
Dispelling the hate against PHP - someguy1233
http://blog.someguy123.com/dispelling-the-hate-against-php/
======
gaelow
It took me some time using PHP to realize it wasn't as bad as its bad rep had
lead me to believe.

It's old, it has been through a lot of changes, most of them great
improvements (although leaving some ambiguities behind, I admit) and it's so
wildly popular on the web that the amount of disastrous coding and outdated
information spread is a mess to deal with and discourages a lot of people who
take software development seriously.

Personal Home Pages has its original purpose stated on its name and it used to
be something you wouldn't want to be endorsing on a multi billion USD web
service with millions of users.

Yet, PHP has become much more than a language for adding some cool web forms,
a guest book and some other dynamic content on amateur home pages uploaded to
shared hosting services.

We still have a hard time taking seriously any programmer who starts saying
(s)he codes on PHP. Many of them can run in circles around me and any other
developer any time with their skills, and I don't think their language of
choice should have any impact on the judgment we do on their abilities or the
quality of the software they build.

I still prefer many other languages over PHP but now I see them as just
preferences (sometimes more or less appropriate, depending on the context),
not better or worse choices.

Let the kids fight over which language is the coolest, I just want to get the
work done.

------
sssilver
Putting aside all the horrible choices the language designers made (hellishly
inconsistent naming, no proper exception usage by the standard library
functions, functions are not first-class citizens, etc etc etc), the one thing
that truly makes PHP revolting are the majority of people who write PHP code.
And by the way, if PHP is the only language you know, chances are -- you're
one of those developers. The community is so uniquely bad, I ofter wonder if
PHP's language design actually has something to do with it.

Python/Ruby community is much different.

~~~
krapp
Elitism and an unwillingness to consider the benefits of other languages or
the rationale of those who use them is a problem present in many communities.
Only knowing PHP is much different than refusing to know anything but PHP.

------
pyalot2
You don't hate PHP because it doesn't have sexy peripheral utilities like
other contemporary language hipsters do. You hate it because it's a badly
designed language/runtime/standard library. And it's not getting any better
although it had had ample time to do that.

------
jacobwg
This has been my go-to link when trying to explain what's wrong with PHP:
[http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-
de...](http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/)

~~~
dykesa
And we would all like to thank you for your continued " I have opinion x and
don't change it when confronted with new information" contribution of showing
issues with the programmer and instead of the language.

------
olssy
There's something to hate in all programming languages but hate can almost be
seen as a popularity metric.

~~~
gaelow
You are absolutely right:

[https://wiki.theory.org/YourLanguageSucks](https://wiki.theory.org/YourLanguageSucks)

------
guidedlight
It's insecure by the language design, not from the framework itself.

When I pen test PHP custom-built sites, I almost always find a dozen high-
severity security defects.

Many of the popular PHP-MySql tutorials on the web have sql injection bugs,
not a good way to learn a new language.

~~~
krapp
Although, any decent framework should take care of most of those issues. It
wouldn't for instance, be using the mysql functions at all, or something like
md5 for hashing passwords, or not escaping user data by default (three common
issues I can think of off the top of my head..)

Not saying PHP is secure by any means, but it can be implemented securely - it
just isn't very often.

That said, if there is an argument to be made _for_ PHP, i'm afraid to say, I
don't think the linked article does a good job of making it. While I think its
suggestion that PHP has evolved beyond some of the common criticisms against
it might have merit, it doesn't address that the bulk of PHP code in the wild
most definitely has not.

~~~
someguy1233
It's definitely unfortunate that PHP code in various websites across the web
is designed horridly, it's also sad that we're unable to fix most things in
PHP e.g. the needle-haystack problem, without destroying compatibility. HHVM
has done a decent job at cleaning it up with Hacklang, but some of these
legacy issues we're going to be dealing with for a long time.

PHP is evolving, many sites on the web are too. But legacy codebases are here
to stay, I mean look at how many sites are still on classic ASP.

PHP was one of my first programming languages so I will defend it, the
ecosystem is much cleaner than it was a few years ago, and it's still the
easiest to deploy language IMO.

