PHP Doesn't Suck Anymore? | Prime Reacts 

I have much regret to inform you all that Beastco, commonly referred to as Big Dick Daddy from Cincinnati, wishes to thank everyone but his YT account contains his real name and he refuses to use it with all of you degens due to your degenerate behavior

Thank you for watching Prime ❤ You're the best.

Fun fact: PHP’s creator Rasmus Lerdorf is from the tiny country of Denmark. Who else is from Denmark, you ask? Well, the creator of TypeScript - and C#. And the creator of Ruby on Rails. And Google’s V8 engine which finally made JavaScript fast enough to be taken seriously as a contender on the server side - also built in Denmark. Edit: Also the creator of C++. All this (and more, but this is getting long) from a tiny country of 5M people living mostly off LEGOs and bacon.

Some things he didn't mention: - mysql calls can be made asynchronously. - cURL can be asynchronous. - class preloading can be used to significantly reduce process boot up time. - close to complete implementation of object oriented programming from other larger languages - two technologies exist which can cross-compile PHP to C++

My first big language was PHP, so it has a special place in my heart. I can't believe all the great improvements in it since I left it a decade ago. Wow. Very cool. Great video.

If anyone is interested in understanding how massive the PHP performance optimization was at version 7, there's this talk at ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-fYTKm2oUzAg.html where the PHP creator, AKA Rasmus Lerdorf, goes into some of the points that made PHP 7 so much faster. At some point, he explains how upgrading from PHP 5 to 7 would reduce the CO2 emissions from servers by 7.5 BILLION kg yearly, which is pretty insane.

I started learning PHP during my apprenticeship and the teachers still gave us the 7.3 executable (yes it wasn't that long ago). I read the changelog when php 8 was getting ready to release and my mind was blown when I discovered pattern matching.

Nothing wrong with PHP. I've made a career out of fixing PHP apps and with the exception of huge enterprises with millions of users, PHP is more than fast enough for 99% of scenarios.

Seeing your mind get blown by traits alone made my day. Thank you. Traits have been around since PHP 5.4. So even if you only get to work on legacy code, chances are you can still use Traits and I love them. Array destructuring was possibel even pre 7.1 via the list() function. It just got a bit more convenient to write. Some of lists()s downsides still exist. PHPs improvement is slooooow, but as we Germans say "Gut Ding will Weile haben". Or in other words "Good things take time".

This is the BEST reaction video ever! I'm a php programmer. I'm just lol my ass off by your reactions! You've got to make a php side project!

Speaking as a recent convert myself, PHP is incredibly productive. And with Laravel + Inertia or Livewire I have never moved faster in the full stack.

I appreciate the work of engineers who were fixing PHP over all those years

Dude I've been programming for almost 25 years now, and I've only just discovered you. I must say I've gotten a big boost because AI also makes my programming life so much easier (especially with other languages that I now feel very comfortable to just dabble with for an afternoon), but this is so good. You get me hyped for things I've been doing for years. This is quite refreshing after watching thousands of tutorials. Disclaimer: I'm not into gaming/discord as I would lose myself and my sanity, so no twitch and all it's goodness. Glad you also share it on RU-vid.

Watching this has made me feel so much better about being forced to learn PHP for my Web Dev class. It looks like I could actually enjoy writing some PHP. Thank you Aaron and Prime. P.S. Happy Birthday Beastco!

I do miss the LAMP stack + jQuery days. Simpler times. This looks very cool.

I'm surprisingly impressed. Kinda crazy how much 'convergence' there is across languages, even the ones you least expect.

"php is better than JS" what i've been telling people for years but eh it's not cool

I worked with PHP/JS/TS/GO/Dart/Python, and php is still my goto language for new web projects. it's the most "it just works" language out there, no compilation, great package managers, decent speed, ...

Let's go PHP, up to date with the needs of the modern programming industry!! Also, Happy Birthday Beastco!!

I remember writing PHP code directly on the prod server with WinSCP... the nostalgia

PHP used to suck because there was nothing worse on the web apart from ASP Net maybe. Nowadays, in the world where react server components exist even PHP5 doesn't look too bad. I mean, if you just render html server-side and don't go super fancy with all these modern restful microservices, php is actually great.

Went back to PHP when version 8 was released. One of my favorites now.

I love variadic arguments. I love them so much, I implemented a polymorphic function using variadic arguments in MSVC's particular flavor of C . . . and now I hate variadic arguments, I hate my life, I hate everything, may God have mercy on the soul of whoever decided that MSVC was not going to support ISO C and thereby leading me down the wrong path for a solid 3 hours of constant swearing. May God have mercy on his soul, because I might not.

PHP progression looks a lot like C# progression over the years. Might have to give PHP a go

Types contextualize variables. Variables don't contextualize types. We read code left to right. Type before variable. Happy birthday beastco.

PHP literally stole all the good junk from every language right now and just jammed it into PHP 8. Absolutely fantastic to work with compared to Python or JS/TS. Unfortunately, I'm looking to use a default language that has more than just back end as its use case, so I'll probably be using Go, Kotlin or C# for that, as they all compile AOT and are easier to deploy rather than having a fat Docker container. PHP though, is definitely the most optimized language for straight up back-end web dev.

People who know laravel are aware of the strength of PHP. He didn't even mention interfaces.

In my non scientific empirical research for the last 10 years 10% of people who hates PHP have actually used it & hates it for valid reasons and 90% hates it because hating it is "cool" but can't provide a single reason as to why they hate it, or they use it out of "scope". As a general programming language it sucks, for web it is more than capable for 99% of the devs for it's intended usecase, it is a great "get shit done" language, but some people take it way to seriously ;)

PHP having traits makes me unreasonably happy

Just to be clear. PHP traits are not like Rust traits, they are more what you tend to call Mixins in other languages.

Prime always pretending like he’s not a js/ts soy dev like the rest of us Edit typo

The point about having more information at a language level makes me think that the modern model for writing a new trendy programming language is "abstract away from the computer but don't abstract away from what the computer is doing" I want to be able to read and understand my code at a human level but it's being written for a computer to execute. as much as a garbage collector can take care of it, it's important to know as programmers that we are telling a *computer* to do the stuff and languages can abstract away as much as they want but it's kinda useful for us to know when we're talking to the computer vs talking to the next person who's been hired to maintain our codebase. sometimes I prefer added verbosity over syntactic sugar cos I actually get a sense of what is going on

This guy is the Tony Hinchcliffe of programming and its fucking awesome.

Im currently writing a new project in php 8.2 with Symfony, it's fine. Pretty much on the level as other languages, just a bit less elegant in many places.

I'd like to add. If you're processing 50000 requests, it's more of an architecture issue than a language issue.

It always cracks me up to see PHP haters get BTFO'd in real time. Also, regarding performance, PHP running on top of Swoole is actually fast af. You should look into it.

PHP is ML future! ChatPHP is coming to disrupt the market!

so this is c# with a $ all over the place...

So many other awesome things that weren't mentioned in this video as well. Composer is probably one of the best package managers I've ever used. We have Fibers built into the language (though they are a little unwieldy right now without specific libraries). Using Psalm or PHPStan, you can have compile time type checking with all sorts of more advanced types (in comments) such as generics. You can also destructure string-keyed arrays. The ecosystem has a standards body that allows us to utilize any implementation of certain things (like caching or logging) interchangeably. Need Async logs? There's a package for that. Needs logs sending to XYZ? There's a package for that. And there is just soooo much more great things to say about the PHP ecosystem.

PHP: Oh you studied me 10 years ago? 😎 Allow me to reintroduce myself. 🙌🏾👏🏾🙌🏾👏🏾🙌🏾👏🏾🙌🏾👏🏾🙌🏾👏🏾🙌🏾

The problem with PHP is that it's jam packed with foot-guns. It can perform great and have lots of sugar but if it's easy for experienced developers to make serious mistakes that are hard to detect. Given that PHP is frequently internet facing that has the potential to end very badly.

Everybody loves pattern matching for switch statements. It's so nice.

My first website with a backend was written in PHP. It has a special place in my heart ❤

PHP sounds like an ointment for hemorrhoids - is that a use case? Giggity

That SensitiveParameter is lowkey super awesome and is what I want in my project

I was fortunate enough to do a stint with a company building their web-site with C#. I ended up modeling my PHP framework around that back in 2009. That saved me a lot of pain. PHP lets you code like a buffoon. But has always given the tools to write clean code if you put in the effort. Since PHP 5.2 didn't have types, so I built my framework around classes because I could at least ensure you weren't setting and getting magic properties by overloading __get and __set with a code base class that all classes extended from.

My mind is blown… no comment on the 420% increase in performance

Strict typing and static analysis with PHPStan are my daily bread. I can't live longer without that. Variadic functionaly (spread operator with named arguments) are fantastic.

A few days ago, when the php video came out, I was about to go on a mission to post the link to this video as a comment on each of your new videos. I'm glad this video reached you without me having to do anything. To the person who shared this video, thank you, you're a champ. ❤

The big advantage of a variadic argument in PHP is that you can specify the type. PHP doesn't natively have generics or typed arrays (you have to use a third party static analysis product for those), but you can do something similar with a typed variadic argument.

00:00 Introduction to PHP and misconceptions 12:05 Annotations and exception handling improvements 13:13 Switch statement and weak maps 14:07 Enums and type hints 22:19 PHP performance improvements and misconceptions 23:03 PHP's speed is sufficient for most use cases

I started during the PHP 5.6-era (I was 14 back then) and started taking it serious around PHP 7.0 (I was 16 or so) so I never understood the hate against PHP. Mainly because each time tried to hate on it, their arguments could literally be debunked with: "That's not an issue", either because PHP added that or because it an issue was so, so, so specific that you'd have to actually *try* to purposefully trigger that "issue" rather than stumbling upon it. Nowadays I mainly use TypeScript with Deno but that's because it has async/await (which PHP sadly still doesn't have) and allows me to create stuff like Discord bots without scuffed hacks like AmPHP or ReactPHP.

They could add type inference so we could get intellisense from the IDE.

PHP 8 is modern PHP. It is NOT your grandpa's PHP folks! 😊

I had the same reaction as our mustache guy here when I watched it the first time

PHP calls its dictionaries/objects/maps “arrays” and therefore I can never forgive it

Problem is a lot of php codebases (that I've seen anyway) were made in old versions of php, which does suck. Even if new php is better, I'd still rather use a lot of other languages instead for new stuff

Aaron's videos for PlanetScale are really good as well, he explains things very well with a lot of nuance.

Happy Birthday beastco! Stop spamming C# danggit! xD

I used to love PHP... I don't know if I am ready to love again.

most of this looks like C# syntax

The only issue is if you get a php job you’ll be using php pre-5.3

When you come back to your childhood neighborhood, and the fat girl with pimples is now Scarlett Johansson

happy birthday beastco

9:43 I like the fn in the beginning. It shows use of arrow function with a glance when you are scrolling code file.

PHP is a lot like Apple Maps

I feel like the damage is done, PHP is going to take a while for people to drop the - "PHP sucks" - impression they have.

Happy birthday beastco

Definitely the most "slap happy" video I've seen in a while.

Sorry to have to tell you this, but based on your reaction to this PHP video, you might actually like C# now too.

12:55 I never used PHP, so for me, most of this video is "Wow, look at all these things that PHP didn't have." But that is genuinely amazing. I had the same expression as Prime.

Honestly, the only thing that makes me want to use something other than PHP by now are generics and function-types. PHP even has fiber-based concurrency now - it's honestly pretty decent. My favorite language is still Scala, though (even though macros/reflection is a hassle) - have yet to see a better type-system in a productive language (i.e. not Coq or Agda).

Prime was busy PHPgasming so much he forgot to complain about the next line curly braces.

Yep, I remember the good ol' days of slinging PHP 5.4. It's great that the language has improved, and having used Rails and Laravel, I think Laravel is a better framework, and PHP is faster than Ruby too :)

the fact most of the web is in javascript right now make me retch every time I remember it. This must stop. Let's come back to sanity once again

Lack of generics, distinction between arrays and hash maps and no extension methods kills it for me.

Alan Perlis once quipped in "Epigrams on Programming" that "Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semi-colons"

I had to use php in 2017 and really enjoyed working on our newer projects that used version 7... I think my gripes were exclusively related to tasks on the old version 5 projects. From what I remember, php7+ isn't backward compatible with 5.x, so there was no cheap way to start upgrading those php5 sites. If it wasn't for that, I'm 99% sure I'd still be open to php jobs.

So, what I see is that PHP has adopted features that I'm pretty sure were first added in Hacklang, and the Hacklang team was, in large part, an ex-C# and ex-F# team hired away from Microsoft (the thing about PHP being influenced by Hacklang is conjecture, the thing about Hacklang being half-Microsoft is a fact).

I am on team PHP ❤

I feel you, but let's not pretend like Tortoise wasn't one of the great tools of the era :D

Kotlin with dollars. Which is the main reason I do Kotlin. So... I'm in.

Director: I have over 100k users Me: but only 1% active

I use PHP at work and we are fine with it. I would love if to drop the dollar sign ($) for variables and the arrow notation (->) to access class attributes.

This is probably one of your best reaction videos every man. I have been laughing all through the video.😁🤣😂😁😁

I often use variadic arguments for deprecation of arguments. It allows me to keep backwards compatibility while re-using the function with different parameters. And then check, if the old args are passed in, throw a deprecation notice. If the new ones are passed in, all good! Then add a PHPDoc with the old arguments with a deprecation, and new arguments, to continue IDE autocompletes.

Would have been nice to hear more comparisons to modern Java. The constructor types are very similar to record classes in Java.

Wow thanks for this video. Great to bust the stereotype and congrats to the language developer for genuinely making it excellent. It definitely feels like something in between python and C# now. Which is a massive improvement.

There's one major advantage of PHP over all other languages: Arrays. The PHP array (hash table) implementation is the most powerful computer science data structure ever invented. O(1) insertion, deletion, lookup, and iteration with support for mixing integer and string keys. But, most importantly, PHP arrays maintain insertion order! That is, when you insert 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, you get 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 when iterating over the items regardless of key type. Does Python, Javascript, Go, C++, or C# natively have a similar data structure? Simply put: No. They do not. Maintaining insertion order is critical but only PHP has that feature.

That guy should have named his episode "PHP Strikes Back." LMAO

Have you seen how much PHP with Swoole increases HTTP request? +500%

Traits are amazing.. Entirety of my database access layer resolves around a database management class that uses domain controllers defined as traits. Makes all the class variables available on BOTH ends, makes modularity a breeze :)

As much as I love Ruby, and by extension Ruby on Rails. Laravel+PHP has been upgrading so quickly, and without the DHH nonsense. It's hard because I still like Ruby's flexibility (and syntactic sugar/flexibility) more, but might need to stick to PHP for developer adoptability.

3rd rock shout out, lets go!! They had an episode where everyone became tommy. Tommy, tommy and tommy.

HBD Beastco 🎉

Php is trying to look like dart lmao I love it

Been using php since like 2001 and it absolutely has come a long, long way in that time. I agree with the initial premise, most folks who hate it/believe it's dead haven't even looked at it in a decade or more. Writing shitty php code in 2010 was mandatory, now it's on you as a developer if you keep writing hacky code.

I'm using PHP over 20 years now, and over that time it's developers added almost every thing that made it a better / mature language.

I wrote projects in Java, Node, .NET and PHP. And Java and PHP were the only languages that I had fun creating stuff. The only thing that I miss from PHP is to be able to declare the same function and constructor multiple times with different arguments.

“How many users do you have ?” The shades 😂, made me cry a little cos I got no users in my app.