Why’s it still popular?
Comment on What's going on with PHP?
slazer2au@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Php is a programming language from the 90s that is still popular today but is kinds the punching bag to other languages. This week the people in charge of php said they are releasing emergency patches in a couple hours and take non critical systems offline until you have patched.
This has brought on a new round of bag punching.
florge@feddit.uk 1 day ago
Venator@lemmy.nz 1 hour ago
It’s very fast to load in the browser and lightweight in the backend too, without sacrificing much functionality except for some fancy animations.
Personally I just hate the language syntax though 😅
dgdft@lemmy.world 1 day ago
It’s the backbone for a lot of other software, the Wordpress ecosystem most notably. Inertia is the big factor in terms of popularity.
Old school PHP was all about the LAMP stack (Linux as your operating system, apache as your web server, mysql as your database, php as the runtime apache would use to serve dynamic documents). The ecosystem was the real benefit that made it sensational for the era; all the pieces were designed to play nicely with one another.
It was also really noob friendly: You could write basic html, copy it to your web server, reload in browser, and see changes. Then to make things dynamic, you sprinkle in a few
<?php ?>tags in your html, copy it to the server, and it starts working! The code inside those php tags gets run by the web server and their output is written into the HTML. No reloading or resetting apache needed, and you need very little programming knowledge to start.The modern language is… serviceable, but lost the key features that made it great.
Janx@piefed.social 21 hours ago
I love LAMP.
tjoa@feddit.org 1 day ago
I like your differentiated explanation most
executivechimp@discuss.tchncs.de 15 hours ago
It’s the English of programming languages. It’s a big ole cobbled-together mess that just happens to be useful in practice.
slazer2au@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Because it works. Why spend the money to rewrite something in another language when the current one is working fine?
Broadfern@lemmy.world 23 hours ago
angry Rust noises in the distance
Slashme@lemmy.world 18 hours ago
Wait, you can write web scripts in rust?
BorgDrone@feddit.nl 14 hours ago
That’s the problem with PHP. It’s quite easy to build something that works. It’s quite another to build something that works and is secure, scales well, is maintainable, etc. The thing is that ‘it works’ is something that people see immediately. Those other things they only get to experience when it’s too late.
This is compounded by the fact that because it’s so easy it attracts a lot of inexperienced developers who don’t even consider things like security. Add to that that the language is full of footguns.
That’s not to say it’s impossible to build good apps in PHP, but that is despite the language, not because of it. It takes experience, knowledge and discipline to write something secure and maintainable in PHP. Something a lot of PHP users don’t have.
marcos@lemmy.world 18 hours ago
Because it works.
As evident from this week troubles, no it doesn’t.
slazer2au@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
Yea it does. Every language has bugs, every program has bugs. The measure of a language is not does it have bugs its how does the governing body respond to problems.
You could have the best language, fast to run, fast to build, uses low resources, but I’d the governing body responds to bug reports saying “well don’t do it then” or “user error” its adoption is not likely to happen.
bravesirrbn@lemmy.world 21 hours ago
Installing it and creating a “Hello world” page is easy and from there the sunk cost fallacy kicks in
Slashme@lemmy.world 17 hours ago
Yep. PHP stands for Perl Home Page. Perl is awful to debug and maintain.
ServantOfRa@lemmy.blahaj.zone 16 hours ago
One of these two statements are correct
schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de 1 day ago
WordPress powers a huge percentage of all websites, and that’s written in PHP. MediaWiki is too, although that’s obviously a much smaller percentage.
tottle@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
Was a major vulnerability discovered?
slazer2au@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Yep, two remote code execution rated at 9.2
call_me_xale@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
The ratings seem to be overblown, however. This is nowhere near some of the vulnerabilities people have compared it to, like heartbleed or log4j
slazer2au@lemmy.world 1 day ago
The leaked info incorrectly called it a 10 so people are acting like a 10. But an unauthenticated RCE is always a big issue.
TheButtonJustSpins@infosec.pub 1 day ago
Two were, yeah.
Skullgrid@lemmy.world 1 day ago
wait, didn’t the patches finish?
bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de 23 hours ago
The patches were released yesterday, more than 24h ago. Originally they were supposed to be released today but some info leaked so they decided to stel up the timetable.
Skullgrid@lemmy.world 23 hours ago
Yeah. You had me worried.
phoenixz@lemmy.ca 7 hours ago
Because as we all know, other computer languages never have had any vulnerabilities, ever
slazer2au@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
I haven’t heard of Rockstar having one. Go become a certified rockstar dev and confuse recruits.