(AKA: “Thoughts on code smells” and how “high brow” they have become)

We have a habit of talking about “code smells” to indicate patterns and practices that our experience has shown can be problematic. Many of these “smells” are backed by a lot of data and really are legitimate problems to avoid. These are constructs and tools that often have few legitimate uses. But many so called “smells” really aren’t significantly bad. Let’s dive into some of the nuance here and talk a bit about why our word choice matters.

Last week, a proposal to standardize middleware for PSR-7 was introduced to the PHP-FIG. The general concept of middleware is not a new one, and has been in use in the PHP world for many years. Several people have raised significant concerns with the proposal, which have gone completely unheeded by the author. Let me go through the most major of these concerns, as well as show what a better proposal might look like.

*Note: All code that will be used in this post is real-world code found in the wild (and linked to) with one exception (X-Powered-By).

Developers as a whole suck at API design. We don’t suck at making APIs. We don’t suck at implementing them. We don’t suck at using them (well, some more than others). But we do suck at designing them. In fact, we suck so much that we’ve made entire disciplines around trying to design better ones (BDD, DDD, TDD, etc). There are lots of reasons for this, but there are a few that I really want to focus on.

If you’ve been following the news, you’ll have noticed that yesterday Composer got a bit of a speed boost. And by “bit of a speed boost”, we’re talking between 50% and 90% reduction in runtime depending on the complexity of the dependencies. But how did the fix work? And should you make the same sort of change to your projects? For those of you who want the TL/DR answer: the answer is no you shouldn’t.

Last week I published a post called Alternatives To MVC. In it, I described some alternatives to MVC and why they all suck as application architectures (or more specifically, are not application architectures). I left a pretty big teaser at the end towards a next post. Well, I’m still working on it. It’s a lot bigger job than I realized. But I did want to make a comment on a comment that was left on the last post.

Last week, I wrote A Beginner’s Guide To MVC For The Web. In it, I described some of the problems with both the MVC pattern and the conceptual “MVC” that frameworks use. But what I didn’t do is describe better ways. I didn’t describe any of the alternatives. So let’s do that. Let’s talk about some of the alternatives to MVC…

There are a bunch of guides out there that claim to be a guide to MVC. It’s almost like writing your own framework in that it’s “one of those things” that everyone does. I realized that I never wrote my “beginners guide to MVC”. So I’ve decided to do exactly that. Here’s my “beginners guide to MVC for the web”:

It’s quite easy to mix up terminology and talk about making “easy” systems and “simple” ones. But in reality, they are completely different measures, and how we design and architect systems will depend strongly on our goals. By differentiating Simple from Easy, Complex from Hard, we can start to talk about the tradeoffs that designs can give us. And we can then start making better designs.

There has been a lot of talk about typing in PHP lately. There are a couple of popular proposals for how to clean up PHP’s APIs to be simpler. Most of them involve changing PHP’s type system at a very fundamental level. So I thought it would be a good idea to talk about that. What goes into a type?

A few days ago, I wrote An Open Letter to PHP-FIG. Largely the feedback on it was positive, but not all. So I feel like I do have a few more things to say.

What follows is a collection of followups to specific points of contention raised about my post. I’m going to ignore the politics and any non-technical discussion here.