PHP vs Node?

PHP is uniquely bad in that the people behind it continuously make bad choices in designing the language. T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM has existed since PHP 3 and is still visible as part of parsing errors today. It should be renamed T_DOUBLE_COLON but somehow still hasn't been, and the manual entry makes it seem like it's a cute and quirky feature of the language. Oh look! You have to know a very specific subset of Hebrew to work your way around the code!

php.net/manual/en/language.oop5.pa...

PHP doesn't abort execution and show a 500 on error. No. Instead it just sends the half-finished paged with an error at the top that is guarenteed to break the page.

PHP wasn't designed with you running a server process, and any framework that tries to use PHP this way undermines itself completely by having to spend 98% of its development time working against the fact that they're trying to run a modern 3D game on top of SNES-like architecture. PHP was made to be the OG serverless language, running per-requests instead of as a daemon process. But even that very core feature of PHP was butchered.

No attempt has been made to standardize the signatures of standard library functions. Sometimes snake_case, sometimes pascalCase, sometimes nocase, sometimes the verb is first, sometimes the noun is - and for array functions, sometimes the array goes in first, and sometimes last!

PHP is the only language with a configuration file assigned to it. Not a list of language features to turn on/off, no. Configuration that will change the way the language works. Which means you can't take the code from one server to the next and expect things to work. You also have to take into account the configuration of PHP itself.

While JavaScript has its share of "wat"s itself, comparison in PHP, and more generally type coersion in PHP is a PITA, and that's a huge euphemism. Oh, and while JavaScript's == is weird but understandable, PHP's ==, oh boy...

These aren't usage errors, where the developer wrongly assumes something about the code itself and unexpected behavior emerges. These are weirdness coming from the language itself, which makes it extra hard to wrap your head around how to use the language itself, and as a result makes you more prone to errors.

Finally, someone will say "oh but language X or Y also has these quirky features". Oh it's okay then, some other language is weird in this aspect, therefore it's okay to put it in PHP. Therefore PHP really is Frankenstein's Monster of programming languages.

Yes, i really felt that NodeJS can replace PHP, i have had failovers in PHP where my website was attacked and stuff, but as far as NodeJS is going its going pretty smooth but because i came from PHP, i really find that PHP is a good language to start with in making good programming concepts.

In short,

<?php

require($_GET['template_name']);

Of course that was hidden over several layers of call stack so it was not so obvious, and the hours were mostly spent making an assessment of the server to know if anybody used it.

I'm not particularly fan of NodeJS but it's just that this kind of mistakes are super-easy to make in PHP despite all the goodwill of frameworks.

My problem with PHP is that the PRNG is unsafe, the way weak typing works is unsafe, the absence of unicode handling is unsafe, the fact that PHP is a templating language is unsafe, the silent failures are unsafe, ... Everything in PHP is unsafe.

It's just an example within an ocean but let's compare JS and PHP on weak typing.

if (0 == "bonjour") {
    // Will be reached in PHP but not in JS
}

By converting strings to integers and not the opposite, the typing system removes information and possibly creates security issues (this specific thing was used in phpBB to become administrator by modifying your session ID).

Of course you can ban == in your code but what about dependencies? What about some things in the standard library which will keep on doing == instead of === because it's more within the philosophy of PHP?

Of course NPM is not perfect and there is tons of flaws in it but the fact is that PHP is fucking terrifying.

PHP was actually helpful when I was a beginner in 2003 but actually better options came out and kind of exposed the fact that PHP will encourage dangerous behaviors. In fact, I can specifically thank phpBB for teaching me all the common security mistakes you can imagine.

Last week I spent hours fixing potential remote code execution issues in a very popular piece of PHP and that makes me very sad. Because this kind of problem is VERY easy to have.

Of course you can artificially throw away 3/4 of the language and base everything upon more or less decent community-built tools while praying that none of your juniors will create a colossal hole in your code but knowing the alternatives that's really not the choice I'd make.

I mostly agree with you! My main point would be: why keep on working on Frankenstein while there is so many straightforward alternatives.

For the record, in 2010 I strongly stepped in favor of PHP for my projects, but things changed so that PHP doesn't make sense anymore (in my opinion, everyone thinks whatever they want)

Btw I have basics with node.js socket.io and Iam quite good at net. I wrote realtime pos system on it, but I would not use node where I dont need(I mean execute exit process software).