Comment by chuckadams

18 hours ago

It was never any kind of official extension, it was an outright fork of PHP (it changed the grammar) and FB never really attempted to push it to core, or really engage with PHP's core dev process in any way. PHP came about in the era of server-side includes, and expecting it to have grokked the DOM structure out of the box is just hindsight.

Anyway, I don't even think about server-side rendering anymore, and for the last few days have had Claude "shitting out" Vue components that replace legacy Bootstrap 3 components with html5 alternatives for my PHP app to use via Inertia.js. The axe-grinding is not helpful to either of us.

5 comments

chuckadams

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hparadiz  17 hours ago

Lol to true. Who even uses twig or smarty anymore hesitantly raises hand

  • DonHopkins  11 hours ago

    I have a client I've been working with for decades (because they're great people to work with), maintaining and improving their php code base that still uses Smarty templates. So I know and hate Smarty from first hand experience, and appreciate what a terrible idea Smarty is and why.

    I've also extensively used Zope and Plone, which attempt to give designers a "safe" set of capabilities and subset of Python which was a total disaster. Template DSLs always end up trying to regrow programming language features, much usually worse then the languages they are implemented in.

    Zope is particularly illustrative because it recursively accumulated: TAL, METAL, TALES, RestrictedPython, and DTML: all to avoid "just use Python templates". (And don't even get me started on all the layers CMF and Plone introduced!)

    This happened with Smarty, Zope Page Templates (ZPT), TAL/METAL, RestrictedPython, Django templates, Helm templates, Jenkins pipelines, GitHub Actions YAML, Terraform HCL, and countless other attempts to create a "safe non-programmer-friendly mini-language" that eventually mutates into a worse programming language, often with horribly leaky abstraction layers of \escaping and &lt; perfect syntax and <![CDATA[ cruft.

    I Wanna Be <![CDATA[ (Sung to the tune of "I Wanna Be Sedated", with apologies to The Ramones):

    >Bad things you accomplish when using Smarty:

    >Adding a second language to program in, and increasing the complexity. And the language is not well spread at all, allthough it is’nt hard to learn.

    >Not really making the code more readable for the designer.

    >You include a lot of code which, in my eyes, is just overkill (more code to parse means slower sites).

    https://web.archive.org/web/20090227001433/http://www.rantin...

    >Most people would argue, that Smarty is a good solution for templating. I really can’t see any valid reasons, that that is so. Specially since “Templating” and “Language” should never be in the same statement. Let alone one word after another. People are telling me, that Smarty is “better for designers, since they don’t need to learn PHP!”. Wait. What? You’re not learning one programming language, but you’re learning some other? What’s the point in that, anyway? Do us all a favour, and just think the next time you issue that statement, okay?

krapp  16 hours ago

> PHP came about in the era of server-side includes, and expecting it to have grokked the DOM structure out of the box is just hindsight.

Obviously not from the beginning. But by the time template frameworks like Twig came around it should have been possible. If it can be done at runtime it's possible to build into the language proper. And I'm specifically talking about the time when PHP 7 started taking other features from Hack.

I'm not grinding an axe here, i'm just stating an opinion.