70% of the world’s internet btw, but out-of-support deployments and little funding for permanent staff to manage the open-source project.
The main time-zone file used across Linux-based operating systems is maintained pro bono by Paul Eggert, a UCLA teacher. Core-js, a piece of support software that lets new JavaScript work in old browsers and is estimated by the author to be used in half of the busiest websites in the world, is handled by Denis Pushkarev. He once had to endure criticism from the community because he added a command-line message to the library’s installer asking for help or a job.
Forgive me if I am coming from a naive position, but in the case of PHP specifically, I don’t think funding is the problem. PHP is fucking obsolete. The paradigm is obsolete, and the implementation is obsolete. The recent php2shell exploit is a case in point. The solution required a 13,000 line patch. This is not an issue of a simple mistake being overlooked due to constrained development resources. This is what it looks like when the Jenga tower of technical debt finally begins to collapse. This event should be looked at like the OceanGate implosion of software engineering.
I mean no disrespect to the core maintainers, but IMO anybody developing software based on PHP today is practically negligent. The project should be wound down into stasis, like X11. No application developer without at least a roadmap to adopting some more modern development practices should be taken seriously.
Okay a bit dramatic don’t you think?
There needs to be a method for compelling corporations that benefit from open-source projects to contribute both code and money to the project.
Reminds me of an old coworker who couldn’t understand why an open source project wouldn’t care about his request when we had support contract with the company that consumed the project.
we pay for support why won’t they code in my request
(note request was then wanting to do something that was supported already but not in the way they wanted it implemented)
Or honestly better comparison is Microsoft and ffmpeg
The xz fiasco has shown how a dependence on unpaid volunteers can cause major problems. Trillion dollar corporations expect free and urgent support from volunteers.
@Microsoft @MicrosoftTeams posted on a bug tracker full of volunteers that their issue is “high priority”
There are only two solutions. Government grants, or restricting Freedom 0 (The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose) and embracing a non-commercial model publication model. The latter model is undesirable because it turns everything into a subsidiary of Oracle.
These Silicon Valley companies are obscenely valuable. They should be taxed steeply.
You’re absolutely right on this. Government regulation is the only way you can get anyone to do anything.
I think it would have to be a formal regulatory body, complete with audits and dependency graphs. I wonder how you would set prices for that without letting people game the market
The
is-numberauthor in the JS ecosystem will be the wealthiest software person on the planet overnight.Probably not the worst case scenario tbh
Maybe the FSF could find itself with a sense of purpose for the first time in a few decades and just start mailing invoices lol
I don’t do webdev. But I thought PHP has been considered garbage since like 2016. Like I remember people explicitly saying avoid it because its a security trap.
I saw (after this exploit) people saying “it got better” but… ok it still WAS a mess. We dumped flash because it was a security mess even if it “got better”. People are ready to dump C/C++ because of how hard it is to do right. At least C/++ has the excuse of legacy and speed. I have never heard anything good about php.
How tf does a bad-to-mid piece of tech become 70% of the net. Oh who am I kidding, JavaScript fucking blows and is 99% of the net. Webdev fucking sucks.
PHP gained dominance by being the only thing that existed in early web days. Alternatives were Perl or C via CGI or PHP via apache that was so easy to learn and use it exploded.
Javascript and ruby didnt come out until after, java came out slightly before i think its forgotten just how old php is. It was designed for programmatically manipulating html pages which was revolutionary and wasnt designed with the modern internet.
Laravel 4/5 breathed new life into the language but its existence is based around intertia, high supply of cheap devs, wordpress. It also dominated the old serverside web which didnt get replaced by anything until around nodejs 4 when the concept for API and client separation became mainstream about 12 ish years ago and everyone became a full stack developer with public facing mongodb instances with the default login.
Source: been a webdev for far too long and the entire stack sucks regardless and the internet should only serve HTML pages as god intended
LAMP + jQuery + minimum wage dev team. Bangin profits
PHP 6
Cake PHP
CODEIGNITER
IIS
Windows server 2003
Relative imports
PHPmyadmin
Oh God relative imports. Queue the Kill Bill Ironsides siren
me not recognizing a single thing in your post except for Windows
I know how to write SQL queries to search for stuff.
LAMP + jQuery + minimum wage dev team. Bangin profits
As someone maintaining an entire platform written in PHP, jQuery, and Bootstrap, I rebuke thee
Blessed stack. Take me with you TAKE ME BACK
I’ll have you know that a few years ago our lead added React to the project using a custom webpack pipeline so now we have selectors that are being interacted with by both React and jQuery. Those bugs are fun
this is why everytime I look at webdev I scurry back to my C shape holeNone of these words are in the Bible. I feel sorry for your lost soul.
Laravel happened and it made PHP a good experience for devs, it’s still a great scripting language for servers compared to javascript
PHP may get the pipe operator before it finally makes its way into JavaScript which is funny though
Get
(x, f) => f(x)moggedI gave my one week notice at work today so PHP and Javascript can pipe themselves to /dev/null now
Yawn another 1 trillion to markov chain sex bots.
21·16 hours agoMaybe they should have had incorporated AI into their workflow.
ⓘ This user is suspected of being a cat. Please report any suspicious behavior.
Lmao the whole world is running on scaffolding being held up by one person?
At least in this case it’s scaffolding not string or paperclips
many such cases. actually maybe all cases honestly.
Python has maybe 4-5 full time devs at any given time* with another 10 contributors that do so voluntarily.Linux has a ton since every big company basically just pays a dev to do what they want.
Anything smaller than those is lucky to have 1 honestly.
*Python has 1 security dev, 1 infrastructure dev (website and hosting), and 1 PyPi dev.
Linux has a ton since every big company basically just pays a dev to do what they want.
This is also exactly why the kernel development process has become fully slopped. Those salaried developers come with strings attached. They conform to and promote their employer’s development practices.
On a separate train of thought, while Linux may have a high number of salaried contributors, it is also such an enormous project with so many modules that once you get down to the granular level (e.g. a specific filesystem, or device driver), you will still probably find that there is only a handful of people who intimately understand how it works. Unlike most software which fits somewhere between libc and the end user, a lot of the implementation details are completely absent from the kernel. The kernel implements some kind of protocol, and the hardware it interacts with is more or less of a black box.
Feels like we could cause the doom by taking out the fourteen mages if you know what i’m sayin
Lmao how many businesses rely on this shit? Nobody who has money cares, death to proprietary software.
Open source projects, while they can sometimes benefit to a limited degree, don’t really need loads of full-time paid staff. I struggle to believe there’s any great underlying issue here.
Exploits are effectively inevitable in all internet-exposed software. For PHP, running 70% of the internet, to get caught out this rarely is a really good sign that it’s working fantastically well.
I just had a coder/sysadmin friend UNLOAD on me about the utter garbagehood of PHP. Both barrels. Something is missing in his analysis or mine - if it’s unfathomably junky why is it still around?
(Note: I’m no expert on this shit just hoping some of the promise of open source will bear fruit by the time we’re all huddled in basements and bunkers)
Legacy systems. LAMP stack was the web dev meta for ages. Now people prefer more modern languages, but a lot of web dev will be maintaining an existing website rather than writing a new dynamic website from scratch.
Also, as another commenter mentioned, WordPress is written in it, so if you’re writing WordPress plugins you’re writing PHP.
PHP is mostly just used because it’s what WordPress uses. If it wasn’t for WordPress, I think PHP would have gone the way of Ruby on Rails a while ago.
Rust, Python, and TypeScript are becoming the foundation for newer frameworks, but there isn’t really a killer app yet. Plus everyone is used to WordPress and Drupal.
MediaWiki is also a huge piece of PHP infrastructure which probably won’t disappear for a long time.
With the separation of front-end and back-end development, the language becomes less important. The front-end is going to be JavaScript (or TypeScript) because that is the hell Google+Mozilla has consigned us to, but on the back end the only requirement is to throw up some REST API. This can be done in Node, Rust, Go, C++, Python, you name it. With CDNs, load balancing, cloud computing, and reverse proxies, everything is basically required to be swappable anyway. An API can be implemented in Python or Node, then ported to Rust if there is a performance justification. I can’t see a monoculture re-emerging the way things were 20 years ago.
PHP’s selling point was basically being able to embed into html. That’s obviously possible with any language; it’s not hard at all really, I think you call that a template engine. But PHP had that as its core idea. Many a webhoster enabled PHP in the 90s, meaning it was easier to deploy than other languages, which would have to go through CGI (common gateway interface, a protocol for handing HTTP requests to scripts/binaries, which is how you traditionally interfaced a web request with e.g. a Perl or C program). CGI also spawns a process each time, which is slow, whereas PHP came as an Apache plugin.
So PHP won over Perl, which had a head start in that space, I think mainly due to convenience and the because webhosters supported it.
Perl is a better, more well thought out scripting language arguably, but was created as an alternative to Unix shell scripts, and not web-first. Also it’s more complex. PHP is more straightforward and C-like.
The complaints about PHP, and I share them, is that PHP was not only for amateurs, it was created by amateurs. In some earlier version of PHP, for example, something like this:
f(g())would have to be written as
$a = g() f($a)which is just ridiculous. People had figured that out in the 60s, maybe even earlier, and that had worked in every language since then. The creator of PHP would have to have never read a book or attended a course on language design, garbage collection, compilers, parsing, or probably any other relevant topic. They were totally winging it. In versions 4 or 5, PHP copied, in a cargo-cult like fashion, various object oriented features from C++ without deliberate thought. The built-in standard library, while extensive, was notoriously inconsistent and easy to misuse, further exacerbated by the fact that PHP loves to convert types silently instead of throwing an error.
It really deserves its place in the hall of fame of the worst languages. Most of the things up there (like Unix shell or BASIC) came way earlier, and at least you can see how and why they are as they are, but PHP is totally born from ignorance (or rather superficial half-knowledge) of what came before.
It’s still around because frameworks like Wordpress, Mediawiki (Wikipedia) and various legacy websites have not transitioned to something else because it would be a monumental task to migrate all this shit.
Inevitably, because it’s trying to be everything to everyone, and the decades of historical baggage, it can frustrate people quite easily due to its conventions and structure.
That being said, as someone who has done professional web development, the reality is it’s an exceptionally reliable language, very lightweight, easy to prototype, does everything you need, pretty easy to understand and for more complex requirements, it has accumulated a large set of useful libraries over the years. It’s not a coincidence it beat out other languages like ASP.NET and Ruby-on-Rails.
I’d argue the main reason it’s being slowly overtaken by the likes of Python and NodeJS is that improved hardware is making the efficiency of languages less and less important. Enabling us to use slower, more bloaty languages (don’t get me wrong, I adore Python) because they more easily let you jam in more-resource-intensive but easier-to-implement solutions.
There’s a couple of reasons. It’s easy to learn, especially in comparison with what came before (I still have nightmares about CGI). If you already had HTML locked down, it’s wasn’t a big jump to coding PHP, whereas Javascript was less noob friendly. This meant that a lot of opensource web content management systems got built first on PHP. Wordpress has been mentioned, but that’s ignoring the larger structural CMS systems like Joomla and Drupal.
At the time these projects were really hitting their stride (2005 - 2010), opensource systems built on a LAMP architecture were out-competing any proprietary language of similar capacity. The only one that came close to PHP’s use was ASP and that was just because it had Microslop behind it. By 2010, PHP had pretty much dominated the existing opensource CMS community, which in turn meant most non-commercial websites and a fair chunk of commercial ones as well had their core interfaces written in PHP.
Does it have flaws? Absofuckinglutely. But it was the first widespread web programming language that was free, easy to learn, and worked well over 80% of the time across all browsers. Nothing since has really hit that sweet spot of being the right software for the right problem at exactly the right time, which is why its still in heavy use today.
Real goats used ASP web forms with visual basic. Anything else is inferior.
Honestly im still yet to find a web experience as simple as lamp + jquery. I used to be able to shit out websites at mega speed. Back in the days when it was normal to poop out a whole website in a few days
