Dhiddentreasure

09/01/2026

LISTEN if you're a programmer

29/08/2024

Create your OWN TO-DO LIST
Follow for he explained every bit of it.

21/08/2024

HIDDEN TREASURE TECHNOLOGIES

27/07/2024

NEW WHATSAPP HACK..

22/07/2024

CBN is about to make water run from so many people eyes

02/03/2024

Why PHP continues to be a popular but divisive programming language
The good, the bad, and how the future looks for PHP users and developers

One thing you can say for PHP is that it’s persistent. Like many long-standing programming languages, it’s often maligned by developers who would like to see a shift to newer candidates, yet it also maintains many supporters and practitioners, serving as a reminder of C++ inventor Bjarne Stroustrup’s wise words:

There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses.

First created in 1993 to enhance the webpage of programmer Rasmus Lerdorf, PHP didn’t originate as a new programming language and as such it developed organically. It has continued to adapt across its three decades of existence and even the name PHP has evolved, coming to stand for hypertext preprocessor rather than the original meaning, personal home page.

And while the web has changed a lot in 30-plus years, PHP has persisted along with it and continues to be actively supported and regularly updated. The most recent version, 8.3, arrived late last year as the latest in a string of annual releases.

Where developers have run up against limitations of PHP, they have successfully found workarounds. The most famous example being Facebook’s team, who had to find a way to adapt PHP to the dramatic scaling of their social network from thousands of users to millions, tens of millions, and then billions. Facebook’s development team created their own dialect of PHP to soothe the growing pains and work at scale.

To this day, Facebook continues to use PHP, as does Microsoft, Etsy, WordPress, MailChimp and Wikipedia. In fact, according to W3Techs,

PHP is used by 76.5% of all the websites whose server-side programming language we know.

Alternatives such as ASP.net, Ruby, Java, and JavaScript don’t even come close to this share of the market. While these rival languages see a higher frequency of use in high-traffic websites, PHP is still the dominant language across more than 60% of the world’s top 1,000 websites.

Though these figures continue to assert PHP’s dominance over server-side scripting, it is starting to see a gentle decline. But, when a language is used across more than three-quarters of the web, even a trending shift away from its use would take years to affect the rankings.

And so, PHP maintains its relevance through widespread use, but there are other reasons for its continued popularity. It’s open source, and many years of use means there is an extensive community and comprehensive body of resources to support developers in its use and troubleshooting. It’s also relatively easy to learn and, for many developers, their first foray into web programming will have involved PHP.

However, being an old, accessible language can have its disadvantages too. With inexperienced users able to cobble together websites using old tutorials and a little bit of knowledge (a dangerous thing), you’re bound to see issues, particularly with site security. And so, PHP sites continue to be a target of hackers hoping to hit upon an old, unsupported version.

Worryingly, according to WordPress stats, the majority (more than 44%) of its sites are using version 7.1 of PHP, for which support ended in 2019. This is one of the most common complaints levelled against PHP, along with the inconsistencies in the language due to its organic development.

If you’re working with PHP, you need to be keeping up with the new releases so as not to contribute to this souring of its reputation. You would also want to learn to work with its supporting frameworks, such as Laravel and Symfony. Indeed, many job postings for PHP developers will ask for skills in both.

For example, this post seeking a lead PHP developer in Frankfurt specifically asks for knowledge of PHP versions from 8 onwards. Another developer role at IT consultancy CGI expects its PHP programmer to work with Symfony and Drupal, a content management system that’s written in PHP.

Jobs in PHP continue to be relevant and will be as long as it remains among the world’s most-used programming languages. And, despite some loud detractors, most developers admire PHP. In the most recent annual survey from Stack Overflow, PHP was identified as highly “admired” by respondents, meaning those who work with PHP would like to continue to do so.

And for those who stay abreast of the latest in PHP, it’s becoming used more and more in progressive web applications, the Internet of Things, as well as artificial intelligence and machine learning, the fastest-growing sector in tech right now. This flexibility and versatility mean PHP developers can enjoy variety in their work, especially if they find a role working across many projects such as this one with German digital agency Denkwerk, one of 2024’s ‘Great Places to Work’.

Article signalling — or even calling for — PHP’s death knell have a history almost as long as the language itself. Nevertheless, PHP persists. It dominates our web experience and continues to be picked up and enjoyed by new generations of developers.

The revised acronym assigned to the personal home page code that became a scripting language doesn’t quite fit — perhaps it should be known as persistent hypertext pre-processor.

01/03/2024

White House urges developers to dump C and C++

Biden administration calls for developers to embrace memory-safe programing languages and move away from those that cause buffer overflows and other memory access vulnerabilities.

US President Joe Biden’s administration wants software developers to use memory-safe programming languages and ditch vulnerable ones like C and C++.

The White House Office of the National Cyber Director (ONCD), in a report released Monday, called on developers to reduce the risk of cyberattacks by using programming languages that don’t have memory safety vulnerabilities. Technology companies “can prevent entire classes of vulnerabilities from entering the digital ecosystem” by adopting memory-safe programming languages, the White House said in a news release.

Memory-safe programming languages are protected from software bugs and vulnerabilities related to memory access, including buffer overflows, out-of-bounds reads, and memory leaks. Recent studies from Microsoft and Google have found that about 70 percent of all security vulnerabilities are caused by memory safety issues.

“We, as a nation, have the ability—and the responsibility—to reduce the attack surface in cyberspace and prevent entire classes of security bugs from entering the digital ecosystem but that means we need to tackle the hard problem of moving to memory safe programming languages,” National Cyber Director Harry Coker said in the White House news release.

The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency also urged developers to use memory-safe programming languages in a September blog post. CISA, the FBI, the US National Security Agency, and agencies from allied countries also published the report, “The Case for Memory Safe Roadmaps,” in December.

The new 19-page report from ONCD gave C and C++ as two examples of programming languages with memory safety vulnerabilities, and it named Rust as an example of a programming language it considers safe. In addition, an NSA cybersecurity information sheet from November 2022 listed C #, Go, Java, Ruby, and Swift, in addition to Rust, as programming languages it considers to be memory-safe.

About 22 percent of all software programmers used C++, and 19 percent used C as of 2023, according to Statista, making them less popular than JavaScript, Python, Java and a few others. But the TIOBE Programming Community index ranks only Python as more popular, followed by C, C++, and Java.

SHIFTING RESPONSIBILITY

One goal of the new report is to shift the responsibility of cybersecurity away from individuals and small businesses and onto large organizations, technology companies, and the US government, which are “more capable of managing the ever-evolving threat,” the White House news release said.

ONCD worked with the private sector, including technology companies, the academic community, and other organizations to develop the recommendations in the report, it said. ONCD issued a request for public input on the topic in August. It also gathered comments in support of the initiative from several technology companies, including Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Accenture, and Palantir. Other software security experts also praised the report.

The ONCD report is helpful and timely, said Dan Grossman, a computer science professor at the University of Washington. While “dangers of C and C++ have been well-known for decades,” this is a good time for the White House to push for memory safety because practical and mature alternatives are now available, he said.

TIME TO CHANGE

At the same time, changes are needed because of “the sophistication of threats from adversaries that exploit memory safety violations,” he said.

Discussions about memory safety involving the government, industry, and academic can lead to meaningful change, he added. “Naturally, many branches of the federal government are key creators and vendors for software and they can use this perspective in deciding their priority for upcoming changes to systems or new systems.”

However, a move away from C and C++ won’t happen overnight, especially in embedded systems, Grossman said. “But the use of other languages for systems software, notably Rust, has already grown significantly, and I think many people anticipate that sort of evolution accelerating rather than C and C++ development simply stopping, which still seems unimaginable in its entirety.”

Moving away from C and C++ will be a “long and difficult process,” added Josh Aas, executive director and co-founder of the Internet Security Research Group. “It takes a sustained effort to change the way people think about things, and communications like this help keep the issue of safety fresh in peoples’ minds.”

For the change to happen, the government and the private sector need to work together to make secure code a priority, Aas said.

“Ultimately, we need to write and deploy new code, but in order to get there, we need resources and we need leaders at all levels, from government to the private sector, to make it a priority,” he added. “Relevant leaders need to be made aware of the problem, and they need to know that they are going to be supported if they make solving this problem a priority.”

16/10/2023

25/08/2023

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