After over two decades of working in PHP, I'm now working in Java. PHP is basically Java-lite. I am absolutely loving the compile-time safety of Java, but I dearly miss PHP's maps and arrays. In Java, the amount of verbosity for defining a map/list and operating on it is overwhelming.
Modern PHP is great. Many powerful language features, excellent performance, great community and package ecosystem, and decent enough safety with modern static analysis tools.
I'm not too sure I agree with the author's complaints here. When using something like array_filter, you're typically mapping from collection to collection (i.e. you don't care about the first element--you care about the whole thing) and so this problem is really a non-issue. The next follow up step would usually be foreach, or another operation like array_map, in which case it's a non-issue.
If you really do need the first element, you can use array_first. And if you really do need a fixed-sized collection, you can use SplFixedArray.
The point on properties is valid to an extent, but IMO not really an issue you commonly run into in the real world (regardless of language, your constructors should generally return an object in a usable state).
If I have an “array” and can do array[0] to get first item, but when I filter this array and array[0] throws an error, that’s super weird. What is the meaning of [] or what is an array even? The language forces me to understand how it is implemented under the hood. That’s exactly what the author says: leaky abstraction.
> Modern PHP is great. Many powerful language features, excellent performance, great community and package ecosystem
I heard this a long time ago about perl. CPAN is great.
Well ... perl entered the fossilized era. I think people do not really observe things correctly. I am noticing the same with ruby right now - everyone sees that ruby is in decline, very strongly so, in the last 3 years. Yet you have blog posts such as "ruby is not dying - it is aging like fine wine". And these are all NOT BASED ON FACTUAL ANALYSIS. I still think ruby is a great language, but if people are not realistic in their assessment of a situation, what does this tell us about people's evaluation in general? People seem to shy away from criticism. You can see this on reddit too, where moderators ban and censor willy-nilly, or even on github, where you can also quickly get eliminated for not conforming to xyz. It's as if some people are very afraid of strong opinions. I don't understand why - an opinion that is objectively false, can be shown to be false.
What actual criticism of PHP is anyone shying away from?
PHP got bashed for such a long time, while simply nothing steps up to do what it does better. Something that, for example, is available on every webhost you can just throw files at, where all (meaningful) config and state can be in those files.
PHP has quite a lot of oddities such as how loose comparisons (`==`) are made, numeric-strings, and type coercion. But the two oddities mentioned in the article are not that "odd" with a bit of context.
- PHP has `SplFixedArray`[^1] that work similar to the standard arrays you expect from other languages. SPL extension is always available in PHP 5.3+, it is not even possible to compile PHP without it anymore. There is no specific type for list-arrays and associative arrays, but there is an `array_is_list` function to quickly check it.
- For typed properties, if a property is not typed, it is effectively considered `mixed $var = null`. If the property is typed, and has no default value, then it is considered uninitialized, and not allowed to access.
> This lax behaviour for property definitions makes writing code around them harder. Especially when you take into account that any object can have properties dynamically added to them:
Doing so now raises a deprecation warning, unless you add #[AllowDynamicProperties], and PHP 9 will convert it to an error. I'm told this will simplify internals and unlock optimizations.
Arrays are still fairly awful, but generics may become a reality sooner rather than later, and on that could be built Vec and Dict types, à la Hack. PHP is going to be stuck with arrays as they are now for forever, but they'll at least become optional for new code.
I’d love to see a post like this for JS that actually talks about things people run into. Usually when people make a post like this in js, its about archaic things nobody actually uses.
To note, it is surprisingly refreshing to completely forgo instanciable classes on a modern codebase.
Phpstan deals well with type definitions, arrays are powerful enough to contain whatever needed, and functions can be stored and passed around easily enough.
Array shapes are still second-class citizens defined in phpdoc, with an inferior editor UX, and lack of any run-time enforcement. A proper record type for PHP with value semantics would be an ideal solution for me. Would go nicely with the pattern matching proposal that's still incubating.
A lot of it came from the rather harmful "php a fractal of bad design" article that used to get posted everywhere despite being highly inaccurate and out of date. Thankfully its fairly rare to see someone daft enough to still try using it in a discussion. PHP's come a very long way since then.
I've written PHP off and on since the .php3 extension was a thing, and I can say that PHP very much deserved the bad rap it had for some time. It's evolved beyond most of that, but a lot of that is due to the composer ecosystem making up for it while the behavior of many builtins remains beyond repair. Which is fine, every language has baggage and warts. PHP's warts are sometimes heinously ugly, and they're on full display in many legacy codebases, but modern PHP is something I actually find to be fairly pleasant to develop with, far more than Go or vanilla JavaScript.
For me, it's the exact opposite. Every time I work with PHP, I wish I could have TypeScript's properly typed arrays and dictionaries instead of the janky untyped 2-in-1 mess it actually has.
> This example exposes the "uninitialized" state that a property can be in, which is NOT the same as NULL. This distinction frustratingly comes up when you try to do a null check on these properties:
If you're accessing an uninitialized property or checking if a property is uninitialized, you're probably already doing something wrong.
The point of class properties with no default value is that you're supposed to set them either in the constructor, immediately after creating an instance, or via some other method that guarantees they'll have a value by the time you need to read them (such as deserialization with validation).
If you want your properties to have a default "unset" value that you can trivially check for, that's what null is for. The author doesn't make it clear whether they are aware that you can declare a nullable string and give it the default value of null, but I hope they are.
Modern PHP is great. Many powerful language features, excellent performance, great community and package ecosystem, and decent enough safety with modern static analysis tools.
I'm not too sure I agree with the author's complaints here. When using something like array_filter, you're typically mapping from collection to collection (i.e. you don't care about the first element--you care about the whole thing) and so this problem is really a non-issue. The next follow up step would usually be foreach, or another operation like array_map, in which case it's a non-issue.
If you really do need the first element, you can use array_first. And if you really do need a fixed-sized collection, you can use SplFixedArray.
The point on properties is valid to an extent, but IMO not really an issue you commonly run into in the real world (regardless of language, your constructors should generally return an object in a usable state).
I heard this a long time ago about perl. CPAN is great.
Well ... perl entered the fossilized era. I think people do not really observe things correctly. I am noticing the same with ruby right now - everyone sees that ruby is in decline, very strongly so, in the last 3 years. Yet you have blog posts such as "ruby is not dying - it is aging like fine wine". And these are all NOT BASED ON FACTUAL ANALYSIS. I still think ruby is a great language, but if people are not realistic in their assessment of a situation, what does this tell us about people's evaluation in general? People seem to shy away from criticism. You can see this on reddit too, where moderators ban and censor willy-nilly, or even on github, where you can also quickly get eliminated for not conforming to xyz. It's as if some people are very afraid of strong opinions. I don't understand why - an opinion that is objectively false, can be shown to be false.
> Ruby is dying
How exactly do you define these “objective” criteria for such sensationalism?
What actual criticism of PHP is anyone shying away from?
PHP got bashed for such a long time, while simply nothing steps up to do what it does better. Something that, for example, is available on every webhost you can just throw files at, where all (meaningful) config and state can be in those files.
- PHP has `SplFixedArray`[^1] that work similar to the standard arrays you expect from other languages. SPL extension is always available in PHP 5.3+, it is not even possible to compile PHP without it anymore. There is no specific type for list-arrays and associative arrays, but there is an `array_is_list` function to quickly check it.
- For typed properties, if a property is not typed, it is effectively considered `mixed $var = null`. If the property is typed, and has no default value, then it is considered uninitialized, and not allowed to access.
[^1]: https://www.php.net/manual/en/class.splfixedarray.php
Doing so now raises a deprecation warning, unless you add #[AllowDynamicProperties], and PHP 9 will convert it to an error. I'm told this will simplify internals and unlock optimizations.
Arrays are still fairly awful, but generics may become a reality sooner rather than later, and on that could be built Vec and Dict types, à la Hack. PHP is going to be stuck with arrays as they are now for forever, but they'll at least become optional for new code.
Archaic maybe, but still brings a smile
Phpstan deals well with type definitions, arrays are powerful enough to contain whatever needed, and functions can be stored and passed around easily enough.
Surprisingly enough, I was more productive in PHP than I was in perl. Perhaps perl is even stranger than PHP.
If you're accessing an uninitialized property or checking if a property is uninitialized, you're probably already doing something wrong.
The point of class properties with no default value is that you're supposed to set them either in the constructor, immediately after creating an instance, or via some other method that guarantees they'll have a value by the time you need to read them (such as deserialization with validation).
If you want your properties to have a default "unset" value that you can trivially check for, that's what null is for. The author doesn't make it clear whether they are aware that you can declare a nullable string and give it the default value of null, but I hope they are.