PHP Has Grown Up, You Should Too

As a php developer who several years ago moved on to Ruby and the like, I was pleasantly surprised when checking out the php scene to find that they had some of the toolsets in php that I liked so much in ruby land. Composer is pretty good for what it does. Laravel is a great framework. I've since done some side jobs in php that were quite fun. I don't know that I could do it every day at work anymore, but that's a flavor issue not a statement about the language.

I've been using PHP since the version 3 days. A lot of the earlier frustrations I had with the language have all but gone. When I look back on code from a while ago, I cringe. I understand that if that's all other's know of PHP, they're probably justified in their judgement. But when looking at the most recent projects and code, I see a thing of beauty. If those same people saw this new state of PHP, I think they may scoff just a bit less.

For enterprise applications, I wouldn't use PHP, for small sites (just as an example) - I wouldn't use Java, and for scripting I wouldn't use either (python does the job well).

It's just a question of the right tool for the right job.

I don't think "has grown up" is the right wording. "Is growing up" may be a bit better. I love PHP, but until I can run a server script for more than an hour without running out of RAM, it hasn't finished growing up.

I'm a proud and successful PHP developer. I've built my own web applications framework, with CodeIgniter as the foundation. I'm extremely happy with the capabilities and performance of my closed-source platform, which happily powers all of my clients' sites. PHP doesn't deserve the bad rap that it gets.

Instead of long-running scripts, I have designed an event+action task manager for my platform. Any application can queue tasks, and then a single heartbeat cron job checks for queues tasks and executes them. This works extremely well and I can set the rate of the heartbeat to whatever is most suitable for each website.

"PHP got the lambda treatment in 2009, while Java received it only months ago."

Yee, PHP is evolutionary grown and will continue with that. While ohters languages have a design the language PHP adapts plenty different things at some point of it's syntax/core.

Dear author, please Make sure you have the whole picture. ;)

I've been using PHP side by side with Scala in a daily basis for the last few months. Indeed PHP has been "growing up" in the past few years, but in my opinion it has so many little problems that makes the experience still annoying (for me).

Lambdas entered in PHP 5.3 but still with that verbose syntax. A lot of idioms lambdas and functional programming favors are just plain painful to use with PHP anonymous function syntax.

Example: I want to get a list of all the ids from some objects.

PHP:
array_map($array, function ($obj) { return $obj->id; });
Scala:
array.map( obj => obj.id )
Or the more compact version:
array.map(_.id)

Idioms like chaining transformations to an array are simply inviable and you are obliged to put intermediate results in variables:

PHP:
$oldPeople = array_filter($array, function ($person) { return $person.age > 18; });
$names = array_map($oldPeople, function ($person) { return $person->name; });
array_foreach($names, function ($name) { echo $name; });

Scala:
array.filter( person => person.age > 18)
.map( person => person.name )
.foreach( name => println(name) )

The Scala code is much cleaner. Even though it is a static typed language (which would normally be more verbose than a dynamic one).

Aside from lambda stuff, there are some things that annoys me in PHP:

- No Set data structure. A lot of things in PHP should use a Set data structure instead of a plain array + in_array(). This problem comes in two parts: (1) the semantic is not correct, the thing you want is not an array of things it is a Set of things; (2) using in_array to simulate a Set is slow (it is O(N) opposed to a normal set implementation with O(1) or O(logN)). You can workaround this limitation with a couple of helper functions (as I did) or classes, but it is a pain that the language does not provide it (I don't recall a mainstream language that does not have Sets).
- Inconsistency in functions. The most notable one, for me, is the array_map(callback, array) versus array_filter(array, callback).
- PHP should embrace OO in its core and transform Array and String in objects. The methods could be simply aliases to the native methods, but would ease some pain anyway.

Despite all that, I still think PHP is a good language to implement stuff. Specially because its so easy to get started and put HTML on the screen.

Anyway, just my 2 cents.

I work with PHP every day, it is a huge mess. It gets the job done, but for me it is stressful to work with it - the language and most of the projects written with it are so chaotic.

Like everything new gets implemented in some weird backwards way compared to other languages. Latest example of something that will probably be implemented in PHP - return type checking:

function getNumber($args) : int
{
}

Like wth? I've worked with many staticly typed languages and the way you do it elsewhere is this:
function int getNumber($args)
{
}

Looks more senseful, doesn't it?

We already got type checking for function arguments right now and I like the general idea of having return type checking though. Once we have that though, I bet in 5 years the devs will realise that hey - it would make sense to be able to type hint variable declarations too. Why do this kind of realisations have to take ages, what's with the teasing?

I predict we'll have the possibility of using PHP like a staticly typed language in distant future, I predict we'll then have even more people saying how PHP has finally grown up. Now lets continue hacking stuff together and wait for PHP to mature into a more serious language another decade? Or maybe it would be better/more fun to switch to a language that has been designed logically from day 1?