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PHP 7.0 Nearing Release, Performance Almost As Good As HHVM

An anonymous reader writes: PHP 7.0 RC2 was released on Friday. In addition to the new language features, PHP 7.0 is advertised as having twice the performance of PHP 5. Benchmarks of PHP 7.0 RC2 show that these performance claims are indeed accurate, and just not for popular PHP programs like WordPress. In tests done by Phoronix, the PHP performance was 2~2.5x faster all while consuming less memory than PHP 5.3~5.6. Facebook's HHVM implementation meanwhile still held a small performance lead, though it was consuming much more memory. PHP 7.0 is scheduled to be released in November.

158 comments

  1. Relevance? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Is php even relevant any more?

    It seems to be exclusively In the domain of non programmer - the kinds who constantly pump out insecure code.

    And boy there is a lot of insecure web apps. I don't run php on a public facing server. For me it's the server version of flash on the desktop. You just know there's another joke just around the corner.

    1. Re:Relevance? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

      My take on your post is that 1) you caught a glimpse of one or two tiresome platitudes regarding PHP and decided to try play the solidarity card, but 2) you don't do any developing at all because you don't know programming, and 3) you don't do any hosting of any kind, because you don't know anything about that either.

    2. Re:Relevance? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      My take on your post is that 1) you caught a glimpse of one or two tiresome platitudes regarding PHP and decided to try play the solidarity card, but 2) you don't do any developing at all because you don't know programming, and 3) you don't do any hosting of any kind, because you don't know anything about that either.

      I believe he is actually a dog.

    3. Re:Relevance? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      http://githut.info/

      Nope. Not relevant at all.

    4. Re:Relevance? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      No, it's pretty much a garbage language. Inconsistent, full of insecure pitfalls, goofy syntax and overall completely horrendous. I had the misfortune of dealing with it for years. Never again.

    5. Re:Relevance? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      Oh please. I work for a VC firm and do due diligence. While the guys doing server-side Java and C# are still talking about frameworks, the PHP guys are typically already supporting thousands or even millions of users. Yes, getting a good, bug-free v2 out the door is a challenge with PHP, most startups fail before even finishing a good v1. You can't get to v2 if you don't finish v1! I don't think the usual estimate that PHP is ten times as productive is far from the truth. For good, solid server-side code, I don't think you can beat Java with Spring, but it takes a lot longer and is a lot harder and more expensive to find engineers. Despite the fact our entire board and investors are made-up with former Microsoft people, the vast majority of successful startups we've funded have used PHP.

    6. Re: Relevance? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      So to avoid the "server version of flash" you use what? Javascript? Straight html? Wait, let me guess: Java?

    7. Re:Relevance? by dgatwood · · Score: 5, Informative

      Is php even relevant any more?

      Sure. Lots of folks use PHP for writing quick server code, because it makes light work of prototyping things. If you know what you're doing, it is a solid programming language, offering a fairly clean, C-like syntax, without the horror of Perl's backwards instructions and bare regular expressions, the OO bloat of Java, the need to install additional interpreters (problematic on shared hosting services), etc.

      --

      Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.

    8. Re:Relevance? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      without the horror of Perl's [...] bare regular expressions

      I know what you mean - I regularly have nightmares about not having to randomly scatter extra backslashes throughout my regexes.

    9. Re:Relevance? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      There is no such thing as a "Software Engineer". Developer or programmer? Fine. But slopping Python or Swift around is nowhere near a serious profession like engineering.

    10. Re:Relevance? by Tough+Love · · Score: 2

      I would say that nodejs is now a better choice for anything that would be otherwise done with php.

      --
      When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
    11. Re:Relevance? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      What a lot of people fail to recognize about PHP when they rag on it is its immense framework support. Languages like Ruby still have to catch up to the vastness of PHP's general acceptance and use. If you're a web programmer and favor Linux? And you're not using PHP then you wont get a job.

      Having said that Node.js has taken over the relevancy of languages such as Ruby in later years (or competitors to PHP). But would I compare the library support and framework support of Node.js over PHP? Its certainly true that Node.js is moving up in the world that's for sure but PHP wins on its maturity. Not to say that will be like that forever.

    12. Re:Relevance? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      > Is php even relevant any more?

      According to the W3, over 80% of the server-side dynamic websites still use it:

      http://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/programming_language/all

      I've worked for a lot of startups, and the ones that used PHP were able to concentrate on features rather than the infrastructure. You can argue against a few bad language features, but you simply cannot argue against its effectiveness. The PHP guys I worked with have all been working on an effective product rather than still mucking with infrastructure and frameworks like the compiled language guys. Yes, it's easier to create bad code in PHP than in, for example, Java or C#, but bad developers can create bad code in any language.

    13. Re:Relevance? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Ruby's dead dood. You're better off writing to /cgi-bin with bash scripts then use Ruby.

    14. Re:Relevance? by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I would say that nodejs is now a better choice for anything that would be otherwise done with php.

      You know a language really sucks when switching to JavaScript is considered an improvement.

    15. Re:Relevance? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You sure are fucking stupid, and I say this as a PHP hater.

    16. Re: Relevance? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Now he's going to wax poetic about r.

    17. Re: Relevance? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      eh? C# is a great language.

    18. Re: Relevance? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      This.

      Too many CS majors in here who are basing opinions purely on structure, semantics, data typing, etc.

      What makes a language valuable ultimately is its community, codebase, support and ease of hiring.

      There are some awesome languages out there that have little of the above and will therefore go nowhere.

      PHP isn't going away. It's user base is growing rapidly. The language continues to evolve. And it just doubled in speed.

      Haters can go ahead and hate it. But they're a minority opinion out there in the real world.

    19. Re: Relevance? by dgatwood · · Score: 1

      Yeah, I almost made a comment about the vast quantities of PHP code out there, but decided against it because so much of that code probably shouldn't be out there. These days, before I bring in any piece of PHP software, I tend to spend at least a day or two doing a cursory security audit in which I look for SQL injection and shell command argument passing vulnerabilities. I usually find some.

      But yeah, at least from a jobs perspective, the community, codebase, support, and ease of hiring are what makes a language valuable. And the more bad code there is out there, the easier it is to get a job fixing all the holes. :-D

      --

      Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.

    20. Re:Relevance? by Art3x · · Score: 1

      At first my web stack was: 10% JavaScript, 60% PHP, 10% Apache, and 20% PostgreSQL.
      Now it's more like: 30% JavaScript, 10% PHP, 20% Apache, and 40% PostgreSQL, as I learned more about those other layers.

      I try to limit the PHP to just a thin connection layer to the database:

      $db = new PDO;
      $q = 'select a fairly refined query that does all the calculation and filtering';
      $q = $db->prepare($q);
      $q->execute($v);

      and as a templating language, using short tags and the alternate syntax:

      <table>
      <? foreach ($records as $r): ?>
          <tr>
              <td><?= h($r['id']) ?></td>
              <td><?= h($r['name']) ?></td>
              <td><?= h($r['note']) ?></td>
          </tr>
      <? endforeach ?>
      </table>

    21. Re:Relevance? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Your inability to gauge functionality is why you're unemployed and on an AC /. account trolling. Just bein real for ya.

    22. Re: Relevance? by jon3k · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Python, Ruby or node.js. I think PHP gets a bad rap, personally. Sure its inconsistent and kind of clunky, but it's very approachable, relatively fast and runs everywhere. But it's also got a big messy history behind it, and it's an easy target to poke fun at.

    23. Re:Relevance? by KGIII · · Score: 1

      Shh! Nobody is supposed to know that.

      --
      "So long and thanks for all the fish."
    24. Re:Relevance? by KGIII · · Score: 1

      Their engineering degree? Well, I suspect they don't have one.

      --
      "So long and thanks for all the fish."
    25. Re:Relevance? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I use PHP as a command line scripting language exclusively. It's fine for that purpose: easy to write, rapid prototyping, and great for one-off scripts.

    26. Re:Relevance? by SQL+Error · · Score: 1

      Ruby has some issues, but it is superior to PHP in every possible way. And for the most part, vastly superior.

    27. Re:Relevance? by SQL+Error · · Score: 2

      What a lot of people fail to recognize about PHP when they rag on it is its immense framework support.

      The problem is, the frameworks are awful too.

      Having said that Node.js has taken over the relevancy of languages such as Ruby in later years (or competitors to PHP).

      Yes, Node.js is a competitor to PHP in sheer misguided awfulness, and a bloody-minded insistence on doing everything in the worst possible way. But that is not, for most of us here, a reason to use it.

    28. Re:Relevance? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      20 % Apache. You can program Apache now? If you're talking about config lines then give nginx a go, and also get the improved performance that it brings.

    29. Re:Relevance? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Ruby has some issues, but it is superior to PHP in every possible way. And for the most part, vastly superior.

      Holy crap I hear this ruby loving all the time!

      Ruby is inferior in one way that is the most important!

      Ruby developers cost WAY MORE than PHP developers.

      PLUS, frameworks such as Symfony have revolutionized software development in PHP.

      Working for a company that gets way over 100M requests a day I am pretty sure we are happy with PHP.

    30. Re:Relevance? by Aethedor · · Score: 1

      Please, explain to me in what ways it's superior?

      --
      It doesn't have to be like this. All we need to do is make sure we keep talking.
    31. Re: Relevance? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Which implementation do you mean Visual C#, .NET Framework, Mono, DotGNU? From where I stand they all fuckin suck. Mono and .NET having to be the worst out of all of them.

    32. Re:Relevance? by Bert64 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      It's more like visual basic... Easy for people to learn, so attracts a lot of novice programmers who write poor code.

      --
      http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
    33. Re: Relevance? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Saidly it still is..

    34. Re:Relevance? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      without the horror of Perl's backwards instructions and bare regular expressions

      Please elaborate. I know Perl, but I haven't a clue about what you're referring to.

      By 'bare', do you mean first-class regular expressions? If so, what's wrong with them? Trying to use regexps with a string syntax (like so many languages do) is utterly silly and requires stupid amounts of backslashing.

    35. Re: Relevance? by cyber-vandal · · Score: 1

      C# is so dead they released a new version of it in July. I'm not sure why you think it's dependent on IE because I use Chrome for my web dev and it works fine.

    36. Re:Relevance? by dinfinity · · Score: 1

      You know a language really sucks when switching to JavaScript is considered an improvement by one random guy on the internet.

      FTFY.

    37. Re: Relevance? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      the world needs more hackable cloudy shite. not.

      get yourself swift, rust or sappeur.

    38. Re: Relevance? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      you are whitewashing. ALL the stuff done in php is horribly insecure. unfit to be operated if not locked tightly into some small intranet.

      here they hacked an entire cloud provider, hetzner, by means od some php dreck gui tool.

    39. Re: Relevance? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      you run this cheating website they have hosed recently ?

    40. Re: Relevance? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      yeah, why buy a mercedes if there are so many FIATs available at low cost?

      seriously, you are an imbecile who apparently has not heard the expression cyber war ever.

    41. Re:Relevance? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      BS in industrial and systems engineering, minor in computer science.

      You're welcome, fools.

    42. Re: Relevance? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You must think everything is shit.

    43. Re:Relevance? by JustAnotherOldGuy · · Score: 0

      Is php even relevant any more?

      2003 called, they want their lame "PHP is for teh losers" joke back.

      The fact is that PHP has made me hundreds of thousands of dollars over the last few years without costing me a cent. I have dozens of websites churning away earning money, and they all run on PHP. (A classic LAMP stack, actually.)

      Feel free to rag on PHP to your heart's content, but coding in PHP has allowed me to work from home for years, do what I want, retire early, and enjoy my life....while you probably have to go into work and slave away each day, hoping that The Boss doesn't fire you.

      So by all means, please keep telling me how awful PHP is, I'd love to hear more. ;)

      --
      Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
    44. Re:Relevance? by JustAnotherOldGuy · · Score: 1

      It gets the job done and makes me money every single day, so honestly, I don't care how inconsistent it is or how silly the syntax seems. I make my house payment with PHP every month and that's the bottom line.

      --
      Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
    45. Re:Relevance? by JustAnotherOldGuy · · Score: 0

      The fact is that PHP works. It gets the job done. Most everything else is irrelevant to me.

      The fact is that in the last 10 ~ 12 years, PHP has made me hundreds of thousands of dollars and hasn't cost me anything. It works, I like it, The End.

      If these nancy-boy frou-frou programmers turn their nose up at it, good for them. But PHP is making me money every day, allowing me to goof off and live a life without of relative leisure, while they have to drag their "elite-coder" asses into work each day and grumble about how much they hate their fucking job. lol

      --
      Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
    46. Re:Relevance? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      According to the W3, over 80% of the server-side dynamic websites still use it:

      http://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/programming_language/all

      I'm not quite sure what "the W3" is, but if you mean the W3C, they have nothing to do with that site.

    47. Re:Relevance? by slashdice · · Score: 1

      It's worse than that -- all the non-programmers have moved to node!

      --
      Copyright (c) 1990 - 2014 Dice. All rights reserved. Use of this comment is subject to certain Terms and Conditions.
    48. Re: Relevance? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Still waiting for ONE example of how php is responsible for insecure applications? When you have shitty "engineers" ANY application will be insecure. So go ahead and give me ONE good example of application insecurity I can't avoid with good coding practices that only affects php. I'll wait. If you say sql injection, cross domain scripting, or clickjacking I won't even waste time reading any further.

    49. Re: Relevance? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      When did he say he was an expert?

    50. Re:Relevance? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
      HAHA -- Once time I evaluated a codebase prior to an acquihire. Figured it was better than reading their resumes. Anyhow, instead of using perl regexes, these bozos implemented their own versions of preg_split, preg_match, functions and used them. That wasn't even the worst WTF.

      Naturally, we passed. Another company did acquihire them but I think most if not all the employees were fired within 6 months. Go figure.

      (Just a note about acquihires for those outside SV -- often a mutual investor will pressure you to acquihire other failed startups so they can all it a successful exit. In some cases, they'll offer to give you, eg, a $500,000 investment, which you immediately pay back to him for this turd company he previously invested in).

    51. Re:Relevance? by Loconut1389 · · Score: 1

      This non-programmer of 20 some years makes 6 figures doing php. i learned c/c++ in college, wrote research and defense contracting apps in them, learned python and worked for companies everyone has heard of, etc. But PHP to my chagrin has been where the work was for me and ive had to keep doing it - but its one saving grace has been better and better strict options / hinting that help make better code. PHP is finally catching up.

    52. Re:Relevance? by narcc · · Score: 1

      They don't actually know. The best you can hope for are some empty platitudes.

    53. Re: Relevance? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      i see php has their propaganda forces by now. cui bono ? those who hate intransparency.

    54. Re: Relevance? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      all the "comfort" features of php basically facilitate horrible security risks. that includes the typelessness, which exists apparently until today.

      and c is equally shitty.

      we should be using some great algol descendants like ada, pascal, modula 2, swift, rust or sappeur. but alas, this industry is strategically influenced by dark interests. in some circles security means hackability. go figure.

    55. Re:Relevance? by theArtificial · · Score: 1

      Good thing no other languages enable writing of poor code otherwise we'd be in trouble!

      --
      Man blir trött av att gå och göra ingenting.
    56. Re:Relevance? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I knew some Perl nutjob was going to get pissed off because someone told the truth about his favourite scripting language. Perl is sloppy, slow and obsolete.

    57. Re:Relevance? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Perl can't even directly handle arrays. You have to do a bunch of referencing and dereferencing bullshit just to pass them along.

    58. Re:Relevance? by dgatwood · · Score: 1

      From my perspective, regular expressions outside the context of a string leads to, among other things, all sorts of fun for IDEs, where they can't properly do brace matching because you have a brace in a regex and they don't know what to do with it. The string syntax is much less problematic because they invariably follow bog-standard language parsing rules, which are much easier to handle than parsing regular expressions (where the rules are inconsistent from one language to the next in subtle ways, with Perl being the biggest mess).

      What makes Perl's regular expression engine particularly nasty is that there's more than one way to do it. Don't like slashes as regex relimiters? Why not use brackets? Or parentheses? Or curly braces? The complexity of the parsing rules goes up by a sizable margin every time you add such "handy" features. And the way special characters are handled inside a regular expression depends on context, which makes it a serious pile of hurt.

      By contrast, I can parse a regex in a C string in about three lines of code (count the number of double quote marks not preceded by an odd number of backslashes or inside single quotes, and if you get an odd number of double quote marks, you're inside a string), and any brace matching engine that can't handle such simple rules is just sad.

      By backwards instructions, I mean that in C, you write this:

      if (foo) bar();

      whereas in Perl, you write this:

      bar() if foo();

      That design violates the norms of natural languages, where conditional expressions almost invariably precede the actions that they modify, and as such, leads to many an incorrect assumption when skimming other people's code.

      --

      Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.

    59. Re:Relevance? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      ... or it's a troll wearing a Dog fur?

    60. Re:Relevance? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      > The string syntax is much less problematic because they invariably follow bog-standard language parsing rules

      But you don't have to parse the regex! You have to parse the delimiters. It's the same three lines of C code, only with a / as delimiter instead of a "

      (I agree that having the alternative delimiters does make syntax highlighters' job more difficult.)

      > By backwards instructions

      I think it is often much clearer to write

      return if $foo;

      than

      if ($foo)
              return;

      Of course, you need to know *when* it's clearer and only use the other form then. return, next etc are good candidates, and having them at the beginning of the line before the condition makes the code flow much more clear to me.

    61. Re:Relevance? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Then you should be fired, because you have no idea what you're talking about.

      The productivity gap between PHP (or in fact any dynamic language) and compiled languages like Java is a complete myth for anything non-trivial.

      Why? Because with PHP maintenance and development costs shoot up exponentially as the code base grows, whilst with compiled type-safe languages it is closer to linear.

      There are entire classes of bug that type safety and compilation catch that can be incredibly hard to track down and debug. Yes, PHP developers will just tell you that they're simply better, and they don't write code with bugs, but it's that attitude that has left PHP apps as the single most exploited server side technology stack on the planet by quite a margin.

      Calling PHP 10x more productive is comical, yes, that may be so if you want to churn out an unusuable, broken product that inevitably flops (that's probably why most of your startups fail before finishing v1 - they're using PHP and as the code grows towards being v1 complete it just falls apart, broken, and unusable).

      The PHP quick start advantage is typically gone in a week, sometimes even days or hours. After that the productivity advantage rapidly tends towards languages like Java and C#.

      So sure, you may find whilst the PHP guys have knocked some crap together in a few days, and the C#/Java guys are still building up their underlying architecture, whose site is still successfully serving people and making money in a months time? It wont be the PHP one because you'll be swallowed up by massive maintenance costs, tons of bugs, complaining users, and scalability issues so bad you're throwing so much money at additional hardware in a desperate attempt to alleviate it that your site remains unprofitable.

      Even Facebook that had so much money thrown at it it wasn't funny and could hire the best of the best remained unprofitable for way too long, with their infrastructure requiring 16gb of RAM PER FUCKING USER, not really stabilising until they have slowly managed to hack PHP away, first by translating to C and compiling directly, and now by simply creating a Java-esque VM for it. Had PHP been developed using say, Java and Spring as you suggest then there would've been a drastic reduction in running costs at Facebook and they could've been profitable (and had a more stable site that broke less) far earlier.

    62. Re:Relevance? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      If you knew Perl, you'd know that arrays degrading to lists is a design decision. And a terribly handy one as well, if you ask me.

      Just because you're used to the 'everything is an object' mentality of some languages doesn't mean Perl's approach is 'bullshit'.

    63. Re: Relevance? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      From a sysadmin perspective ruby is annoying to deploy, the reliance on non packaged gems is problematic. It kinda sucks memory. The only complaints I have about performance are ruby applications. Php may very well be bad from a dev perspective but I sure as heck prefer deploying it over most anything else. Its trivial to sandbox, uses bugger all resources and I don't get complaints about the apps or the environment.

    64. Re:Relevance? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      So I'm primarily a PHP developer. However, Ruby does have a number of things going for it. It does not have first-class functions, but it does implement things like closures in a useful way. Metaprogramming is also nicer for the most part. Operating on arrays and collections tends to be easier, and for better or worse almost everything can be changed at runtime. Off the top of my head, you can't screw with simple variable assignment, and you can't destroy the concept of classes, but pretty much everything else is up for grabs. You can do clever things with method arguments that PHP forces you to do more explicitly, e.g. group all arguments after the third into an array. Also, an obvious difference is that PHP is exclusively a web programming language, whereas Ruby is intended to be a general-purpose programming language. Finally, Ruby avoids PHP's type coercion/type juggling, which is a misfeature.

      PHP has advantages too, namely that it's easier to learn and to set up, and it's a little harder to write incomprehensible code. Not that's it's hard to write "What were you thinking?!" code, but anything that lets you redefine basic operators has more potential for abuse.

      Generally, Ruby code is more elegant and concise than PHP, and more readily comprehensible than Haskell or (heaven forfend) APL.

    65. Re:Relevance? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      By backwards instructions, I mean that in C, you write this:

      if (foo) bar();

      whereas in Perl, you write this:

      bar() if foo();

      That design violates the norms of natural languages, where conditional expressions almost invariably precede the actions that they modify, and as such, leads to many an incorrect assumption when skimming other people's code.

      You're an absolute fucking moron if you think that doesn't happen in natural languages.

      And really, of all the PLs to complain about not following natural language principles, you chose Perl?! I stand by the above assessment.

    66. Re:Relevance? by dgatwood · · Score: 1

      But you don't have to parse the regex! You have to parse the delimiters. It's the same three lines of C code, only with a / as delimiter instead of a "

      If someone uses brackets as delimiters, your code has to also parse character classes correctly.

      --

      Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.

    67. Re:Relevance? by dgatwood · · Score: 1

      You're an absolute fucking moron if you think that doesn't happen in natural languages.

      It is legal in most natural languages, and is quite common in non-imperative sentences. However, for imperative sentences (commands), putting the action before the condition is not the normal way that people speak in most natural languages, precisely because it leads to mistakes. For example, in a high-stress situation, if one person shouts to another "Shoot her if she moves", there's a high probability that the other person will shoot reflexively before even hearing the last half of the sentence.

      Similarly, shifting the "if" statement off to the right end of the line makes it much more likely to be missed by someone scanning down the column of text, because people naturally skim down the justified edge of a block of code, rather than the ragged edge. This language design anti-pattern makes Perl code considerably harder to skim than languages that do things in the more typical order of condition followed by action. (To be pedantic, C does provide one statement type—do-while—that puts the action before the condition, but the action is preceded by an additional token that makes it obvious that the action is conditional. This distinction matters.)

      --

      Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.

    68. Re: Relevance? by KingMotley · · Score: 1

      .NET Framework isn't C#. It's a framework. I've never seen Mono used in a real production environment (Not that it can't be, it's just not nearly as common). I've never heard of DotGNU.

      Which version of Python did you think was better than C#? The 2.x version, or the 3.x version that's mostly incompatible? Or are you using IronPython or the LLVM versions?

  2. And que by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    And que the fractal of bad design people

    1. Re: And que by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I was about to say que the que of fractal of bad design posts.

    2. Re:And que by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Are they intertwined with the fractal of insecure apologetics?

    3. Re: And que by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Queue.

    4. Re: And que by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Or 'cue', maybe. "Que" means nothing, unless you're speaking spanish.

    5. Re: And que by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Cue.

    6. Re: And que by rHBa · · Score: 1

      Cue if you're playing snooker or pool, queue if you'e standing in line.

    7. Re: And que by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      Cue if you're playing snooker or pool

      ... or if you're calling for someone to begin their performance, as in the OP.

    8. Re: And que by ChunderDownunder · · Score: 1

      Sorry, just reading The Politics of Star Trek article.

      DonÂt forget Q, the omnipotent person/race.

    9. Re: And que by pspahn · · Score: 1

      "Que" means nothing, unless you're speaking spanish.

      Or eating deliciously prepared meats cooked with fire and smoke.

      --
      Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
  3. faster php? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    does it still have those retarded function names?

    1. Re: faster php? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      A lot of the language is just a thin wrapper around various libraries, which is why so many functions are like that. Newer functions and classes are much cleaner, but there is a bunch of old junk still in there for compatability.

      Used properly it is a nice language. Unfortunately most people don't bother to really learn it and just copy and paste code. A big flaw in the language is that it let's you get away with really awful code.

    2. Re:faster php? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You are free to redefine functions with your own functions any way you like and then create first class variables to call them inside strings if you want, or elsewhere--and this is why 80% of the major frameworks are written in PHP.

  4. NodeJS by maop · · Score: 1

    I already switched to NodeJS because of the convenience of one language.

    1. Re: NodeJS by SQL+Error · · Score: 4, Informative

      So from an entirely awful language and environment to just an almost entirely awful one?

    2. Re: NodeJS by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      An almost entirely awful one that is the only choice on the browser

      The gimmick here is that using the same language on both sides of the fence lets you re-use some of your code

      I am not all that hot on nodeJS myself but the idea of that re-use appeals to me and I am thinking of screwing around with nodeJS on my next personal project to see if there's any merit to it

    3. Re: NodeJS by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      An almost entirely awful one that is the only choice on the browser

      The gimmick here is that using the same language on both sides of the fence lets you re-use some of your code

      That language doesn't actually have to be JavaScript.

    4. Re:NodeJS by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I never really got this. You'll rarely need identical code on both client and server, and just about every server side language can serialise an object response to JSON automagically. The whole point in having a dynamic language client side is so you can access whatever the server has thrown you. As such the idea that sharing code client/server thanks to node.js is 99% nonsense.

      It's far better to actually have a proper development language that isn't shit on the server, that is drastically more performant, and that has a worthwhile toolchain as well as many more years of being battle tested.

      If having the convenience of having the same language server and client side is your priority when developing a web application, then your priorities are entirely broken.

    5. Re: NodeJS by MenThal · · Score: 1

      How's learning Mandarin going then?

    6. Re:NodeJS by joss · · Score: 1

      I went down that route. However, I really missed being able to write code like this:

      1 do this
      2 do that

      as opposed to

      do_this(function(err,res) { if (err) {something..} else { do_that(res) })

      Once your backend gets complicated, may the lord help you.

      If you backend is simple, it doesn't matter what language you use.

      There is a far superior language you can use on both ends: scala - scala.js is really nice

      --
      http://rareformnewmedia.com/
  5. PHP Bashing by TheBlackMan · · Score: 1

    Weekly PHP bashing contest starting in 3...2... Aaaand I was late.

  6. Student Suspended Over Suspected Use of PHP by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1
  7. This is great news by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    php is out there, it's everywhere, and if the engine gets 2 to 2.5 times faster, I am grateful.

  8. PHP - 21st Century COBOL by Peter+(Professor)+Fo · · Score: 0

    It works. It isn't sexy. Who cares? You can write awful programs... Unlike any other language of course It evolves slowly. To paraphrase Tolstoy: "Happy programmers are all alike; every language is unhappy in its own way." Most of us never come across edge-cases and PHP is still getting regularly fixed. But also the tectonic shifts are happening at tectonic speed as they should. So to my mind the repairs and resdesigns are suitably separated and yet both going on.. PHP is here to stay for the next 40 years. Personally I try to nibble with node as it's a completely different mindset, tool chain and opportunity but PHP is a workhorse. We should be pleased to see v7 is emerging. None of us is going to bet on V 7.0.0 but by 7.1 or 7.2 we'll have jumped at our own comfortable pace.

    1. Re:PHP - 21st Century COBOL by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      PHP is here to stay for the next 40 years.

      Ahem.. no son. Don't be ignorant.

      Perl, C, and even Python? Yes. Adults program in those languages (as they did COBOL and FORTRAN).. but PHP? Nope.

      Tell you what, little boy, any time you want to compare my Zope/Plone and even Mason code? Sure.. I'll show you revised, stable code that has stood the test of time. Show me a PHP framework (not even accounting for the shitty language) that has the kind of stability of any of the aforementioned.

      If you truly want the new COBOL, its name is Java.

    2. Re:PHP - 21st Century COBOL by MightyMartian · · Score: 2

      I hate PHP, but that doesn't mean I go around waving my dick. PHP is like VB6, it sucks but a boatload of code is written in it.

      --
      The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
    3. Re: PHP - 21st Century COBOL by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Laravel.

    4. Re:PHP - 21st Century COBOL by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Wow! Where'd you come from? The 80's? You know we have this new hip device called a "mouse" you should check em out.

      To directly answer your question. CodeIgnite, Zend and Symfony just name a few.

    5. Re:PHP - 21st Century COBOL by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I gotcha... children use PHP. Adults throw personal insults instead of making an actual point, denigrate a language that they admit they do not use, and make statements that contain within them the proof that they have no idea what they're talking about?

      I admit I'm tempted to tell you you're an idiot. I have a feeling you already know that, though, and your post is a pathetic attempt to convince yourself otherwise.

    6. Re: PHP - 21st Century COBOL by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      No, please. Not Zend!

    7. Re:PHP - 21st Century COBOL by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      HA! I took COBOL back in University, I do some PHP now, PHP is **NOT** COBOL by any goddamn stretch.

    8. Re: PHP - 21st Century COBOL by Aethedor · · Score: 1
      --
      It doesn't have to be like this. All we need to do is make sure we keep talking.
    9. Re: PHP - 21st Century COBOL by Aethedor · · Score: 1
      --
      It doesn't have to be like this. All we need to do is make sure we keep talking.
    10. Re:PHP - 21st Century COBOL by squiggleslash · · Score: 1

      Java is 21st Century COBOL. PHP is... something else entirely.

      Java and COBOL are programming languages that you do massive waterfall projects in. They're both designed to be easily readable and validatable by a reasonably qualified third party. (Yes, I know, Java routinely fails at that, in part because the assumption was that "everyone knows C" and so the syntax was based upon that, without any investigation into C's flaws) They're designed for slow, deliberate, programming by programmers who are reading from a spec.

      PHP is much more free form, for better or worse. That's the root of why the two schools look down on one another, with PHP programmers able to point at higher productivity, and Java/COBOL programmers able to point at "right first time" solid code with few security flaws upon the eventual first release of their code.

      Not a PHP fan myself, but that's because the syntax and feature list are shitty. A cleaned up PHP-like language would be very valuable, though many would argue that's exactly what Javascript - the language, not the framework built into browsers - is.

      --
      You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
  9. PHP works well, if you know what you're doing. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I've written several commercial grade, industry wide web applications in PHP... can't consider a time when someone has hacked the site, jacked the site, or basically screwed it over because of some piss poor LANGUAGE flaw.

    A great developer is what matters.

    And I've seen my fair share of perl code that was completely stupid, filled with security holes and bugs up the ass.

    Honestly, I've been using PHP for twelve years, and Java, C++, and C# for about as much... and frankly wonder WTF sort of mind it takes to even create a shitty application in the first place.

    Am I an exception to the rule? Probably. But I'm excited for PHP 7. It works... if you know how to make it work.

    I've seen enough shit websites built in PHP, and ASP, and perl, and C#, and JSP/Java... WTFever... and frankly, its not the language that's the problem.

    1. Re:PHP works well, if you know what you're doing. by Pikoro · · Score: 3, Insightful

      nail
      head

      --
      "Freedom in the USA is not the ability to do what you want. It is the ability to stop others from doing what THEY want"
    2. Re:PHP works well, if you know what you're doing. by Tough+Love · · Score: 3, Funny

      When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.

      --
      When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
    3. Re:PHP works well, if you know what you're doing. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      thumb.js

    4. Re:PHP works well, if you know what you're doing. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      PHP has/had some genuine shitty misfeatures like register_globals, default error_reporting to the client, and magic_quotes.

      If you've been writing code long enough, you've probably forgotten the awful stuff you wrote as a kid.

      You become a great developer with years of experience and, in my opinion, treating it like engineering where you always keep in mind how to have the software fail safely; and treating it like people are *actively trying* to make your software break and covering your inputs and outputs and domains. Your car needs an engine, but brakes are just as important.

    5. Re: PHP works well, if you know what you're doing. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      This. I would also add that something like 90% of PHP programmers don't know what they're doing.

    6. Re:PHP works well, if you know what you're doing. by tingentleman · · Score: 1

      Want to keep your skills 1337 and exclusive? You need a language with a predisposition to ideologically bureaucratic code and a ton of scaffolding that ensures even simple tasks take several days paid consultancy time. PHP is not for you, my insecure coding buddy.

      Want to get a new start-up to market rapidly without an enormous team? Choosing something simple that gets out of your way gives the best chance of success.

      Worried about the lack of strong typing causing bugs? Ask yourself this - how many production system bugs have you ever had in your life that would have been caught by a type-militant language at compile time? 99% of the time bugs are due to bad application design. HIRE GOOD PROGRAMMERS. If they need baby sitting to the point that they pass arrays to a function that needs an int then DON'T HIRE THEM.

    7. Re:PHP works well, if you know what you're doing. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Given that PHP has some of the most bureaucratic and nonsensical frameworks (e.g. CakePHP that extended MVC because it didn't get MVC) going and is host to by far the most exploited sites on the web I think you have your first paragraph entirely backwards.

      "Ask yourself this - how many production system bugs have you ever had in your life that would have been caught by a type-militant language at compile time? 99% of the time bugs are due to bad application design."

      You're not really a programmer are you? I mean, nothing you say actually makes any sense. Are you seriously saying no one ever gets compile time errors that would've resulted in bugs in an interpreted language like PHP? Really?

      Get some experience beyond your my first website before commenting again please.

  10. Cost of deployment of Node.js by tepples · · Score: 2

    I would say that nodejs is now a better choice for anything that would be otherwise done with php.

    Including cost of deployment, especially on a small slice of a leased server? PHP has long had a deployment cost advantage. It also has some very widely used applications. What Node.js based forum software is better than phpBB? What Node.js based wiki software is better than MediaWiki? And what Node.js based blog software is any good?

    1. Re:Cost of deployment of Node.js by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      none. node.js is not reliable enough in a production server environment.
      Its ok for proof of concept and testing out ideas, but garbage for infrastucture.
      I've pulled all our code out of node.js now for our product, just to get something I don't have to watch like a hawk.
      PHP is reliable at least.

    2. Re:Cost of deployment of Node.js by JustAnotherOldGuy · · Score: 1

      What Node.js based forum software is better than phpBB? What Node.js based wiki software is better than MediaWiki? And what Node.js based blog software is any good?

      1) None.
      2) None.
      3) None.

      They don't exist because writing these applications in Hode.js would be stupid and pointless.

      (I personally prefer SMF to phpBB, but both of them are pretty capable forum systems.)

      --
      Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
    3. Re:Cost of deployment of Node.js by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Including cost of deployment, especially on a small slice of a leased server?

      Why the fuck would you want that?

      What Node.js based forum software is better than phpBB? What Node.js based wiki software is better than MediaWiki? And what Node.js based blog software is any good?

      How is that relevant when deciding what platform to use for a new application?

    4. Re:Cost of deployment of Node.js by tepples · · Score: 1

      Why the fuck would you want that?

      Because not everybody who wants to put up a website has the money for a dedicated server.

      How is that relevant when deciding what platform to use for a new application?

      Because you may want to develop your application to connect to an existing application's authentication framework or as an extension for an existing application.

    5. Re:Cost of deployment of Node.js by jean-guy69 · · Score: 1

      Node.js forum software => NodeBB
      I use it and IMHO it is pretty decent

      Node.js blog software => Ghost

    6. Re:Cost of deployment of Node.js by jean-guy69 · · Score: 1

      As for not being production ready, the Joyent IaaS solution SmartDataCenter heavily uses Node.js
      It is used on many public / private cloud including Joyent public one..

    7. Re:Cost of deployment of Node.js by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Because not everybody who wants to put up a website has the money for a dedicated server.

      Sucks to be them, especially if it means they have to torture themselves with PHP.

      Because you may want to develop your application to connect to an existing application's authentication framework

      Deciding something as fundamental as what programming language to use just because some idiot wants to log in with their blog password is the tail wagging the dog taken to the extreme. And that's only if the existing application doesn't use something like LDAP, OAuth, or even just simple hashed passwords in a database, that can be used regardless of language.

      or as an extension for an existing application.

      Because companies are going to develop their shiny new inventory and order tracking system as a fucking Wordpress plugin.

    8. Re:Cost of deployment of Node.js by tepples · · Score: 1

      Sucks to be them

      What would you recommend instead for those for whom it sucks to be?

  11. Six problems, some of which PHP 7 addresses by tepples · · Score: 3, Interesting

    As I wrote in my article about PHP, some very simple coding standards analogous to those described in Douglas Crockford's JavaScript: The Good Parts will work around most of the stuff described in the "fractal" article. This left six distinct points, some of which PHP 7 addresses to an extent.

    • Number-like comparison of strings can never be fully turned off. PHP 7 type hints diminish this somewhat, as you at least know what types you are getting in and out of a function.
    • Parse errors are fatal rather than causing include_once to throw an exception the way Python's import does. PHP 7 converts many fatal errors to engine exceptions.
    • Inconsistent naming conventions and duplicate functionality. PHP 7 removes some of the duplicate functionality.
    • Associativity for the ternary ? : operator is on the less useful side. PHP 7 adds an additional null coalescing operator ?? whose associativity is on the useful side.
    • No keyword arguments. PHP 7 does not change this.
    • No file-level selection of old or new semantics the way Python has from __future__ import some_feature.
  12. Mongo DB is web scale by goombah99 · · Score: 1
    --
    Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
  13. Performancce is not what the HHVM is about by EmperorOfCanada · · Score: 3, Insightful

    My theory about the HHVM is that you have all this top talent at FB who are forced to either use PHP to work on the core product or they can use other languages but not hang out with the core developers. Thus the HHVM would be much like the JVM in that it would allow for PHP to be end run and other languages could run inside the VM.

    Also working on the VM would appeal to the academic pseudo cred that they want while working at the very heart of FB. In theory this end run will allow these top tier developers to go to conferences and say, I am a core developer at FB, I work on the key features, but I am not a pathetic hack using PHP, I am a god programming in (Haskell, Lisp, Scala, Go, Rust, R, Erlang, etc) and thus I am beyond mere mortals who program in the pedestrian languages that are so far beneath me that can barely think about them.

    All this without spitting in Zuckerberg's face and telling him his life's work was done like a two bit hack using the tools of a nube.

    But some of the wind might be taken out of their sails if PHP 7 comes along and eats at the main metric that they can use to justify this end run. I suspect that somehow stats will be pulled out that show that under carefully crafted circumstances that lowly mortals can barely understand that HHVM is so much better than PHP 7 that it completely justifies the massive efforts that have gone into HHVM.

    The real test will be to see if some organizations such as Wikipedia then dump HHVM to return to the less complex deployment environment found in PHP 7.

    1. Re:Performancce is not what the HHVM is about by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Interesting theory, what do you base it off of?

      Specifically, developing hhvm for academic pseudo cred so they can sit at the hipster's conference table. Almost nobody gives a shit about the languages you listed. (Well, I can see Go maybe getting traction...)

      In my opinion hiphop and hhvm were justified because php is so goddamn slow.

    2. Re:Performancce is not what the HHVM is about by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      In my opinion hiphop and hhvm were justified because php is so goddamn slow.

      I'd guess it has more to do with memory usage than speed. Their DB access is likely to be the slowest part of their stack. now the HACK language does change that quite a bit with its async calls and the question is does facebook use the PHP language or are they on HACK now?

    3. Re:Performancce is not what the HHVM is about by EmperorOfCanada · · Score: 1

      I have met many programmers who became religious about particular technologies. I know an electrical engineer who wants to pretty much set fire to the arduino factory. His argument is that the entire at family of controllers are for amateurs. He was royally pissed when I found one in a brand name toothbrush.

      Then you get XML people who think that JSON is basically satan's breath. Or Python 3.x people who think that Python 2.7 people should all be thrown into a pit. But PHP is about the least "academic" language in the world. If you go to a ML conference and your slides and sample code are in R, matlab, Python, or the newest ML fad lua then you will get approving nods. But if you pulled out a strong AI written in PHP they would tar and feather you and nobody would cite your paper, they would cite the paper where someone redid your AI in a "proper" language.

      Even the people accomplishing these astounding performance increases in PHP aren't getting much cred. If someone altered either of the core pythons to get this kind of performance they would be hailed as heros. But instead the PHP developers are looked at with a mixture of hatred and scorn. Scorn because PHP was seen as so slow. And hatred because now PHP will live to fight their favourite language another day.

      My theory on PHP is that one of the problems that many people have with PHP is that it was written to do a set of jobs very well. It is an excellent language for non-programmers who are wanting to make their html more powerful and it is a great language for quick and dirty tasks. Whereas if you look at Python 2.7 it very much was in this same sort of spirit of simplicity. But Python 3.x is getting more and more "Pythonic" which generally means that it no longer reads like Pseudocode but you have to actually parse the code in your head in order to understand what is going on. This is great for people who want to be able to separate themselves by being experts in their language. The key being that expert is a separate definition than being good. Expert, as in they know the ins and outs of the language. Whether they can write quality, easy to maintain code, is a whole other skill that often the "experts" in a single language never seem to focus on.

      PHP with its extreme focus on just getting the damn job done seems to really piss these sorts off. Thus my theory that the "experts" at FB hate PHP and aren't really interested in getting the damn job done, but instead want to impress people with their HHVM. This gives a whole lot more cred then having built a better way to upload a fart joke to your friends.

  14. hahahahahaaha by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I was reading,waiting for your language retort, then I read java

    do you actually take yourself serious?

    1. Re:hahahahahaaha by JustAnotherOldGuy · · Score: 1

      I was reading,waiting for your language retort, then I read java

      do you actually take yourself serious?

      I laughed too, especially at the "stellar performance" bit. Ya gotta admit, that was funny.

      --
      Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
  15. Re:I'm that first poster by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Objective-C ?

  16. It's not about the language by Aethedor · · Score: 1

    This endless PHP bashing is getting a bit sad. Sure, earlier versions of PHP did have some bad things, but with PHP 5 it's very easy to create solid applications. You still may not like PHP, that's fine. In that case the only wise thing to do is to choose something else. But for any badly written application in PHP 5 I'm 100% sure that the programmer is to blame, not the language. Yes, looking at all the other modern programming languages these days, that I think that's the case for all of them. But PHP 5 is a modern and mature programmming language and has everything you need to write a modern web application. It can easily compete with the others.

    To all those PHP-haters: bash and whine whatever you like. The world doesn't care. Look at the statistics: PHP is used much by many. It's here to stay. Grow up and move on.

    Myself, I use PHP a lot. I've written my own framework. I really like PHP, because it's easy to use and specially because it's so easy to deploy. Easier than many other languages. I'm really looking forward to what PHP 7 has to offer.

    --
    It doesn't have to be like this. All we need to do is make sure we keep talking.
  17. Re:I'm that first poster by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The first version of asp was released in January 2002, the first version of PHP was released in 1995 and PHP 4 was released in May 2000...

  18. Yayyy.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Back to nodeJs development *cracks knuckles*

  19. PHP 6.0? by Drinking+Bleach · · Score: 1

    What happened to PHP 6.0? Are they skipping a version just to one-up Perl?

    1. Re:PHP 6.0? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It was abandoned.

    2. Re:PHP 6.0? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      PHP 6 was supposed to be the version after PHP 5.2 (or was it 5.1?).

      However, there where huge snags related with the unicode, which was delaying everything over and over again.

      The end result was that PHP 6 functionalities where cut down and released in subsequent 5.x release in more manageable release steps.

      PHP is a solid language, i just find it infuriating that after all this years, they still didn't realized that to make it a proper language they will need to do some code cleanup in the core of it, specially with the dreadful refresh loop which forces every request to reload the code.

      The opcache alleviates the problem, but it is just a band-aid.

      And language uniformity is something that was always talked about since PHP 4, and never addressed. Even after 15 years of PHP you will still refer to the manual because it is impossible to memorize all the different function names. Is it strlen, str_len or string_length? What comes first the needle or the object?

      And then, there is always the problem of the "script" culture. Bashing a couple of lines of code can solve one problem, but is the code maintainable? Most probably not.

      Proper use of software engineering processes is something that still needs to get into the head of most developers of PHP.

      And nope, just having unit tests is not a solution if your tests are crap.

  20. There is no perfect tool, but it doesn't matter by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    What you need when building software is a commercial grade tool, that you know how to use. And there is really nothing mayor wrong with PHP 5+ as that tool (for webapps). Its pretty good: that's why its so popular.

    So lets start coding software in that pretty good tool you know the best...

  21. Re:I'm that first poster by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The first version of asp was released in January 2002

    Bzzzzt!

  22. Re: There is no perfect tool, but it doesn't matte by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    php was specifically designed to make the internet a insecure place and all your propaganda wont change this.

    it still is untyped and that opens a shitload of attack avenues. some folks like this, others are less interested in war...

  23. Re: There is no perfect tool, but it doesn't matte by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    it still is untyped and that opens a shitload of attack avenues.

    Good news. Try reading the article.

    DECLARATIONS & SCALER TYPE HINTS
    PHP 7 will allow developers to declare what kind of return type a function is expected to have – similar to argument Type Hints.

    In addition, argument type hints and the new return-type declarations now support new scalar types, allowing developers to denote that they’re expecting strings, floats, ints or bools to be passed or returned.

    No you don't really get the performance benefits of a strongly typed language. But you do get the ability to knock out those attack venues.

  24. Re:I'm that first poster by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    First version of ASP was released December 1996. Still well after the first version of PHP in June of 1995, 18 months earlier.

  25. Works like a charm by proibido · · Score: 1

    Like any other language that suits his purpose - when well coded!

    I've been using PHP in web development for 10 years now and I can say it has very good features along with some flaws but, once again, just like any other language.

    People read "PHP" and think automatically in(secure) phpBB or Joomla but you can write your own PHP code/framework/project, you know. Just make sure if it fits your needs first before you say it doesn't do the job. Maybe you just chose the wrong set of tools for the job.

    Damn, I even write shell scripts with it and been replacing old bash scripts for PHP!

  26. Alternate theory by bigsexyjoe · · Score: 1

    Facebook uses PHP so it's developers don't get really great job offers from other companies, as PHP pay doesn't generally go as high as pay for things like Java.

  27. Re:I'm that first poster by KingMotley · · Score: 1

    The first version of ASP (Active Server Pages) was RELEASED in 1996 after a couple years of betas, and the first version of PHP as we know it (PHP/FI 2.0) wasn't until 1997. There was "Personal Home Page Tools (PHP Tools)" in which PHP came from dating back to 1995, but it wasn't a stand alone language like we know it.

    As someone who was actually using ASP in 1994, I can definitely say it predated PHP, even if you consider "Personal Home Page Tools (PHP Tools)" being announced in 1995.

  28. Re:I'm that first poster by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    As someone who was actually using ASP in 1994, I can definitely say it predated PHP, even if you consider "Personal Home Page Tools (PHP Tools)" being announced in 1995.

    I'm going to call bullshit on that one, since Denali (dev code name for ASP) ran on IIS 2.0, and thus couldn't predate IIS 1.0 which came out as an add-on for Win NT 3.51, and released in May 1995. So unless you worked at Microsoft and had super-secret access to very early alphas, there's just no way you did ASP in 1994.

    Either way, there's no way Rasmus had such knowledge when he started PHP. He says he never intended to write a programming language in the first place, it just grew out of his scripts.

  29. Re:I'm that first poster by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    So while the arm chair experts here think php is the shit, it actually is shit. And only an absolute amateur would go near it for anything more than a high school assignment.

    The people who use it don't hate it.
    The people who hate it don't use it.

    Sounds like an amicable situation to me!