I recently revisited some of the earliest web code I ever wrote, which was in PHP 5.5 (about 7 years old, I think). I wasn't surprised by all the mistakes I made, both from being a newbie programmer and from making what I think were fairly easy-to-make PHP mistakes. After all, every tutorial I could find back then used mysql, didn't used real_escape_string, etc.
What was surprising was how hard I had to dig now, 7 years later to find out how to do things correctly in PHP 7. Searching for what I thought should be fairly common things to do seemed to bring up all of the old articles that I first mislearned from, and it was really hard to find things like what the best way to iterate over a mysql result set was.
Honestly, after putting my 7 years of experience to practice, the final code didn't look half bad, but I don't think I'll ever end up using PHP since it still appears to be very easy to write bad code. Maybe if a definitive guide for how to write good PHP shows up, I'll give it a shot (or maybe I'll just try Hack).
What was surprising was how hard I had to dig now, 7 years later to find out how to do things correctly in PHP 7. Searching for what I thought should be fairly common things to do seemed to bring up all of the old articles that I first mislearned from, and it was really hard to find things like what the best way to iterate over a mysql result set was.
Honestly, after putting my 7 years of experience to practice, the final code didn't look half bad, but I don't think I'll ever end up using PHP since it still appears to be very easy to write bad code. Maybe if a definitive guide for how to write good PHP shows up, I'll give it a shot (or maybe I'll just try Hack).