On PHP

6 102
Avatar for Satoshiwall
4 years ago

You've probably heard it from your hipster friends. PHP is dead, or at least it's dying. At least that's what I've been hearing since I became a developer in 2013. Even though these statements can not be backed by data, they seem to have a significant impact on what kind of developers and technology the cryptocurrency space keeps attracting.

Let me go out on a limb here. Imagine Bob. Bob is a developer and he's interested in building a product or a useful tool around some cryptocurrency. The fact that Bob is interested in "crypto" is a good indication that he likes new technology. His preference for new tech will very likely impact his technology stack. Bob knows about PHP, but everyone around him keeps saying that it's dead, and he prefers "new" tech anyways, so he goes with newer options like Node.js, Rust or Golang, maybe Python. You know, the hipster stack.

That's perfectly fine, nothing wrong with that. There are good use cases for each of those languages. In fact, it's probably easier to build your crypto project with anything but PHP. Due to lack of good libraries it can be frustrating to deal with Bitcoin on PHP at times. When I decided to implement BIP-70 at Satoshiwall, I couldn't find a single working BIP-70 library. I had to fork one and throw together pull requests from different developers to make it work. This is very time consuming and even depressing.

80% of the web runs on PHP

https://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/programming_language/ms/y

Now let that sink in. I built a BIP-70 payment server in order to accept Bitcoin Cash payments on my site, and there was no working library for the most popular server-side programming language in the world. I can only imagine how many developers gave up when they realized they need to build all that stuff from scratch, or that they would need to fix some old library nobody bothered to maintain.

Nudes and PHP: The secret to establishing a global peer-to-peer currency.

We need to make things easier for PHP developers

We can't ignore the market leader in server-side programming languages. If BCH is supposed to be global peer-to-peer electronic cash, then web developers need to have an easier time implementing it into their existing infrastructure. This means we need to attract more PHP developers into the space, so they can build great tools that can be used by lots of other developers of said established programming language.

I'm telling you with great confidence that PHP isn't going anywhere. If the Bitcoin Cash community could somehow find a way to lower the barriers for PHP developers, I think that would be a great advantage over competing projects.

1
$ 1.75
$ 1.00 from @btcfork
$ 0.60 from @Read.Cash
$ 0.10 from @Telesfor
+ 1
Avatar for Satoshiwall
4 years ago

Comments

That's a good idea you have shared.. Though i works with HTML, i understand PHP also.. I'm subscribing you because of this article

$ 0.00
3 years ago

The only real gripe with PHP is that there's a ton of old, bad code out there. One look inside WordPress is enough to make any modern programmer cringe (though, it's not really a fault of WordPress - it's quite mature and has to maintain a lot of backwards compatibility). But the modern versions of PHP are really on par with most modern languages.

Any plans to open source the BIP-70 library?

$ 0.01
4 years ago
$ 0.10
4 years ago

Awesome!

$ 0.00
4 years ago

That's a good idea.

$ 0.01
4 years ago

PHP is a fantastic language and I don't understand the hate it gets. It's extremely easy to prototype on.

tipbitcoin.cash's backend is written in PHP. :)

$ 0.20
4 years ago