Yep, PHP is turning 30 this year! Wondering if "PHP is still relevant?" Ever since we have been hearing that PHP is dead. It was “dead” 10 years ago, 5 years ago, and “is dead” today. But somehow - it isn’t. Anyway... happy birthday!

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] Decq@lemmy.world 95 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (13 children)

Let's be honest though. The early PHP versions were absolute dog shit. And the definition of how not to design a programming language. That said, that never stopped anyone in web development from using it apparently. No clue what modern PHP looks like, apparently it's better now.

[–] thesystemisdown@lemmy.world 19 points 2 weeks ago (4 children)

Modern PHP is better because it's modern. Which early version of a programming language was good? I've used a lot of them, and by modern standards, I think dog shit is a somewhat appropriate description for most of them.

[–] ByteWelder@feddit.nl 4 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Early Kotlin and early Swift were good.

[–] bestboyfriendintheworld@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 week ago

Early Swift was very slow to compile and start. The debugger was nonfunctional.

Otherwise it was pretty usable. Especially since it got to leverage the huge libraries written for Objective-C.

Which meant it lacked some basic collection types. A Swift native Set was introduced with Swift 3 IIRC. Before that you had to bridge back and forth between Swift and Objective-C. Sometimes leading to unexpected behavior at runtime.

In Objective-C if an object reference was nil, you could send it messages (call methods) without a problem. Swift however did away with this. Optionals had to be explicitly unwrapped. So if the annotations weren’t correct, Swift code would crash at runtime where Objective-C would have been fine. Lots of bugs related to that existed.

Swift peaked around version 4. Since then, they have been adding kitchen sink features and lots of complexity to feel smart.

I still would have preferred an Objective-C 3.0. Chris Lattner was a C++ guy and never really understood Objective-C culture and strengths.

load more comments (2 replies)

load more comments (10 replies)