Charcoal HQ

Makyen

12:00 AM

For a complete project, Typescript is a very reasonable choice.

Machavity

@Das_Geek Let me guess. This is early PHP 5. Maybe 5.2 5.3?

Das_Geek

Good to know. I was originally trained in C/C++/ASM, so I do feel more at home with the older-style syntax

@Machavity Originally, yes. Which we didn't know going into it, with our dev environment set up with totally different versions of everything.

ArtOfCode

Aye, my userscripts are always pure JS (or ESwhatever-the-current-one-is), though you can use JSDoc formatting for type comments. For my Node app, only the backend stuff is TS because that's way easier to compile and use than it is to compile TS+ESnext down to ES5 for the browser

Das_Geek

The worst was the MySQL transition, where the old stuff they used was deprecated in a bad way or straight up deleted

Machavity

@Das_Geek I'll bet you anything they were using register globals. In which case, you have my sympathies. On the upside, once you move it to PHP 7+ it becomes considerably less painful

Makyen

12:03 AM

@Das_Geek Loose type conventions can be a significant source of problems. However, that can be largely mitigated when writing/architecting the code/project. It's unfortunate that they relied heavily on loose typing. I'm sure that has presented lots of problems.

Das_Geek

@Machavity Holy crap. I have to write this down. Literally hadn't heard of that.

Though we have made more steps to pay off tech debt. Luckily the larger project is relatively well-funded, so there not too much of a time crunch for deliverables

Machavity

PHP 5.3 is where they started to get rid of it. If you want to know why a lot of legacy projects never moved to 5.3 or beyond, that's generally it. Register globals was a horrifying concept

Das_Geek

@Makyen Yes, so many. There was a q() function they used as a "wrapper" for the mysqli object....the number of types that thing could return was mind boggling

Makyen

@Das_Geek I agree. Using Typescript on the backend is usually a good idea (assuming TS/JS is in the stack being used). It does reduce the likelihood of a variety of issues.

Das_Geek

@Machavity Yeah that link was the first thing I looked up when you told me. I was speechless.

Makyen

12:08 AM

@Das_Geek Ouch. That's usually not good. It's easy for that sort of thing to cause worlds of problems.

Das_Geek

@Makyen Yeah, it has, which we've mostly sorted out, kinda. I'm the main guy working on a feature branch to overhaul the broken DB query system.

Originally, they use a for each loop to query the database.....that means one row returned per loop....one thousand queries for what would have been a simple SELECT ... WHERE statement

Makyen

That's... bad (understatement) :-(

Das_Geek

Though to be fair, I can't blame them that much. Basically every column/variable/whatever in the database has a many-to-many relationship with every other column. So I can see why that would make sense if you didn't know about DB stuff

@Makyen Just bringing the queries outside the loops brought the page load time from over a minute to like 10 seconds

Makyen

@Das_Geek Yeah, but if you're writing that sort of thing, part of the task is to learn, if you don't already know.

@Das_Geek That's a very good improvement. I'd expect people were happy.

Das_Geek

Normally I'd agree, but once again they weren't devs, and this tool is super low-priority compared to the rest of what they do

Yeah, there's a lot more to be done but I think we're at a point where it's "good enough"

I really hope so, anyway

Sorry to post so much chatter

Makyen

12:15 AM

As much as we'd often like to get to "perfect", "good enough" is usually the criteria we should use.

@Das_Geek np. I for one need a break from all the other stuff happening on SE today and yesterday.

Das_Geek

I feel that

Makyen

And I'm not really that heavily involved. But, the whole thing is quite draining.

Machavity

@Makyen Part of the problem was PHP was easy to be sloppy with. My first projects were horrible. Add in some of the bad ideas in process (like mysql_result) and you'd have a kluge of code in no time, with PHP strewn all over HTML

Das_Geek

Agreed. I was in the Meta Chat for maybe 30-45 mins before the freeze, not knowing anything about anything before joining, and I just got so immediately stressed

Makyen

@Machavity Ouch.

Machavity

12:19 AM

There are still terrible lessons about PHP on the internet. We still get questions about the deprecated/removed MySQL API from time to time

Das_Geek

@Machavity I wouldn't know about interwoven HTML/PHP...hehe....not at alll :(

Machavity

My stuff nowadays is almost all objects and views separated from code logic

Makyen

@Das_Geek I've been dabbling at reading the Meta Room, but I haven't really dug in. After all, there are only 1075 new chat message in that room since it was unfrozen. An easy read. :-(

Das_Geek

If you want a barrel of laughs, take a look at the ajaxCRUD GitHub....it's the god class around which this project was built

@Makyen Yeah, my typing speed isn't good enough to keep up with that haha

Machavity

Holy crap. That's a PHP4 constructor. Been a long time since I saw one of those

Das_Geek

12:25 AM

Isn't it great? :D

Machavity

Yeah, those were deprecated in 7.0

Das_Geek

And the OG devs added a whole bunch of $_GET-related logic before the class, because of a weird thing they do with iframes. It's just...painful

Machavity

Well, if you ever need some modern PHP sanity the PHP chat room is filled with actual PHP devs

Das_Geek

Fortunately all this will soon be on the back burner, as I'm getting some small projects that I'll be able to develop from scratch

Yeah I very well may. I haven't touched frameworks outside of random Zend magic to interface with a Bugzilla instance

Machavity

Start with 7.3 and remember autoload and Composer are your friends

Das_Geek

12:29 AM

Yeah, I do need to look more into autoloading. I've toyed around with the spl_autoload_register, but haven't done much else

Machavity

Oh, and when you do start, get PHPStorm. Helps you code properly (at least in most cases)

Das_Geek

Honestly the silver lining on this project was having to learn Python for the Selenium libraries

Lol, you're assuming I have a GUI to use on the dev machine

Can you say Vim with Xdebug?

My setup is RDP-ing into a jump server, and from there ssh-ing into the dev VM, which has no GUI nor am I allowed to host anything on it like VNC. I also have to have the code only on that VM, then use the jump server to open the web page for the PHP code

It's...very painful

Machavity

The only good news I have for you is that's still not the craziest setup I've heard of. Maybe this one. And it's not using PHP

Das_Geek

Or what about that guy who developed entirely on an iPad connected to a remote hosting service

@Machavity Holy.....

I'm suddenly very grateful for my job

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