Re:PHP in 2019
by ljm on Wednesday May 15, 2019 @02:16PM
(#19922162)
I cut my teeth as a developer on PHP, back in the 4.3 days before they'd really placed their bets on OOP, and we were dealing with mysql_real_escape_string, needles and haystacks, and haystacks and needles. No PDO, XSS and SQL injections up the wazoo.
I can't say I enjoyed working on any of those projects compared to the kind of stuff I do now (and how much I've learned since), but I've been remarkably surprised by some more recent codebases, despite the architecture sometimes feeling a little over-engineered (Symfony 2, for an outdated example).
It's not the style of code I enjoy writing at all but I've seen some incredibly clean stuff that would put a lot of Rails apps to shame. And I'd take that PHP over a badly maintained Rails app any day.
I wouldn't use PHP by choice still, but I no longer care to be snobbish about it. People are doing some good stuff in it, just the same as has happened with JS.
I can't say I enjoyed working on any of those projects compared to the kind of stuff I do now (and how much I've learned since), but I've been remarkably surprised by some more recent codebases, despite the architecture sometimes feeling a little over-engineered (Symfony 2, for an outdated example).
It's not the style of code I enjoy writing at all but I've seen some incredibly clean stuff that would put a lot of Rails apps to shame. And I'd take that PHP over a badly maintained Rails app any day.
I wouldn't use PHP by choice still, but I no longer care to be snobbish about it. People are doing some good stuff in it, just the same as has happened with JS.