Anyone who has had to work on a single system for many years may be interested (even entertained) by this talk.<p>One thing I appreciated about the video was how one of the biggest complaints against PHP isn't quite accurate: Inconsistencies of needle/haystack parameter order in functions. (there is a consistency there, but I didn't know it)<p>And the fact that PHP was developed over time and in dramatically different eras of the internet that heavily influenced it's features. He admits where mistakes were made, but also where people misunderstood the source/reasoning behind some of the decisions in PHP. (though he seems to sidestep some of them completely)<p>Magic quotes, globals, register globals, etc... he has really good reasons for why and how these things came about. I found this talk fascinating, especially since I build a system that has morphed over time as well.
This is tangential but this channel frustrates me to no end. They shamelessly rip other people's content, stripping their videos of author information, conference information etc, AND add their own title card so that it appears like they are the publishers of the video. Why is this acceptable!<p>Anyway, here is the original source [1], that this time was NOT in their video description.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGOAQli7tGc" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGOAQli7tGc</a><p>And this is the last time I commented about this channel [2]<p>[2] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20797683" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20797683</a>
I've been coding for 30 years and I've always considered programming just a means to an end. It's the tool you use to create that vision you have.<p>I was so happy to see that Rasmus feels exactly the same way. In the video he states that PHP alpha was created as a way to make his life easier to build dynamic websites rather than coding in C CGI.<p>I started out coding C in CGI and then moved to PERL. When I saw the PHP mail() function I was hooked. It enabled me to send an email with one line of code vs the 30+ it took in C or PERL.<p>Rasmus states himself, that he expected someone else to create a better competitor to PHP, and in his mind he was only going to use it for another 6 months until that new awesome project was released.<p>I felt exactly the same way!<p>But they kept updating PHP just as I was starting to think about new tools. Then Laravel came along and they also improved core performance of PHP.<p>So, now, PHP and Laravel are an absolutely beautiful (and comfortable) tool to work with and the performance is awesome.<p>Additionally, Laravel and PHP updates keep flowing freely and I can see no end in site of innovation from the amazing people behind these projects.
There is literally a slide titled: `What was we thinking` where Rasmus goes through the most controversial decisions he made while doing PHP.
I recommend this talk for anyone, specially because most of us, if we are lucky, will have to deal with a 25 year system at some time during our career.
"Arguing about the color of the hammer used to build that thing is just moronic. And all these flames about technologies and stuff... We can't lose track of what we are doing here; why we are programming. We are programming to solve a problem." --Rasmus (video 1:07:09)
If this talk is too long for you to watch, I can recommend this segment towards the end:<p>"<i>This is a tool. PHP is not important. What you do with it is important.</i>"<p><a href="https://youtu.be/wCZ5TJCBWMg?t=3879" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/wCZ5TJCBWMg?t=3879</a>
Wish people would start treating their dev tools as tools rather than objects of worship. The web today feels less robust than those simple tools of the past.
Really interesting talk and for the first time ever, I gotta say I really loved the youtube comments. On the first page (at least) there isn't a single negative comment.<p>I have the a lot of respect for Rasmus and I love the PHP community as it was my first language. I love how PHP and the community around is so practical.<p>And I still think PHP is the easiest language to deploy of all the languages I have tried.
Does anyone have more background on the mod_php vs mod_perl problems he highlighted here: <a href="https://youtu.be/wCZ5TJCBWMg?t=599" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/wCZ5TJCBWMg?t=599</a>.<p>I found it interesting but didn't quite grasp the explanation.
If mod_perl was too powerful and had access to too many of Apache's internals, why not just create a lighter version or make it configurable?
The original untrimmed video of this talk by GrUSP (Italian PHP events organizer) can be found here: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGOAQli7tGc" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGOAQli7tGc</a>
He mentions how mod_php allowed web hosts to support thousands of users on a single server, but doesn't that run all the different users' scripts under the same Unix user account, letting everyone mess with each other's stuff?
I don't like the language but the execution model is unbeatable. Not having to worry the whole server goes down if your code breaks or runs for too long, is nice. I'd like to know if there is some way to run JS code just like that.
I stumbled across him mentioning arrow functions comming to PHP.<p>Looks like this is the syntax:<p><pre><code> fn($x) => $x * 3
</code></pre>
Strange that they went with fn() and not with the simpler approach established in Javascript:<p><pre><code> $x => $x * 3
</code></pre>
Here is a link to see an arrow function in action:<p><a href="https://3v4l.org/JpFJl" rel="nofollow">https://3v4l.org/JpFJl</a>