Every day.

I am a PHP developer.

Yeah, "another PHP is awful" rant... no, not really.

It's just unsuitable for some ambitious projects, just like Ruby and Python are.

First of all, DO NOT EVER use Laravel for large enterprise applications. The same goes for RoR, Django, and other ActiveRecord MVCs.

They are all neat frameworks for writing a todo app, as a better-than-wordpress flexible blogging solution, even as a custom webshop.

Beyond 50k daily users, Active Record becomes hell due to it's lazy fat querying habits. At more than a million users... *depressed sigh*.

PHP is also completely unsuitable for projects beyond 5M lines of code in my opinion. At more than 25M lines... *another depressed sigh*.

You can let your devs read Clean Code and books about architecture patterns, you can teach them about SOLID & DRY, you can write thousands of tests... it doesn't matter.

PHP is scaffolding, it's made of bamboo and rope. It's not brick or concrete. You can build quickly, but it only scales up to a certain point before it breaks in multiple places.

Eventually you run into patterns where even 100% test coverage still doesn't guarantee shit, because the real-life edge cases are just too complex and numerous.

When you're working on a multi-party invoicing system with adapters for various tax codes, or an availability/planning system working across timezones, or systems which implement geographical routefinding coupled to traffic, event & weather prediction...

PHP, Python, Ruby, etc are just missing types.

Every day I run into bugs which could have been prevented if you could use ADTs in a generic way in PHP. PHP7 has pretty good typehints, and they prevent a lot of messy behavior, but they aren't composable. There is no way to tell PHP "this method accepts a Collection of Users", or "this methods returns maybe either an Apple or a Pear, and I want to force the caller to handle both Apple/Pear and null".

Well, you could do that, but it requires a lot of custom classes and trickery, and you have to rewrite the same logic if you want to typehint a "Collection of Departments" instead of "Collection of Users" -- i.e., it's not composable.

Probably the biggest issue is that languages with a (mostly) structural type system (Haskell, Rust, even C#/JVM languages to some degree, etc) are much slower to develop in for the "startup" era of a project, so you grab a weak, quick prototyping language to get started.

Then, when you reach a more grown up phase, you wish you had a better type system at your disposal...

Dear Programming Languages,

if you only support weakly typed constructs, I wish you a special place in hell.

Dear Fellow Developers,

if you use a language that allows strong typing with weak typing, the next time we will meet after I have to fix a shitty bug due to that I will play piano on your teeth, and a melody you won't like.

And yes, that means PHP as well. PHP allows for strict types since php7.

So. Just. Fucking. Use. It.

There are no excuses!

I don't care if you don't see the benefit or find it "annoying" and tedious to write it out. Use a decent editor and it will be mostly code-completion anyway.

I just don't want to fix your fuckups. And if your fuckup is due to a typing issue that "slipped" by, you are part of the problem.

If you write software, it should be clear what type each and every variable or object has.

There are no excuses but your laziness.

If you want to be ambiguous, try poetry.

So, what have We learned in this week (wk25)?

There are two types of websites.
The Website, which allows setting passwords Like "123", and the Website that says that your firstname is too weak and must contain lowercase, uppercase letters, requires three or more Numbers and at least two Special characters.

'17:15' < '09:45' === false
'5:15pm' < '9:45am' === true

I either need a language with a stronger type system, or coworkers who understand that comparing raw time input in validation is a bad idea 😡

Implicit types are for the weak!