[http://symfony.com/doc/current/quick_tour/the_big_picture.ht...](http://symfony.com/doc/current/quick_tour/the_big_picture.html)

Or any other pieces of documentation. Its very well made, and demonstrates
proper creation of websites using seperation of logics and configurations.
And, you don't have to use symfony, there's tons of others that impliment the
same kind of theories, which is why i think PHP has stuck around for so long
and is improving like every other language. It has the ability to be formed
into these seperations and logics. Much like how C# is able to give you a much
better separation of data and objects than say C++. Perhaps thats something
that could be done in any per-request response language like PHP, but it has
withstood its test of time when properly done.

~~~
pan69
Symfony is indeed a very well crafted framework. For those who are interested
to have a bit of an introduction to what modern PHP web development looks like
today, it might be worth having a look through this tutorial that basically
walks you through building your own web framework based on Symfony components:

[http://symfony.com/doc/current/create_framework/index.html](http://symfony.com/doc/current/create_framework/index.html)

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MarkMMullin
OK, non-productive and snarky, but I always thought this hit the spot with
Personal Home Page -- [https://toggl.com/programming-
princess](https://toggl.com/programming-princess)

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apple4ever
I love PHP, and I never get all the hate for it. This article makes a lot of
sense to me.

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raarts
[2016]

~~~
dvfjsdhgfv
It would be great if they could update the article, many things have changed
since then.

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nickrio
The problem of PHP is it's a old & narrowed language. It been designed to run
in as a Web Service dedicatedly, and of course limits it's potential.

It's just like no one had motive to make HTML turing-complete. A language
dedicated as a web script is good enough as long as it output web page, right?
:(

BTW:

> I claim that PHP’s simpler “think; edit; reload the page” cycle makes
> developers more productive.

Does this can be simulated by automatically recompile and restart the
application? I don't think it can be an serious advantage here.

~~~
stephenr
Old compared to what, exactly?

PHP being largely targeted st web app development is a bonus: how many times
do ruby apps need to rely on a swath of gems to achieve functionality PHP has
in its standard distributed extensions?

~~~
nickrio
You just notice "Old"? Old usually are not cause any problem, but when you
combine old and narrow, that is not a good thing.

It just like Morse Code which designed for telegram operators to send and
receive message.

By that time when telegram was new, it was a good invention, everyone who
wants to use telegram must know Morse Code. And because of it's designed for
telegram, it come with every each bonus to make send and receive telegram
faster.

However, one day, a new technology been invented, it's called Telephone. Not
long after that, telegram started to fade away.

What fade away with it, is of course, the Morse Code. Because it only good at
sending and receiving telegrams which not many people still do today.

Now the PHP. It has a lot of old burdens (To make it good at outputting HTTP
respond) and poor design decisions. They need to find a way to organize those
things and carefully redesign that language. Then, maybe it can become
respectable.

~~~
dvfjsdhgfv
It's almost the opposite of what you're saying. As PHP was designed for web
development, "newer" languages often need a lot more (configuration, modules,
etc.) to produce what PHP can easily do by default.

