PHP 8.0.0 beta 2
77 points by julien_c 4 years ago | 99 comments- svnpenn 4 years agoPHP is damn good in certain areas.
It is one of the best choices (if not the best choice) for rapid prototyping of a program. Its damn fast to similar alternatives (Python, Ruby, Dart, JavaScript), and the standard library is huge.
It does have footguns. I am not a fan of the loose typing, but you can take some steps to mitigate. You can do "===", "strict_types" and type hinting for function input and output. It is similar to C in that the language itself doesnt really do much to stop you from writing bad code. Also the function naming is not consistent, and even function arguments are not consistent. However PHP 8 will help with that somewhat, as you can now do named arguments.
Also PHP has the best language documentation I have ever seen. I would prefer more examples, but its well above some other languages.
- colecut 4 years agoThe creator of PHP addressed the "function arguments not consistent" issue in a YouTube video called 25 years of php.
PHP is basically a wrapper of C modules.
String functions are ($haystack,$needle)
Array functions are ($needle, $haystack)
Because that's the way the underlying modules worked. I had used PHP for a long time without realizing this.
- beberlei 4 years agoa few of the footguns are also getting removed in PHP 8 by stricter and more consistent number to string comparisons:
https://wiki.php.net/rfc/string_to_number_comparisonhttps://wiki.php.net/rfc/saner-numeric-strings
In addition more internal functions throw exceptions instead of notice+return false on completly invalid arguments:
- SwiftyBug 4 years agoI can't believe named arguments aren't default in every language. TypeScript could have implemented it.
- ht85 4 years ago
- ht85 4 years ago
- paledot 4 years agoI'm with you on everything but the docs. More than once I've had to dive into the source when the docs tell me one thing but the behaviour in some edge case is different. PHP's docs are extensive, but not nearly as reliable as they should be. And don't get me started on the comments.
- sfusato 4 years agoRegarding "best language documentation", wait until you meet Elixir. Used to do PHP before transitioning to Elixir. Elixir & community have basically taken documentation to a new level.
Other than that, PHP is rock solid when it comes to web stuff.
- colecut 4 years ago
- mrrsm 4 years agoPHP, since version 7.0, has been a much improved language since when many people started hating on it. They have been consistently moving the spec forward and making improvements. It's not perfect, but no language really is after all. It is really nice just seeing issues that have been around for a long time being addressed and fixed.
- rglullis 4 years agoI have to confess that I have a lot of prejudice against PHP after having to work with it at the time of PHP3 and 4. It seemed like even worse than Perl in the sense of how many things were just bolted on it as a way that the developers could claim "yeah, you can do that with PHP". After having a blog running wordpress hacked twice by mere virtue of being online, I dismissed it for good.
I keep hearing about how the language has improved, but to me it feels like even if the language gets rid of all its heaps of crap, it still is in a evolutionary dead-end. Is there anything that PHP is developing or adopting that can not be had at other established languages?
(Edit: I never had something downvoted so fast before. This is not concern trolling. I seriously would like to know if it makes sense for a non-PHP developer to look into it)
- CiPHPerCoder 4 years ago> Is there anything that PHP is developing or adopting that can not be had at other established languages?
Modern cryptography is baked in since 7.2.
https://libsodium.gitbook.io/doc/bindings_for_other_language...
Most of the people who shit on PHP have a lot of love for other languages. A survey of the cryptography features the "favored" languages offer will almost certainly fall into two camps:
1. "We wrap OpenSSL"
2. "Go compile it yourself" (i.e. there is nothing baked in)
There's a lot of badness with OpenSSL's API design, especially with asymmetric cryptography. For a fun exercise in these languages, try encrypting with RSA with OAEP padding, but without using SHA1 as your hash function.
For completeness, PHP is one of the languages that wraps OpenSSL too! But it also wraps libsodium, and the community has been moving towards libsodium (unless they need something from OpenSSL for the sake of backwards compatibility) since early in the 7.x series.
If you're going to provide cryptography features in your language, but you aren't shipping modern cryptography in your standard library, you're underperforming what PHP has offered for years at this point. The easiest way to meet the standard that PHP 7.2+ establishes is to add libsodium to your language's standard library.
(There are salient arguments for "why even provide a cryptography feature as part of the language at all?" but most of the languages that see real world deployment are already doing that.)
- smt88 4 years ago> after having to work with it at the time of PHP3 and 4
PHP 5 was released 16 years ago and was a massive evolution of the language. The same is true for PHP 5.2, 5.3, and 7. It's safe to say that your conclusions about the language are no longer accurate.
> Is there anything that PHP is developing or adopting that can not be had at other established languages?
No. I can't think of any reason to start a new project with PHP today. All of its best features are things that have been available in other languages for years. It's also not particularly popular outside of WordPress.
- wyck 4 years agoWordPress accounts for approximately 60% of all websites, PHP accounts for approximately 79% (knows server side sites). So I would say it is particularity popular.
- KerryJones 4 years agoLaravel is decently popular, has the most *s on github for a backend framework I believe (or it did at one point in time) and in a number of Fortune 100 companies.
May not be as popular as React/Flask backends, but it ain't nothing.
- tambourine_man 4 years agoWikipedia? Facebook?
- wyck 4 years ago
- kamel3d 4 years agoI don't know how can you blame the hacking of your website on the language rather than your admin skills, there infinite number of websites built in PHP and never got hacked!
- rglullis 4 years agoI wasn't hosting the blog. It was on webfaction.
> infinite number of websites built in PHP and never got hacked!
If I look at the logs of my webservers and scan for bots trying to exploit some vulnerability, I would guess that 80%+ of the URLs would indicate a PHP-based webapp. So, yeah, there are many that never got hacked but there are certainly a good amount of PHP apps that have some vulnerability. Should we blame all the developers who were "doing it wrong" or should we at least make sure that the language is not facilitating such shots-in-their-feet?
- throwaway8941 4 years agoConsidering the number of vulnerabilities frequently found in Wordpress and its popular plugins, rglullis' admin skills would not be the first thing I'd personally put the blame onto.
- rglullis 4 years ago
- skrebbel 4 years agoBy the way you phrase that question, you're dismissing that single key feature that PHP _already has_ that cannot be had at other established languages.
I know of no other language that lets you deploy a web app by dragging some files from the left to the right in FileZilla. No setup, No vendor lock in, no nothing. It just works.
Cross-cloud serverless frameworks that wrap AWS lambda + competitors get you somewhat close in other languages, but you still have a lot more setup to go through, and lot fewer hosting providers to choose from.
PHP's deployment and execution models really set it apart.
- ragnese 4 years agoYou cannot deploy a PHP app by just plopping a file on an unconfigured server.
Deployment is not that simple.
Or, if it is, then you have to allow me the same grace of just being able to plop my Go or Rust binary on that server and have it magically work. It might even work BETTER because I don't need to check if my php.ini matches my dev machine.
- rglullis 4 years agoRight, but isn't precisely this "drag from left to right and get a website running" that leads to an endless stream of sites that get hacked because the developer was careless/ignorant enough to leave admin.php with executable permissions?
- ragnese 4 years ago
- muglug 4 years ago> Is there anything that PHP is developing or adopting that can not be had at other established languages?
No, not really, but it's still very good for casual web development, which makes up the lion's share of all backend code being written today.
Languages don't need to evolve a ton to be popular – just look at Python, which is doing very well despite not having had a ton of radical changes.
- rglullis 4 years agoIt's not "just" the language. It's also a matter of what the improvements bring in for possibilities of new developers and mindshare.
Python as a language hasn't changed much, but it made huge strides into the scientific community and got a lot of marketshare from ecosystems like R and Matlab. It's becoming king in the ML/AI side. Go is growing in the backend systems/devops stuff that used to be the realm of Python. Rust is getting more and more adoption as a systems language and focus on safety. Even Java seems to be adopting things that make it less bureaucratic while being general enough for the enterprise.
I am not saying that PHP has to go away or anything. It's just that I wished that new releases could have more interesting things to say besides "it's not as crappy as it used to be".
- rglullis 4 years ago
- ragnese 4 years ago> Is there anything that PHP is developing or adopting that can not be had at other established languages?
IMO, no. The language is still near the bottom for both dynamic and "static" typed languages. HOWEVER, if you're doing web backend stuff, Laravel and Symfony are both really solid frameworks.
The direction PHP Is moving in right now is to emulate Java 7, but without generics or concurrency. It's definitely a dead-end unless they come up with something pretty novel and change direction (again).
- core-questions 4 years ago> IMO, no. The language is still near the bottom for both dynamic and "static" typed languages.
Why do you say that? It's faster than Python and Ruby for most cases, still extremely simple to deploy, the package manager (Composer) is very predictable and easy to deal with compared to Pip or Rubygems, the documentation is good, etc.
It has clean lambda functions that you can pass around easily and has for more than a decade. Type hinting has been in place for a long time, too, as have enough OOP / reflection constructs to do just about anything you'd reasonably want to do in a language aimed primarily for web development.
The only downside of PHP that I can still point to is that it's sometimes hard to remember the function parameter order for some of the common string and array functions. Far from a dealbreaker, that.
- core-questions 4 years ago
- dktp 4 years ago> Is there anything that PHP is developing or adopting that can not be had at other established languages?
I think for the vast majority of projects, this is not a question you'll be asking yourself when picking the language.
I think PHP is one of the best languages to pick when you want a quick MVP for an online service (one that doesn't require specific things PHP is not good at). The community is one of the largest, there are more developers than nearly any other backend language and Laravel is probably the most complete all-in-one backend framework out there.
So the question is often, is PHP good enough to develop a maintainable app with decent performance, where developers won't hate every minute spent on it. And the answer is pretty much yes with PHP 7+
- open-source-ux 4 years ago"Is there anything that PHP is developing or adopting that can not be had at other established languages?"
One thing that PHP does better than any other language for web development is ease of deployment. It isn't really anything inherent in the language that makes it easier to deploy, it's simply that hundreds, probably thousands of web hosts have made deployment easy for PHP. Also, the PHP community has documented deployment and installation scenarios thoroughly.
Deployment might sound like a small piece in the overall picture of building a web app but it is actually hugely important. If you want your users to self-install your web app, or to give them the widest possibly choice of deployment hosts, then PHP beats every other language by a mile.
I always mention this quote from blogger and programmer Jeff Attwood on this topic of depolyment:
"If you want to produce free-as-in-whatever code that runs on virtually every server in the world with zero friction or configuration hassles, PHP is damn near your only option." [1]
Guess when he wrote it? 2012.
Sure, we've got VPS and even more hosting options, but in 2020 what other languages can match or even surpass PHP's ease of deployment? Can you give instructions to your relatively non-tech users and tell them how to successful deploy your web app with the same ease as PHP?
- jasonlotito 4 years ago> Is there anything that PHP is developing or adopting that can not be had at other established languages?
I feel like I can ask that question about most established languages and get the same answer back. It still has the easiest deployment and development flow of any language I've ever used. I don't know of a single language that does that right now, and makes going from 0 to 100% much easier, which for smaller pet projects, it's so much less hassle. Upload file, it's running on the web. That's it.
As for all the features it has that other languages have, PHP tends to merge them together. While this means the language is larger than most, it also means I can do things in ways I want to and try new features out.
This doesn't mean I'm not using JS or Go or Java or other languages. But if I'm building a web API, PHP is the one that gets out of my way and lets me build it quickly and easily.
- alganet 4 years ago> Is there anything that PHP is developing or adopting that can not be had at other established languages?
Good documentation and reasonable backwards compatibility.
- rglullis 4 years agoYou can have both at other languages and platforms.
- rglullis 4 years ago
- RussianCow 4 years ago> Is there anything that PHP is developing or adopting that can not be had at other established languages?
Probably not, but that's the wrong question. The real question is: If you already know PHP, is there enough incentive/benefit to switching languages? Based on the experience of PHP devs I know (I personally haven't used it in years), the answer is "no" for many (most?) web dev cases.
- Lazare 4 years ago> Is there anything that PHP is developing or adopting that can not be had at other established languages?
I would say no, but of course, the same is true of most other established languages. What's interesting about PHP is that it's shifting from being a dumpster fire that you would never pick over a real language like Python/Ruby/node/Java/whatever, to one that's honestly broadly comparable for many tasks.
Is it innovating or doing anything really unique? Well, no, but you don't tend to find much innovation or unique features in any of those languages (these days, anyhow). At best they copy them (eventually) from the innovative languages. :)
> I seriously would like to know if it makes sense for a non-PHP developer to look into it
No more or less so than any other big, mainstream, relatively popular language. Learn it because you need it for a job, or because you'd like to see how another language ecosystem solves common problems. Don't learn it thinking you're going to see anything especially new.
- stanmancan 4 years agoAs a gross oversimplification, I would say that the vast majority of languages share the same core functionality, then there's a little sliver that sets them apart from others and makes them unique. I would probably say that what sets PHP apart is it's easy. It's easy to install, use, develop with it, deploy, find hosts that support it, and get help from the community.
It's a decent language and with frameworks like Laravel you can quickly build reliable CRUD apps, which is the vast majority of websites and development.
- 4 years ago
- beberlei 4 years agoPHP has sort of done serverless in 2000, so evolutionary dead end is a a bit harsh :)
- rglullis 4 years agoDo you mean cgi-bin? If that is the case, Perl and C had it beat. ;)
- rglullis 4 years ago
- CiPHPerCoder 4 years ago
- rglullis 4 years ago
- yagodragon 4 years agoI think it is possible that PHP is still the best choice for web development in 2020.
I'm coming from an academic background and i was looking to learn a new backend language to create simple CRUD type, web applications. I already know c/c++, java, js and some python but after research it seems that Rails, Laravel and Django are the best options for this kind of projects as javascript on the backend is still a mess. So i've made a little comparison between them to choose what to learn.
Rails: It might be the best full stack web development framework from what i'm gathering, but it's declining fast and Ruby has a small market share outside the US.
Django: It's been always the 2nd or 3rd best option. Django 3.0 is going async which looks great on paper but in reality it needs work. It doesn't have a built-in asset pipeline for modern js development on the front-end. It needs plugins for basic stuff like social, api auth etc. Python has libraries for almost everything but the web is not always a first class citizen.
PHP: It is by far the most popular backend language. Libraries are tailored for web development and are probably well maintained because they are used by huge projects(wordpress, magento etc). For the same reason it won't disappear any time soon because it handles most of the information on the web and also billions of dollars in online commerce. Symfony has the most contributors than any backend framework and Laravel is probably the easiest framework to create an MVP with. Developers love Laravel and the community is huge. PHP is also improving and adopting new language features with a more advanced type system.
So the real question is why shouldn't someone learn PHP in 2020 ?
- _nothing 4 years agoHonest question: If I'm an American programmer, is there any reason I need to care about Ruby's market share outside the US?
- _nothing 4 years ago
- tambourine_man 4 years agoPHP is seeing a renascence and renewed interest similar to what happened with JavaScript a few decades ago.
A language that's easy to make fun of but widely used is an attractive target for improvement.
- outime 4 years agoMaybe I'm not in the right circles but I see absolutely no renewed interest towards PHP. Is there any reason to believe that? Honest question - PHP was my first language (or second if you want to consider mIRC scripting) and I have not so bad memories but at least me and everybody I know moved away from it years ago and don't see people going back to it anytime soon.
- muglug 4 years agoThere's been one big change in the last 5 years – the adoption of type-inferring PHP static analysis tools in CI.
As companies started adopting TypeScript/Flow into their Javascript pipeline, PHP developers realised the need for something similar in their ecosystem.
I work at Vimeo (which has a lot of business logic in PHP) and I took it upon myself to write a static analysis tool (which you can play with at https://psalm.dev). Other similar static analysis tools were developed at other places that use PHP, and together they have helped make modern-day PHP development a little more orderly.
- no_wizard 4 years agoThats pretty rad.
I'm curious if you guys use PHP at all for any real time workloads. Thats where I've always had struggles with PHP.
Also, have you found the event dispatch system of the modern PHP frameworks to be slower over time?
- outime 4 years agoYour example is similar to a WordPress developer saying they adopted modern PHP - sure, they were on PHP already. But at least Vimeo still wanted to stick to PHP so that's one positive point.
- no_wizard 4 years ago
- Syntaf 4 years agoSymfony was the backend framework with the most contributors in 2019[1], and Laravel is seeing some huge growth in the PHP community. I think there's a lot of hype for the modern improvements in the language, and it's quite easy to manage a stateless web server in production making it a safe technology to use.
[1]: https://symfony.com/blog/symfony-was-the-backend-framework-w...
- no_wizard 4 years agoDoesn't make it the best backend framework of 2019!
In all seriousness, I think this has more to do with the ease of PHP development comparatively to other stacks. Even Python (arguably just as easy to learn as PHP), has more overhead here.
- no_wizard 4 years ago
- stanmancan 4 years agoI mean surely that depends on the crowed you hang around with. Majority of people I interact with use PHP primarily. Anecdotal evidence isn't great at identifying trends.
- muglug 4 years ago
- neovive 4 years agoThe Laravel framework (https://laravel.com) and its growing ecosystem and welcoming community is a great example of this renaissance.
- smt88 4 years agoIs it? Laravel effectively has a single maintainer, as its other contributors seem to have abandoned it[1].
It also seems to have declining interest after peaking in 2017[2].
EDIT: I was looking at the wrong repository, so my comment about Laravel's popularity is wrong.
1. https://github.com/laravel/laravel/graphs/contributors
2. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge...
- mediascreen 4 years agoYou should probably be looking at the core Laravel framework repository, not the "new project"-boilerplate.
https://github.com/laravel/framework/graphs/contributors
To me it seems like the ecosystem is growing rapidly. There are at least three large conferences each year, a handful of established podcasts and an excellent video tutorials site. There are also a number of paid services like Vapor for running Laravel on Lambda, Forge for easier server management and Laravel Shift for automatic version upgrades.
- apocalyptic0n3 4 years agoYou're looking at the bootstrap install repo. That's barely changed since 5.0 was released in 2015-ish. The framework repo[1] is still being maintained by many different developers and sees a significant new release every 6 months. Taylor still accounts for a significant amount of contributions, but it is his project afterall. Also worth noting that the framework has pretty much reached maturity at this point and updates are more focused on stability and bug fixes than new features. A lot of the work being done is on the ecosystem being built around Laravel (see "The Laravel Ecosystem" on [2]), with Taylor currently teasing another new piece to the ecosystem to be released with Laravel 8 in a few weeks that apparently involves inertia.js (whose maintainer is a speaker at the Laracon event too, if I remember correctly)
- mediascreen 4 years ago
- smt88 4 years ago
- edgarvaldes 4 years agoI don't think PHP _needs_ a renascence. It's already a widely used language, so I prefer it to keep growing the good parts and leaving behind the bad old habits.
- smt88 4 years ago> PHP is seeing a renascence and renewed interest
I have seen no PHP renaissance anywhere (real life, Hacker News, reddit, or anywhere else), but I also checked TIOBE[1]. PHP's popularity peaked in 2006, when it was 500% as popular as it is now.
- outime 4 years ago
- toupeira 4 years agoArticle with an overview of the changes: https://stitcher.io/blog/new-in-php-8
Some highlights are union types, a JIT compiler, named arguments, annotations, and match expressions.
The approach to named arguments is interesting. It's nice that you don't have to change the signature of existing functions, but the downside seems to be that you can't enforce the usage of named arguments on callers, as in other languages like Ruby and Python where keyword arguments need to be declared as such.
function foo(string $a, string $b, ?string $c = null, ?string $d = null) { /* … */ } foo( b: 'value b', a: 'value a', d: 'value d', );- Denvercoder9 4 years ago> Python where keyword arguments need to be declared as such.
In Python you don't need to explicitly declare keyword arguments either (though it is possible). This is perfectly valid and working:
def foo(a: str, b: int, c: bool=None, d: float=None): pass foo(b=5, a='something', d=3.0) # is equivalent to foo('something', 5, None, 3.0)- toupeira 4 years agoThanks, TIL!
- toupeira 4 years ago
- Denvercoder9 4 years ago
- no_wizard 4 years agoIf the JIT for PHP ever becomes good enough it solves the memory leak problems PHP to this day is still plagued with, that might be enough to convince me to use PHP again, possibly, for some workloads.
I can't help but feel that PHPs popularity is mostly tied to Wordpress, and to a lesser extend Laravel (with Symfony coming in behind that).
Not really sure the rest of the ecosystem even matters, outside those core pieces. I'd love to see it fix alot of landstanding issues, and I love that the language has moved forward. I've worked with it professionally over the last few years in various places, and I don't particularly dislike so called "modern" PHP, but its only really good at very specified problem domains (mostly, you have a website, need to display said website. I always had scaling problems for anything other than using it in the context of a template language or very straightfoward database access. Real time APIs? nope. Just couldn't get it done, too much memory pressure)
- webignition 4 years agoWhat are the memory leak problems?
I was under the impression that PHP's stateless nature, with a whole new instance of everything coming into being for each request, somewhat sidesteps the capacity for problematic memory leaks that could otherwise exist for processes that remain alive between requests.
- smt88 4 years ago> I was under the impression that PHP's stateless nature, with a whole new instance of everything coming into being for each request
A couple issues here.
1. Even if the PHP process exits after each request, memory leaks during the request are still an issue. If I'm looping through 1,000 elements of an array and leaking memory each time, I could end up with a peak memory usage of 100MB when 1MB would've sufficed. That forces me to scale vertically when I might not otherwise need to.
2. Most mature applications have worker processes that may be longer-lived than serving an HTTP request. If PHP leaks memory, it's less suited to those tasks. Maybe you write those in Go instead, but then you have to ask yourself why you didn't just write the whole application in Go.
- CaveTech 4 years ago1. This is likely user error due to a poor understanding of how PHP memory management works. Unless you're using poorly written extensions then memory management in PHP is quite straightforward.
2. There's a large amount of PHP libraries built to do exactly what you're describing. Long lived PHP processes are live in production across the world.
Straight up misinformation.
- CaveTech 4 years ago
- wanderr 4 years agoThis is true. As far as I understand, the only issue with memory leaks have been around super long running processes that create cyclical references that cause refcounting to not "notice" that something is free. I have never had a memory leak problem with a web service, and I wrote* the PHP backend for Grooveshark (45 million monthly users, averaging 2 hours per visit, running on half a dozen front end web servers. Sadly I don't remember RPS figures at this point)
*not to take sole credit. I created RPC framework and initial API, and oversaw a small team of very talented engineers who added a significant chunk of the functionality powering Grooveshark over the years
- diek 4 years agoMost web workloads will use some sort of process cache, like php-fpm, simply because spawning a process for each request is very inefficient. So the process and any extensions used can leak memory over time across requests.
- wanderr 4 years agophp-fpm is typically configured to restart those processes after some number of requests, just in case there is such a leak. But I have not seen those leaks happen between process restarts, state is still wiped clean between requests, so leaks should be rare/difficult and probably most likely the result of faulty extensions.
- wanderr 4 years ago
- no_wizard 4 years agoManipulating complex data structures that are large and/or trying to manage long running processes cause memory leaks. I often find I have to jump through hoops I don't have to in other languages to deal with these kinds of problems, for instance.
I usually have to resort to queues, which just adds complexity where I typically don't want it.
- FranOntanaya 4 years ago> Manipulating complex data structures that are large
I do assume it's not the case, but one of the footguns with PHP is that assigning around large variables/arrays and triggering the copy-on-write can end building up the amount of duplicates of that data being kept alive. Pass by reference, unsets, generators and the like aren't used super often due to a lot of runs being small stateless requests, but sometimes they may be needed.
- FranOntanaya 4 years ago
- smt88 4 years ago
- 4 years ago
- webignition 4 years ago
- brian_herman__ 4 years agoHopefully this will change Apple's mind. https://twitter.com/GrahamJCampbell/status/12951119829248614...
- kyriakos 4 years agoI think this is irrelevant, apple just moved scripting language support out of their OS bundle. They blew it with that warning message though.
- kyriakos 4 years ago
- mcdramamean 4 years agoThe best language is the one you can make money with or positively affect the world. Please grow up out of this old debate. You all sound like 3 year olds...
- azangru 4 years agoYou can make money with COBOL. Does it make it the best language? Considering that you can make money with any other language as well?
- hu3 4 years agoYou're comparing COBOL with a language that has namespaces, traits, closures, reflection and just gained a JIT compiler, named arguments, annotations and match expressions.
Exhibit A of your parent's point.
- hu3 4 years ago
- azangru 4 years ago
- ausjke 4 years agoI heard about PHP is really just used by wordpress and drupal to keep its popularity ranking these days, and new projects seldom adopt it based on google trends, is this true?
The new PHP7/8 is certainly exciting, is it too late?
- kugelblitz 4 years agoI do contract development work, haven't touched Wordpress in 10 years, never touched Drupal. I mostly work with the Symfony and Laravel frameworks.
- kugelblitz 4 years ago