Laravel 4 Released Today

[sKunKbad]

Laravel 4 was released today. I guess a lot of people had been using the beta and RC versions, but it's good to see the release. I've played around with it a bit, and look forward to getting more experience with it. I hope it is better than I was anticipating. Anyone else check it out?

[trq]

Great little framework. We've built a few apps with it at work. Still evaluating really, but yeah, it's pretty cool.

[trq]

Oh... and speaking of which. Every developer should read at least the first chapter of this: https://leanpub.com/laravel-testing-decoded

 

The first chapter nails why we should all be "testing all the things". For that alone, it's worth the $15. Looking forward to reading the rest.

[Monkuar]

Would never, EVER use a framework ontop of PHP, just simply stupid and you would need to learn more code.  This about the same logic as a human having to learn Arabic just to visit Iraq or whatnot.

 

I heard FluxBB software is going to try to convert their code to laravel or whatever that crap is, lol going to be bloated as crap, aint gonna be lightweight anymore, it's a dam shame really.

 

Old fashion php with properly casted variables and session handling is fine in my book, no need extra garbage ontop of code.

 

Have a nice day

Edited May 29, 2013 by Monkuar

[Jessica]

Pretty sure you don't actually understand what a framework is.

 

 

 

Also: some people actually like to learn new things. SOME people excel when given new things to learn. Some people thrive on learning. What is the point of just learning a few functions then writing the same shitty code over and over?

 

In the past 4 months I've started using various new-to-me "things": Symfony, Behat, (obviously composer), YML, Silex, Vagrant, and Doctrine. Also had to investigate Kohana a little as we're moving off it.

 

I've never been happier at work. I actually got to spend my work time writing a Formatter for Behat which we're going to release. My first ever open source contribution. If I just stuck with "old fashioned" php I'd be miserably making the same stupid "contact us" forms and calendar apps I was doing 5 years ago, and making a third of what I make now (in terms of money and actual software too)

[Monkuar]

Yes Jessica, well I guess it just depends on the person And how knowledgable they are in certain areas.  I myself cannot really think or imagine how much more simpler PHP can get though.  I am thinking these "frameworks" are just different code styles to make it seem like you feel more professional or "smarter" which just doesn't work for me. 

 

Also, as in someone that isn't 100% fluid in PHP Like my self, I hope you understand where I am coming from, from not wanting to learn new code

 

Having to learn/adjust to even more new code, just would make my head explode. 

Edited May 29, 2013 by Monkuar

[Jessica]

No, you called something stupid because you're not smart enough to understand it's value. You also called it crap. Don't try to act like you're not being a moron.

Don't spout off opinions on how crappy something is when you can't even comprehend it. It makes you look even almost stupider than you did the time you told us about spraying bleach in your dying cat's face.

Edited May 29, 2013 by Jessica

[Monkuar]

No, you called something stupid because you're not smart enough to understand it's value. You also called it crap. Don't try to act like you're not being a moron.

 

Don't spout off opinions on how crappy something is when you can't even comprehend it. It makes you look even almost stupider than you did the time you told us about spraying bleach in your dying cat's face.

Who are you? God?

 

People can't express opinions? Well sorry for posting, have fun on your php framework, my gosh, you sound raged. Oh the irony..

 

Nice, PHP Guru calling other people stupid and morons, seems legit, you should be ashamed, I never once insulted u, but whatever, lol

Edited May 29, 2013 by Monkuar

[sKunKbad]

Oh... and speaking of which. Every developer should read at least the first chapter of this: https://leanpub.com/laravel-testing-decodedThe first chapter nails why we should all be "testing all the things". For that alone, it's worth the $15. Looking forward to reading the rest.

I could probably benefit from testing, but every time I read about it it seems like a total waste of time. I've been using PHP for 7 years, and never needed it before, so what I need is an explanation, or a real life situation where testing would be beneficial. I'll try reading this book and hope it clears things up for me.

[ignace]

Quote

to make it seem like you feel more professional or "smarter" which just doesn't work for me.

A framework essentially takes out boilerplate code (session, authentication handling, db "abstraction", ..) and allows you to focus on writing the actual application. Some frameworks are really good at this, others just try to get in your way as much as possible just to make sure your really annoyed when working with it.

 

I don't like Laravel, never did, never will. They have a DI container, yet they promote calling all your classes using their static operator, yeah... no! Symfony components are really wasted on them.

Edited May 29, 2013 by ignace

[trq]

 

 

what I need is an explanation,

 

The first chapter is the mentioned book should indeed be enough to open your eyes to the benefits.

 

 

They have a DI container, yet they promote calling all your classes using their static operator, yeah... no!

 

Obviously you haven't seen how there facades work.

[Zane]

PHP is a C-based framework essentially.  If it wasn't for frameworks, we would still be using a language from the late 1960s.

[jazzman1]

By the way, php is not good language for starting with programming and especially for people coming from the Micro$oft's world.

 

There are lots of builded functions, also tons of video/audio tutorials on the web making their life "easier" but actualy that's fake.

 

I see members here using php for more than 3-4 years with a full lack of basic knowledge in php.

 

Why?

 

Because, most of them preffer watching youtube tutorials instead to start reading the API documentation for instance.

[trq]

 

 

By the way, php is not good language for starting with programming and especially for people coming from the Micro$oft's world.

 

Says who?

 

 

I see members here using php for more than 3-4 years with a full lack of basic knowledge in php.

 

Why?

 

Because, most of them preffer watching youtube tutorials instead to start reading the API documentation for instance.

 

That is just because people are lazy. There are a lot of people who think they want to be programmers but can't actually be bothered putting in any effort to learn to program.

[KevinM1]

By the way, php is not good language for starting with programming and especially for people coming from the Micro$oft's world.

 

There are lots of builded functions, also tons of video/audio tutorials on the web making their life "easier" but actualy that's fake.

 

I see members here using php for more than 3-4 years with a full lack of basic knowledge in php.

 

Why?

 

Because, most of them preffer watching youtube tutorials instead to start reading the API documentation for instance.

As someone who writes both PHP and .NET (C#), I find this to be laughable.

 

Programming != syntax. If you're competent, you can create programs in any language. And there's nothing in PHP that isn't suitable for a beginner to learn. Indeed, it's ubiquity and ability to spit out HTML on the fly make it a perfect candidate, as beginners get results immediately without having to compile. Add in fairly verbose error messages, and it's one of the best languages around for teaching the basics - input, output, variables, arrays, functions, expressions.

[KevinM1]

Who are you? God?

 

People can't express opinions? Well sorry for posting, have fun on your php framework, my gosh, you sound raged. Oh the irony..

 

Nice, PHP Guru calling other people stupid and morons, seems legit, you should be ashamed, I never once insulted u, but whatever, lol

Opinions without any knowledge behind them are useless. You very clearly don't know what a framework is, yet have already made up your mind on them. When called on your ignorance, you got defensive. How is that meaningful to anyone?

 

Instead of chiming in on a topic you know nothing about, maybe you could take the time to learn?

[jazzman1]

As someone who writes both PHP and .NET (C#), I find this to be laughable.

 

What do you want to say that does not matter which is gonna be your first language and php is a good language to start learning the programming?

Edited May 31, 2013 by jazzman1

[jazzman1]

I think I should be more specific.

Personally, I love it. I think it's a great language and it can be used on any system and the web isn't going anywhere.

It's a great tool where many tasks we would be accomplished so easy, but in my opinion PHP is not a good language to start programming.

When somebody starts to learn PHP first, usualy he/she isn't learning how to solve problems as a usual programmer using the basic fundamentals and thinking in algorrithmic way.

He's learning how to set up Apache, HTML, CSS, SQL and so оn, so on.... and after an year he completely lost what PHP is and what PHP does.

I see members here and not only after 4, 5 years with PHP, still having lack of the programming conventions, concepts and the basic ideas of programming. That's a ridiculous gift!

And some day m-r "X" decided to jump into some based good structured framework like Symfony, ZF for instance and he got in trouble, b/s all concepts of programming had been lost some time in the start.

So, I'm newbi in PHP also. My previous languages were Pascal and Bash. I would suggest the first one to be C or Python.

They are really good examples teaching us of good programming discipline that PHP obviously would not.

[KevinM1]

You're making a lot of generalizations based on incomplete data.

 

For one, setting up PHP can be trivial. apt-get apache2, apt-get php5. There you go.

 

Second, other languages have the same sort of setup issues. With C, you generally need to know how to compile, how to create makefiles, how to handle the inevitable seg faults, etc.

 

Third, the samples you see here are skewed. This is a help forum. Of course most of the people here don't know what they're doing. That's why they're here. You can't take what happens here or on other help sites as a real indication of anything.

 

Fourth, even beyond that, the 4-5 years experience thing you mention happens in every technical profession. It's generally accepted that it takes 10 years for someone to really become proficient in what they do. Given the broad application of websites/apps, the public perception that anyone can be the next Zuckerberg, and the fact that the profession lends itself to part-time freelancing, how many of the people here write PHP as their full-time job? 4-5 years is really usually 1-2 years of practical experience.

 

Fifth, someone abusing a framework merely says that the person was too ignorant/lazy to learn the basics. It'd be like blaming Python for Django.

 

Sixth, there's nothing inherent within PHP that makes it a bad language to teach the basics with. It has C-style syntax. It has straightforward scoping. It has easy-to-create custom functions. It has arrays, and strings, and the host of usual primitives. It has the host of usual operators, including the unary increment/decrement operators and the always fun ternary operator. It even has rudimentary OO with a familiar syntax. Aside from being dynamically typed, it meets all the requirements of a first semester intro language.

 

The problems you cite are problems with people. People who foolishly think they have the next Facebook, who believe their scriptkiddie son/daughter/niece/nephew/cousin that programming is trivial, and think that blindly copying 6-10 year old tutorials are all it takes. Most of those people would fail at anything technical. There's a reason why those of us that are good get paid very well. Not everyone can do what we do. And like any technical professionals, our path to success is littered with people who couldn't hack it, for one reason or another. But that reason is very rarely the tool used.

[Jessica]

I wish I could *like* that post more than once Kevin.

[jazzman1]

Irrelevant.

 

That does not change the fact that PHP sux as a first language and doesn't provide basic concepts of programming.

 

Why don't you ask someone who's jumping from PHP to another language how easy is it?

[kicken]

That does not change the fact that PHP sux as a first language and doesn't provide basic concepts of programming.

I gather your "basic concepts of programing" are Algorithms and Problem Solving. PHP provides just as much ability to learn those aspects as any other language does. Sure it may provide a lot of hand extensions or libraries that will handle a lot of those things for you, but so do most other languages at this point. If someone is not learning these concepts with PHP it is not because PHP sucks and they would do better with something like C. It's because they are lazy and don't really want to program at all. If they were starting with something like C rather than PHP they probably would have just given up entirely rather than take the initiative to learn these "basic concepts."

 

PHP is great for a first language. It is easy to use, simple to setup, provides instant feedback by just having to refresh vs re-compile and run, has very good error reporting and recovery from errors, and a syntax that is similar to a number of other language. For someone who has never programmed before, the above environment is perfect setup since they get good feedback about what they did wrong instantly, and their time spent learning the syntax will apply more easily to other languages.

[KevinM1]

Irrelevant.

 

That does not change the fact that PHP sux as a first language and doesn't provide basic concepts of programming.

 

Why don't you ask someone who's jumping from PHP to another language how easy is it?

 

You're going to need to come up with something better than a stubborn dismissal and an appeal to anecdotal evidence.

 

Again, people who have trouble jumping from language to language are people who never understood what they were doing to begin with.  They're cargo cult programmers, copying and pasting and blindly mimicing whatever they find in a tutorial or book because it works, or it seems like it works, or because someone in authority told/showed them to do it that way.  That's not a flaw of PHP, the language, but rather a human flaw.  Correlation != causation. 

 

And if you really want to swap anecdotes, I've encountered just as many shitty .NET programmers who think that programming consists of dragging server controls onto the canvas and supplying db connection strings.

[jazzman1]

Well, there are lots of good articles (books) on the web which group of languages are suggested to be learning as first and why!?

 

Anyways....it's only my point of view and personally I will never suggest someone to start learning the basic concepts of programing with php unless his scope of desires are - build a website easy and fast.