The New PHP 254
An anonymous reader writes "This article at O'Reilly Programming suggests that PHP, a language known as much for its weaknesses as its strengths, has made steady progress over the past few years in fixing its problems. From the article: 'A few years ago, PHP had several large frameworks (e.g. CakePHP, CodeIgniter, and so on). Each framework was an island and provided its own implementation of features commonly found in other frameworks. Unfortunately, these insular implementations were likely not compatible with each other and forced developers to lock themselves in with a specific framework for a given project. Today the story is different. The new PHP community uses package management and component libraries to mix and match the best available tools. ... There are also exciting things happening with PHP under the hood, too. The PHP Zend Engine recently introduced memory usage optimizations. The memory usage in PHP 5.5 is far less than earlier versions.'"
Re:One question (Score:5, Informative)
yeah - http://php.net/password_hash [php.net]
It's now pretty easy to do password hashing correctly.
real_foo_bar() and somesuch_improved() (Score:4, Informative)
Make PHP the lauging stock of many a programmer.
The language's development has been in the wrong hands from day one.
You can do great things in Python because of Python.
You can do great things in PHP in spite of PHP.
Moving to Python (Score:5, Informative)
It is shaping up to be one of these things where my only regret is not switching sooner.
I was a huge defender of PHP for a long time but that time is over. There are interesting things like HHVM that are another bandaid for PHP but I am sick of making PHP work. I am sick of typing all those stupid dollar signs. I'll just say what so many have said before, "Python is like typing pseudo code, except you are actually coding." I don't look at my python and shudder.
PHP reminds me of some of my own projects where I changed course many times leaving strange little architectures and changes in philosophy. The longer the project goes on and the more it changes direction the more debris it leaves behind. It is not necessarily broken just sort of all just off.
Where Python is a tiny problem with the web is that setting up a development environment took me a tiny bit more work than the usual LAMP setup. This might make it harder for beginners but maybe that is a good thing. I don't mind leaving the beginners back in PHP land.
Re:Inconsistency (Score:2, Informative)
I agree they are incomparable. Javascript is much worse in so many ways...