Why do people love to hate PHP? - _RPM
======
MalcolmDiggs
Let me go out on a limb and speak for many people with broad generalizations:

Many of us have contempt for earlier versions of ourselves.

Many of us started on PHP, hacking together wordpress and joomla and drupal
sites, etc. We cut our teeth on it. We went from incompetent to competent on
it. But then we decided we wanted to be something bigger, something better,
something more professional. So we jumped on the flavor of the month (a few
years ago it was RoR, now it's Node, soon it'll be Golang) and we never looked
back. Since this hot-new-thing looked and acted and felt nothing like the old
thing, we figured the new thing was good, and therefore the old thing was bad.

Now the new junior programmers remind us of our old selves. We've got no
patience for it. It makes us uncomfortable to think that we were ever that
new, ever that unseasoned or naive. They're using PHP? Oh well that only
reinforces that I'm above it now. In this way our disdain for PHP is only a
self-congratulatory indulgence. We're patting ourselves on the back for making
that choice to leave it behind.

Like the bullies in the hallway at school, we're just a bunch of insecure
people. And that's why we keep shoving PHP into a locker.

~~~
gumballhead
I think you nailed the answer to the question. Many people are going to come
in and answer a different question (why PHP kinda sucks), while willfully
ignoring that you can make pretty reasonable arguments about why any
language/framework/environment kinda sucks. PHP seems to get a special amount
of hate because to most of us PHP coder means newb because that's what we were
when we wrote PHP.

It's main strength is as a server-side rendering language, with everything
else bolted on. That's fine if your requirements are simple. It's not really
practical to make that work side-by-side with mobile clients. Developers are
finding languages that provide asynchronous (node) or concurrent (golang)
features to be more important when you're mapping data from many different
sources to json output.

It's worth noting that Ruby and Python don't really provide those things
either, but have much better reputations as back-end languages. I don't think
that will last though. I can easily picture a world where people say, "LOL
Ruby! That's what we used in boot camp!"

------
joshtronic
"There are only two kinds of programming languages: those people always bitch
about and those nobody uses."

    
    
       -- Bjarne Stroustrup

------
krapp
It's an awkward, haphazardly designed, weirdly implemented and frankly ugly
beast of a language which just happens to be better suited to its task
(server-side HTML templating) than other more beautiful and elegant languages,
none of which are hated by anyone.

~~~
_RPM
Have you actually read php-src? In my opinion there are many clever design
patterns used to create the language.

~~~
code_duck
The implementation being clever in parts does nothing for the language itself.

~~~
_RPM
What you just said makes absolutely no sense.

~~~
dangrossman
Perhaps you misunderstand his comment? You might write an elegant and clever
Lisp implementation of Brainfuck. That doesn't make Brainfuck an elegant or
clever language to program in.

~~~
_RPM
Making the implementation faster would most certainly benefit the language
itself. There is a logical fallacy in his statement and I was just making that
clear for the record.

~~~
code_duck
The design of a language and the performance of programs written in that
language are fairly separate issues. Of course they combine to create the
overall value of PHP, but it's like... To use an auto analogy... imagine a
really uncomfortable car with no cup holders that has amazing transmission
performance. When I say 'the language itself' I mean the interface as
presented to a programmer, not a sysadmin.

------
bowlich
I work with PHP. My suspicion is that it's the the Java of the day. I remember
a lot of crap being heaped onto Java 15 years ago and now it's PHP's turn to
sit on the seat of scorn.

I feel like PHP is just a very dull work horse with a lot of legacy code devs
have to churn through. It doesn't really do anything new or sexy. It kind of
globs features from other popular languages long after those features have
been tried and tested.

------
jayrambhia
I just started my first job and I had applied for a role of android developer.
The first I was told that I had to work on PHP. I'm currently working with PHP
and Symfony 2. I have to create a campaign manager and make it compatible with
the existing backend stack. I have just started to learn PHP and I don't think
I have the patience to go through with it. Advice appreciated.

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sarciszewski
Because of a lot of beginners use it, and a lot of people laughed at eevee's
"fractal of bad design" rant from nearly 3 years ago, and most peoples'
understanding of PHP is as old as the minimum version supported by WordPress
:|

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getdavidhiggins
"Hate" is a bit strong - as if PHP was some malignant force of the universe. I
agree with Bjarne Stroustrup quote:

"There are only two kinds of programming languages: the new hotness (node,
etc), and oldskool PHP"

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NameNickHN
Some people like it to feel superior and some parts of PHP make an easy
target. Not to mention sheer mass of PHP scripts that make a huge target.

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omarforgotpwd
Everyone wrote a bunch of total crap in php when they were 12, thus the deep
mental links between PHP and piles of shit.

------
mc_hammer
search wtf php

