[HN Gopher] PHP 3.0 Final is out (1998)
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PHP 3.0 Final is out (1998)
Author : xd
Score : 33 points
Date : 2021-05-21 21:51 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (web.archive.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (web.archive.org)
| alberth wrote:
| It's hard to explain just how much easier PHP made creating a
| dynamic web site back in the 90s / early 00s.
|
| You drop a file in your public web server folder and you're done.
| Prior was CGI Perl scripts that hacked together how to access
| session and rest data. Or you had to develop in C. PHP had native
| support for the web. It also eliminate the need for an app
| server.
|
| I'm still not certain even today, if anything exists that is
| faster to get a dynamic site up and running than PHP.
| dspillett wrote:
| It basically did for simple web programming what visual basic
| did for Windows desktop toys: allowed you to throw some UI
| together (drag & drop components in the VB case, any old HTML
| with links or forms for PHP) then start stringing bit of code
| in haphazardly to link it together. No need to learn a more
| complex compiler or other build tools, worry about configuring
| CGI or other web server tech (unless running PHP yourself), ...
|
| Great for prototyping, or just to encourage new programmers (as
| they can see results almost immediately).
|
| Though PHP was essentially thrown together initially so had a
| massively inconsistent standard library, had some insanely
| unsafe defaults for a few major versions, and other issues that
| it is very valid to complain about. It was also closely
| associated with mysql which at the time played very fast and
| loose with data integrity (2008-02-31? - perfectly valid date
| to store! Foreign keys? Let the business layer worry about
| rules like that! Transactional integrity? Again, sort that
| elsewhere!) in the name of ease & claims of performance - the
| two shared bits of each others reputation.
| asadlionpk wrote:
| Try nextjs.
| nly wrote:
| I'm currently working on a Django project and have to restart
| uwsgi after each git pull. It's a pain
| Seattle3503 wrote:
| > I'm still not certain even today, if anything exists that is
| faster to get a dynamic site up and running than PHP.
|
| With PHP you can just start typing in your file and produce
| output. Even with lightweight frameworks like Flask there is
| boilerplate.
| 101008 wrote:
| Definitely. I started with PHP when I was only 12 or 13 years
| old. Adding some logic inside your .html files (mostly
| includes, that were like magic back then _), renaming to .php
| and upload them to the server using FTP was so simple. A few
| years later, when I had to set up a lot of things to run Django
| I was surprised at how hard it was.
|
| PHP was simple to use, and to understand its logic, because it
| was embeded into HTML itself if you want to. No need to write
| views, controllers, templates, anything. And most of the shared
| hosting (paid and free) supported it.
|
| _ Includes were like magic back then because if you had a heavy
| content website with a lot of inner pages (fansites), updating
| the navigation sidebar was a pain in the ass. Originally they
| were made with framesets, later iframes (with no borders, but
| if the content changed, a scrollbar appeared). When I (and my
| friends) started to use PHP and be able to use includes, it was
| awesome.
| iammiles wrote:
| This is the same story for me. Moving from PHP to Python was
| really difficult conceptually for me. For years fiddling with
| Apache configs and uploading files via FTP was web
| development.
|
| I sometimes find myself thinking about teenagers getting
| started nowadays and the accessibility of development, but I
| suppose there are a lot more resources now than the early
| 2000s for some enterprising kids to get started.
| incanus77 wrote:
| This is right when I started using it and it launched my career
| in software dev. You could build anything. Combine that with
| being 21-22 and the associated naivite and nothing was
| impossible.
|
| Prior to PHP as part of a LAMP stack, I had indeed been
| cobbling Perl scripts and GDBM key/pair databases to do web
| apps for various projects and customers. The ability to just
| print to the browser with PHP without explicitly having to send
| HTTP headers was wonderful.
| kbenson wrote:
| > You drop a file in your public web server folder and you're
| done.
|
| The implications of what this meant for security were very
| important too, but in a negative way. Instead of an application
| with a single or few small entry points (like CGI), you could
| just design your PHP app with a bunch of files spread across
| the exposed public directory structure, and for a long time
| this was the reigning paradigm for PHP.
|
| This, combined with the extension controlling whether it was
| processed as a PHP script or a plain text file meant that
| anyone making a quick and dirty backup of a file they were
| changing that didn't consider this would often end up exposing
| files to the public they didn't intend (mv config.php
| config.php.bak).
|
| Additionally, since most people were running on shared hosting
| platforms and PHP was usually run as the webserver user, and
| many applications were designed to be dropped entirely into a
| public web structure, any capability for writing locally (like
| allowing file uploads) often consisted of setting a directory
| world writable to drop files in. Even ignoring how often people
| screwed up setting permissions and set _everything_ of theirs
| world writable, even when done correct this usually ended up
| being security through not-so-obscurity, since common apps had
| default locations they used more often than not (customizing
| that required more user interaction and knowledge to set up,
| which was against the ethos of "drop in and use" PHP heavily
| leaned on initially).
|
| PHP's ease of use was the ease of use of Windows 95 compared to
| Windows NT or Windows 2000. Sure, things are easier when you
| don't have to care about users and permissions and security.
| But you need to bootstrap any success you have into fixing
| those problems ASAP.
|
| PHP was always a victim of it's own success in this regard. The
| thing that made it easy to use for people was that it did away
| with a lot of the security concerns that were (barely) in place
| at that time, and the effects of that are what made it a
| nightmare for those managing it, and often at one point or
| another those using it as they were bitten by these problems.
|
| I'm glad we've all moved on from that. PHP did a lot to make it
| easier for people to do stuff online, and that in itself is a
| good thing and a laudable achievement. I'm unsure if it was a
| _net_ gain though. It 's too complex for me to easily say it
| was one, nor that it was definitively a net loss.
| habibur wrote:
| Nostalgia. I started with PHP/FI 2.x. Was a great relief from
| writing web server apps in C.
| hitekker wrote:
| > This may sound a little foreign to all you folks coming from a
| non-Unix background, but PHP doesn't cost anything. You can use
| it for commercial and/or non-commercial use all you want. You can
| give it to your friends, print it out and hang it on your wall or
| eat it for lunch. Welcome to the world of Open Source software!
| Smile, be happy, the world is good. For the full legalese, see
| the official license.
|
| What a nice, whimsical message.
| oscargrouch wrote:
| I guess you are lacking some context.
|
| Back in the day, you could:
|
| * Be bold enough to use Linux or FreeBSD and use CGI or Perl as
| the only free version
|
| * Use ASP but pay license fees for Windows NT, ISS and SQL
| Server
|
| * Use ColdFusion which was kind of trendy but was pretty
| expensive.
|
| When PHP arrived it was so refreshing. I used to make my stuff
| in Apache+PHP, MySQL and Linux and it was magical what you
| could do with very few lines of code.
|
| The worse part was to manually get the sources of the
| dependencies one by one, hit ./configure and make, so you can
| compile a php module for Apache
|
| In those days Microsoft was pretty strong, everything used to
| be closed source and payed and that's why for people who
| understand what it was back then, this does not sound like the
| splashy announcements of today.
|
| That's why every time you see Linus, Stallman or any person
| that was active in the open source movement, you should pay a
| beer to them. The world of technology owe a lot to them,
| specially the underdogs.
| carabiner wrote:
| I remember my employer was paying Indian consultants a
| fortune to build a web app in ASP that didn't work. I told
| them I could do it in PHP in a week, but they didn't trust
| some "free program."
| verelo wrote:
| It's funny. For all the hate php gets these days, it was a
| pretty big part of the web getting to where it's at today. I
| was super pleased when php 7 came out, this project isn't going
| anywhere just yet.
| osrec wrote:
| PHP deliberately has a low barrier to entry, and as a result
| there is a lot of poor quality code out there, written by
| beginners. People like to use this fact to suggest that the
| entire language is bad, which it most certainly is not.
|
| I've seen lots great, well structured and performant PHP code
| - the quality depends on the programmer, as it does for any
| other language.
| tinus_hn wrote:
| Back in the days it had terrible defaults that made it very
| difficult not to write insecure code and it was lacking so
| much it was really hard to write good, structured code.
| osrec wrote:
| Back in the day perhaps, but not today. PHP has come a
| really long way.
| edoceo wrote:
| It's not the wand, it's the wizard.
| zdragnar wrote:
| If you recall the cartoon of programming languages as
| weapons, PHP was a sword without a hilt, which was quite
| fitting. Despite the low barrier to entry, there were
| "features" that were / are distinctly dangerous, and
| should not have been exposed to beginners (the comments
| section in the official documentation os a perfect
| example of this).
| 542458 wrote:
| As somebody who loves PHP, some PHP mockery is deserved.
| The standard function naming and argument ordering is
| inconsistent and stupid. It throws errors written in
| Hebrew. There were fundamental decisions made that harmed
| web security for years. Unicode wasn't in PHP for a long
| time. Getting decent performance and/or scaling was/is a
| major challenge. The comparison tables are questionable at
| best. Etc.
|
| The language is bad, but... you can still write great code
| in a bad language. And you don't need a good language, or
| even good code to build a great website. Facebook has made
| more money with questionable PHP code than any site built
| with elegant pearl webscripts that I know of. Wikipedia is
| PHP. So was Digg (RIP). Your users don't give a darn how
| good your language or code is so long as it usually works.
|
| So tl;dr, PHP sucks, but I love PHP.
| darig wrote:
| It was??? It always will be.
| simlevesque wrote:
| I never say this, but this resonates with me.
| devfatigue wrote:
| Bah! All I need is some perl and a CGI script to sail her by.
| Kidding, with the current web development churn I sometimes miss
| the simplicity of php.
| [deleted]
| bigyikes wrote:
| I haven't used PHP in years, but Laravel was _such_ a fun and
| productive framework to work in. It really has a way of making
| you feel like a "code artisan", something I typically only hear
| coming from Rails developers. In contrast, every Node app I've
| worked on has felt somewhat amateur, even if the code was high
| quality.
| canadianfella wrote:
| Laravel only came out 10 years ago. It's not old.
| Akcium wrote:
| I remember when I was at school in ~2000, I bought a paper book
| about PHP4.
|
| I remember that as a warm feeling...
| tluyben2 wrote:
| Someone from my dads office gave my some printed pages about ASP
| from MS. Until that time I was doing all my web dev in Perl (it
| was basically either that or c) with print "<HTML><BLINK>hello...
| et. After reading about ASP, I concocted my own miserable php-
| like thing in perl where you could put perl code in between <% %>
| to add logic. I tried to find the code (I have it somewhere in
| dropbox, I'm sure), but I remember I failed at doing it reliably
| with regexes, so I made a while(1) loop finding all open <% and
| close %>, escaping the html before and after, printing it and
| adding the code in between. It was only a handful of lines and
| worked really well; I wrote a lot of cgi for my clients with it.
|
| But it was slow (even after adding cache) and it need quite a bit
| of setup and libraries (CPAN with my own layers to make it easier
| to use), so I was very happy when I discovered PHP 3 (I did not
| know it existed before that).
|
| Good memories; deploying a site cheaply by scp/rsync the files.
| aussieguy1234 wrote:
| Around this time, I tried to create stuff with the old Java J2EE.
| I found it too slow to compile and the language was too
| inflexible.
|
| So, without a framework, I built my project in PHP and finished
| it in a week.
| cowmix wrote:
| My company sent (or tried to send) money to Rasmus back in '95 to
| have him implement a feature we needed. I think he ended up
| adding our ask to PHP for free. Anyway, good times.
| Minor49er wrote:
| Do you remember what the feature was?
| simonw wrote:
| "PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor was chosen as the official meaning
| of the PHP acronym with 53% of the votes."
|
| For anyone curious I tallied the votes from the linked page:
| 57 PHP HTML Preprocessor 29 PHP Hypermedia Preprocessor
| 98 PHP Hypertext Preprocessor
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