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I learned to use php when I was like 14. I’m 27 now and still derive such joy when making my own little projects that will never see the light of day. I try to

by vdo 5y ago

I learned to use php when I was like 14. I’m 27 now and still derive such joy when making my own little projects that will never see the light of day. I try to be humble as far as just being a php trash coder, but I don’t feel too ashamed honestly, as it is the most mainstream thing really. I will always be grateful to php for being accessible and yeah, I guess easy. I don’t know why php is the only one I really stuck with exactly, but it is weirdly dear to me. Nearly half my life I’ve never gone too far past being a lowly php coder, and not a great one at that, but I still like what I can make at the end of the day. It’s a side creative thing for me. Laravel was a revelation for me over the last few years, it just makes some things make sense that never did for me as a self-taught hobbyist.

hparadiz 5y ago
I started at 16 and I'm 34. Went from working on gaming websites to running giant ERP backends for mobile apps, web apps, and api users in high throughput environments. All I need to get to work is VSCode and some linux VM or container. PHP has an obnoxious amount of depth. You can become an expert on just ORMs or just SSO or just Collections or just routing and still be learning something new everyday. I am actually "self tought". Whatever that means.
- irrational 5y ago
  > I am actually "self tought". Whatever that means. What does that mean? I know what taught means, but tought? No idea.
  - I_complete_me 5y ago
    A charitable interpretation would be that he meant "self-taught". It's not that difficult.
jabbany 5y ago
I started doing my first web development with PHP (4 & later 5) around the same time! Actually ended up learning a lot about how the entire LAMP stack worked + a lot of tricks and theory behind how to make things secure (PHP had very few safeguards back then). I'm still reaping the benefits of a lot of this knowledge to this day. I have moved on to other languages like JS and Python since ~2012. Looking at the article, I feel like modern PHP is almost a completely different beast compared to when I used it back then >_<
distantsounds 5y ago
yup, same. started at like 16 and just never found a replacement for writing web apps that was as easy to pick up with lots of built in power. the documentation has always been _extremely_ helpful too, shout outs to the php.net team for making it so easy to learn.
kodemager 5y ago
In a world where everything is fast becoming a JavaScript front end with “some” backend and with the improvements PHP has seen in recent years I don’t see why you’d consider yourself a “lowly” php developer. I’m mainly a C# guy myself as far as the backend goes, but I don’t view PHP as being bad in 2022. I think people who do are stuck in the past to be perfectly honest. It’s sort of like disliking JavaScript because it really sucked the soul out of you before typescript eventually made it nice to work with. But being mad at any programming language is sort of silly isn’t it? If it works it works.
- manigandham 5y ago
  The reason for PHP's hate is detailed in this great vintage article: https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/ https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/ That's from 2012 and many of the issues have been fixed since then, but it was the truth a decade ago and tainted the experience for many devs who have sine moved on to other languages.
- y4mi 5y ago
  > why you’d consider yourself a “lowly” php developer. PHP has always been considered as a somehow bad language in all corporations I've worked at to date. The same applies to other script languages such as python, ruby or nodejs - but PHP was the most undervalued of them all. It's kinda strange because the language is really performant and relatively easy to use. Maybe that's exactly why the big brain architects don't like it. They do tend to love things correlated with pointless complexity after all
  - xgb84j 5y ago
    People dislike PHP because its standard library had many inconsistencies and interesting design decision that no sane programmer would ever even think off, like all random numbers being odd (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/31612082/why-does-mt-rand1-php-int-max-always-return-an-odd-number https://stackoverflow.com/questions/31612082/why-does-mt-ran...). Many of these decisions revolve around the authors not wanting their functions to fail under any circumstances. This is nice for beginners but quickly hurts more than it helps in larger projects as it obfuscates bugs.
midrus 5y ago
I'm one of those web devs that tries everything under the sun, and I also happen to have worked for a lot of companies (more than a dozen already, I'm on my 40s). Laravel is such a *joy*. I've never had this feeling of using something so easy and productive. I've been recently building a side project with LiveWire and oh-my-god. I really wish I had discovered it before. From the templating system (you get components out of the box! no more "includes" if you don't want to) to the validations, to the queues system... everything is so well integrated and so easy to use. For the last decade I've worked mostly with Django and SPAs, I'm not going back to that any time soon. Django templates are extremely limited for nowadays requirements, and SPAs are 1000x more complex to build and maintain so in my opinion they're not worth the price/effort. I think Livewire, Hotwire, Unpoly, Htmx, etc are what 90% of web apps need.
- gjsman-1000 5y ago
  Laravel and Livewire is the best-kept secret ever because everybody is too busy being biased against PHP.
  - sodapopcan 5y ago
    Or we're too busy using Phoenix LiveView ;P
    - cutler 5y ago
      Or Rails/Hotwire.
    - midrus 5y ago
      One of the companies I worked for used Elixir/Phoenix. It is an extremely cool piece of tech but it is nowhere near as productive as Laravel, Rails, etc. Missing libraries, difficult to hire for, bad editor support, and overall feels very niche which such a small community. That company eventually moved out of it.
      - sodapopcan 5y ago
fvavsc 5y ago
PHP was my first love. It still is. Professionally I have moved on to other languages. But whenever I have an urge to create something for personal use, PHP is always the most productive way to get it done. With Laravel, I can even make it look polished and put it on the web. PHP is such a joy that I am really thinking about switching back to it for my day job.
progmetaldev 5y ago
In my experience, a lot of the hate that PHP gets is unjustified. I can only speak from personal experience, but most people I know that complain about PHP were just burnt out from dealing with other developers' code. Having such a low barrier to entry created many novice and hobbyist PHP developers to hit the market, and start producing terrible code due to not fully understanding software development practices. I know I never had an issue with PHP, and could get work done very quickly, but once I had to start working through other's spaghetti code it burnt me out and I moved on to other languages with a bit higher barrier to entry.

by vdo 5y ago

hparadiz 5y ago

I started at 16 and I'm 34. Went from working on gaming websites to running giant ERP backends for mobile apps, web apps, and api users in high throughput environments. All I need to get to work is VSCode and some linux VM or container. PHP has an obnoxious amount of depth. You can become an expert on just ORMs or just SSO or just Collections or just routing and still be learning something new everyday. I am actually "self tought". Whatever that means.

irrational 5y ago
> I am actually "self tought". Whatever that means. What does that mean? I know what taught means, but tought? No idea.
- I_complete_me 5y ago
  A charitable interpretation would be that he meant "self-taught". It's not that difficult.

jabbany 5y ago

I started doing my first web development with PHP (4 & later 5) around the same time! Actually ended up learning a lot about how the entire LAMP stack worked + a lot of tricks and theory behind how to make things secure (PHP had very few safeguards back then). I'm still reaping the benefits of a lot of this knowledge to this day. I have moved on to other languages like JS and Python since ~2012. Looking at the article, I feel like modern PHP is almost a completely different beast compared to when I used it back then >_<

distantsounds 5y ago

yup, same. started at like 16 and just never found a replacement for writing web apps that was as easy to pick up with lots of built in power. the documentation has always been _extremely_ helpful too, shout outs to the php.net team for making it so easy to learn.

kodemager 5y ago

In a world where everything is fast becoming a JavaScript front end with “some” backend and with the improvements PHP has seen in recent years I don’t see why you’d consider yourself a “lowly” php developer. I’m mainly a C# guy myself as far as the backend goes, but I don’t view PHP as being bad in 2022. I think people who do are stuck in the past to be perfectly honest. It’s sort of like disliking JavaScript because it really sucked the soul out of you before typescript eventually made it nice to work with. But being mad at any programming language is sort of silly isn’t it? If it works it works.

manigandham 5y ago
The reason for PHP's hate is detailed in this great vintage article: https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/ https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/ That's from 2012 and many of the issues have been fixed since then, but it was the truth a decade ago and tainted the experience for many devs who have sine moved on to other languages.
y4mi 5y ago
> why you’d consider yourself a “lowly” php developer. PHP has always been considered as a somehow bad language in all corporations I've worked at to date. The same applies to other script languages such as python, ruby or nodejs - but PHP was the most undervalued of them all. It's kinda strange because the language is really performant and relatively easy to use. Maybe that's exactly why the big brain architects don't like it. They do tend to love things correlated with pointless complexity after all
- xgb84j 5y ago
  People dislike PHP because its standard library had many inconsistencies and interesting design decision that no sane programmer would ever even think off, like all random numbers being odd (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/31612082/why-does-mt-rand1-php-int-max-always-return-an-odd-number https://stackoverflow.com/questions/31612082/why-does-mt-ran...). Many of these decisions revolve around the authors not wanting their functions to fail under any circumstances. This is nice for beginners but quickly hurts more than it helps in larger projects as it obfuscates bugs.

midrus 5y ago

I'm one of those web devs that tries everything under the sun, and I also happen to have worked for a lot of companies (more than a dozen already, I'm on my 40s). Laravel is such a *joy*. I've never had this feeling of using something so easy and productive. I've been recently building a side project with LiveWire and oh-my-god. I really wish I had discovered it before. From the templating system (you get components out of the box! no more "includes" if you don't want to) to the validations, to the queues system... everything is so well integrated and so easy to use. For the last decade I've worked mostly with Django and SPAs, I'm not going back to that any time soon. Django templates are extremely limited for nowadays requirements, and SPAs are 1000x more complex to build and maintain so in my opinion they're not worth the price/effort. I think Livewire, Hotwire, Unpoly, Htmx, etc are what 90% of web apps need.

gjsman-1000 5y ago
Laravel and Livewire is the best-kept secret ever because everybody is too busy being biased against PHP.
- sodapopcan 5y ago
  Or we're too busy using Phoenix LiveView ;P
  - cutler 5y ago
    Or Rails/Hotwire.
  - midrus 5y ago
    One of the companies I worked for used Elixir/Phoenix. It is an extremely cool piece of tech but it is nowhere near as productive as Laravel, Rails, etc. Missing libraries, difficult to hire for, bad editor support, and overall feels very niche which such a small community. That company eventually moved out of it.
    - sodapopcan 5y ago

fvavsc 5y ago

PHP was my first love. It still is. Professionally I have moved on to other languages. But whenever I have an urge to create something for personal use, PHP is always the most productive way to get it done. With Laravel, I can even make it look polished and put it on the web. PHP is such a joy that I am really thinking about switching back to it for my day job.

progmetaldev 5y ago

In my experience, a lot of the hate that PHP gets is unjustified. I can only speak from personal experience, but most people I know that complain about PHP were just burnt out from dealing with other developers' code. Having such a low barrier to entry created many novice and hobbyist PHP developers to hit the market, and start producing terrible code due to not fully understanding software development practices. I know I never had an issue with PHP, and could get work done very quickly, but once I had to start working through other's spaghetti code it burnt me out and I moved on to other languages with a bit higher barrier to entry.