This is what AI is made for. Murtaugh is too old for this 💩 and Riggs has to find a new partner. I absolutely love how they brought in every character from that era and even combined two different characters for one actor in a couple different scenes. 🤣🤣🤣💥🔫

BREAKING: Microsoft, $MSFT, is offering buyouts to 60,000 workers as part of the company’s efforts to cut costs amid AI adoption, per Bloomberg. Personnel on select teams in the US, Canada, India, and the UK at a vice president level and below will be eligible. This reflects ~27% of Microsoft's total workforce.

*scream*

It'd be nice if folks were having conversations. But instead, it's just the usual one-line snarky takes backed by no constructive argument like "PHP is <insert expletive>". And I've seen same takes directed at literally every other stack out there. And my point is, all stacks are, for the most part, "fine". They've all had their share of CVEs, and with LLM-driven research, there will be an explosion of more, very soon. They're all designed to be patched with mature package managers that support version-pinning. It's just that these upgrades remain the responsibilities of the developers. What happens though is developers start a project on a given stack at a given point in time. If you look at a "stack" you have these moving parts: The Stack Layers, from high level to low level: - Layer 1: The Application Framework (Laravel, Symfony, Spring, .Net, Django, Rails) - Layer 2: A wild flurry of 3rd-party Libraries - Layer 3: The Language / Runtime (C#, Java, PHP, Python, Ruby) - Layer 4: The Operating System (Linux, Windows) Layer 1: So the developer starts building a SaaS application in a given Application Framework (AF). Their application right-away starts getting coupled to this framework's, call it, "API". Now right here, if you embrace an "Onion" or "Hexagonal" Architecture, you can dramatically limit this coupling, making it orders of magnitude easier to upgrade the AF down the road. Most devs have never heard of those though, couple all their code tightly to the framework, and live and die by its very paradigms which have absolutely nothing to do with their business logic. Some frameworks are biased toward this tight coupling, others make it easier on you. I have opinions with specifics but I'll keep them to myself. The key factor is you absolutely are not required to lean into any bias. It's just that most developers don't spend time thinking through this. Layer 2: As their needs evolve, they start adding 3rd party libraries to their application. Some of these libraries are tightly coupled to the Layer 1 framework, call them "extensions of the framework". Other libraries are self-contained and don't care about the framework. But they definitely care about the language version, Layer 3. If you want to upgrade a Layer 2 Library, you'll often need to upgrade your Layer 3 language version. Layer 3: The language/runtime cares about Layer 4, the Operating System. Upgrading it will eventually require you to upgrade Layer 4, the OS. Layer 4: The OS ... largely avoids getting upgraded. Say you built an application on a Layer 3 language runtime of PHP 8.1, CVE comes out and people say upgrade. So you look for a minor version patch for PHP 8.1, and none exists, as clearly indicated by PHP's widely published version support schedule. So you try to emergency-upgrade to PHP 8.2 ... HAHA. Whoops your Layer 3 language PHP 8.2 is not compatible with your Layer 4 OS version. So you upgrade the OS. Assuming you're successful, now three of your 15 Layer 2 3rd-party Libraries break when you run your Unit Tests. (because you did write unit tests ... RIGHT? And you do TDD, RIGHT?) But you can't update your Layer 2 Libraries because they depend on other Layer 2 Libraries which depend on a specific version of your Layer 1 framework. FML. These challenges exist across all stacks. Folks are out there deriding a Layer 3 language, not even qualifying a Layer 1 framework, all of which have always had very robust version management and upgrade paths since their inception, but that nobody ever leverages. Blaming the stack is counterproductive. Conversations need to be had on better Software Engineering practices. Which is exactly why I started my original post the way I did, calling out TDD, Onion/Hexagonal architectures, Domain-Driven Design and the Data Mapper pattern.

So anyway who was saying you deserve it for running PHP again..?

Oh 100% all this. But the PHP you knew back then, and the PHP that's actually deployed out there are two completely different beasts. Unrecognizable. And a lot of folks with experience similar to yours have remained anchored in opinions which are simply not informed by reality of the past 20 years at least. And I hear you, I lived thru those years as well, I remember C-compiled binaries, shell and perl scripts in cgi-bin folders whose stdin/out was the web server socket. Those were terrifying days. I remember Netscape Enterprise Server. I remember the first "Servlet" specs and APIs that follow, and Tomcat. PHP 5.0 released in 2004 made PHP one of the first web-application-enabling interpreted languages with a very clean implementation of Object-Oriented Paradigms. Interface. Abstract Class. Class. private, public, protected methods and members. It already supported explicit types on method arguments, just not on method return types. With these core language capabilities, and frameworks such as Symfony, you could actually build very-well architected web applications leveraging some of the better practices I laid out in my original post (TDD, Onio/Hex architecture, DDD, Data Mapper, etc.) Method return types were introduced 10 years later in PHP 7 in 2015. Since then PHP and application frameworks built on top of it have continued to flourish.

Somewhere, a CTO just found out their servers still run PHP 5.6 💀

It'd be nice if folks were having conversations. But instead, it's just the usual one-line snarky takes backed by no constructive argument like "PHP is <insert expletive>". And I've seen same takes directed at literally every other stack out there. And my point is, all stacks are, for the most part, "fine". They've all had their share of CVEs, and with LLM-driven research, there will be an explosion of more, very soon. They're all designed to be patched with mature package managers that support version-pinning. It's just that these upgrades remain the responsibilities of the developers. What happens though is developers start a project on a given stack at a given point in time. If you look at a "stack" you have these moving parts: The Stack Layers, from high level to low level: - Layer 1: The Application Framework (Laravel, Symfony, Spring, .Net, Django, Rails) - Layer 2: A wild flurry of 3rd-party Libraries - Layer 3: The Language / Runtime (C#, Java, PHP, Python, Ruby) - Layer 4: The Operating System (Linux, Windows) Layer 1: So the developer starts building a SaaS application in a given Application Framework (AF). Their application right-away starts getting coupled to this framework's, call it, "API". Now right here, if you embrace an "Onion" or "Hexagonal" Architecture, you can dramatically limit this coupling, making it orders of magnitude easier to upgrade the AF down the road. Most devs have never heard of those though, couple all their code tightly to the framework, and live and die by its very paradigms which have absolutely nothing to do with their business logic. Some frameworks are biased toward this tight coupling, others make it easier on you. I have opinions with specifics but I'll keep them to myself. The key factor is you absolutely are not required to lean into any bias. It's just that most developers don't spend time thinking through this. Layer 2: As their needs evolve, they start adding 3rd party libraries to their application. Some of these libraries are tightly coupled to the Layer 1 framework, call them "extensions of the framework". Other libraries are self-contained and don't care about the framework. But they definitely care about the language version, Layer 3. If you want to upgrade a Layer 2 Library, you'll often need to upgrade your Layer 3 language version. Layer 3: The language/runtime cares about Layer 4, the Operating System. Upgrading it will eventually require you to upgrade Layer 4, the OS. Layer 4: The OS ... largely avoids getting upgraded. Say you built an application on a Layer 3 language runtime of PHP 8.1, CVE comes out and people say upgrade. So you look for a minor version patch for PHP 8.1, and none exists, as clearly indicated by PHP's widely published version support schedule. So you try to emergency-upgrade to PHP 8.2 ... HAHA. Whoops your Layer 3 language PHP 8.2 is not compatible with your Layer 4 OS version. So you upgrade the OS. Assuming you're successful, now three of your 15 Layer 2 3rd-party Libraries break when you run your Unit Tests. (because you did write unit tests ... RIGHT? And you do TDD, RIGHT?) But you can't update your Layer 2 Libraries because they depend on other Layer 2 Libraries which depend on a specific version of your Layer 1 framework. FML. These challenges exist across all stacks. Folks are out there deriding a Layer 3 language, not even qualifying a Layer 1 framework, all of which have always had very robust version management and upgrade paths since their inception, but that nobody ever leverages. Blaming the stack is counterproductive. Conversations need to be had on better Software Engineering practices. Which is exactly why I started my original post the way I did, calling out TDD, Onion/Hexagonal architectures, Domain-Driven Design and the Data Mapper pattern.

Oh 100% all this. But the PHP you knew back then, and the PHP that's actually deployed out there are two completely different beasts. Unrecognizable. And a lot of folks with experience similar to yours have remained anchored in opinions which are simply not informed by reality of the past 20 years at least. And I hear you, I lived thru those years as well, I remember C-compiled binaries, shell and perl scripts in cgi-bin folders whose stdin/out was the web server socket. Those were terrifying days. I remember Netscape Enterprise Server. I remember the first "Servlet" specs and APIs that follow, and Tomcat. PHP 5.0 released in 2004 made PHP one of the first web-application-enabling interpreted languages with a very clean implementation of Object-Oriented Paradigms. Interface. Abstract Class. Class. private, public, protected methods and members. It already supported explicit types on method arguments, just not on method return types. With these core language capabilities, and frameworks such as Symfony, you could actually build very-well architected web applications leveraging some of the better practices I laid out in my original post (TDD, Onio/Hex architecture, DDD, Data Mapper, etc.) Method return types were introduced 10 years later in PHP 7 in 2015. Since then PHP and application frameworks built on top of it have continued to flourish.

I just sponsored @ThePHPF. Go sponsor your open source dependencies! (at @LonghornPHP ) github.com/sponsors/ThePHPF?…

Me after patching my servers for the php2shell exploit.