

PHP Sucks: So What? - DigitalSea
http://ilikekillnerds.com/2012/05/php-sucks-so-what/

======
Argorak
I don't like "my tool sucks, but clients care about the result". If architects
thought that, we'd still be living in huts. Improving your tool improves the
result. Clients are also not the only benchmark: mostly, they just want a
faster horse.

Either PHP doesn't suck because it does the job better then others in certain
areas (which I'd happily admit). Or it sucks and should be replaced.
Everything else is a programmers Stockholm Syndrome.

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jerf
"It doesn't matter if X sucks" is a rephrasing of "It doesn't matter if Y is
excellent." If it doesn't matter if a language sucks or is excellent, than
what exactly does the word sucks in "PHP sucks" refer to?

It's a logical sleight of hand, but logic doesn't tolerate that. You may be
willing to pay the downside cost, but that doesn't mean the downside cost
doesn't matter or doesn't exist. There's no way around the fact that language
quality matters.

And I for one don't have too much trouble finding non-PHP web work. I doubt
I'm alone.

~~~
muyuu
_sleight_ of hand

~~~
jerf
Aye.

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10098
The first code that I was actually paid for was written in PHP. I was a hungry
student trying to earn some money and gather some experience.

We were a small studio making websites. There were enough customers, and my
income depended directly on how many "projects" I could do in a short
timeframe, so naturally, I wanted to do more, faster.

Of course, PHP was the easiest way to achieve that goal. I would take a CMS,
slap the design onto it, write some php and javascript code to make it behave
as expected, and voila. The client was happy, my boss was happy and I got
paid, but I was not happy at all, because the whole thing was soul-crushingly
boring, stupid and I had already learned enough of a decent programming
language to understand the shortcomings of php and be irritated by them.

When I got an (unpaid) internship at a real company offering work on more
interesting (non-web) projects, I left that php sweatshop as fast as I could,
without ever looking back.

Point is, if you want to spend the rest of your career slapping around icky
php code (like my 17-year-old self), then by all means, learn nothing, talk
about how it's the result that matters and do your best to keep your horizons
as narrow as possible. good day.

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VMG
_PHP is cheap to host, cheap to find decently priced & skilled programmers and
quick to code in if you know what you’re doing and at the end of the day what
does your client truly care about;_

If that statement is correct (I don't know), it is an argument to _not_ do PHP
professionally if you are concerned about income. Better target a market with
a lower suppy.

~~~
Xylakant
From my experience neither is true.

> PHP is cheap to host

This used to be true in some respects. Free webhosts often offered PHP as the
only scripting language but the offers were often severely limited in which
extensions were available and in other respects. Deploying a moderately
complex application often was work for a day [1] - which translates to at
least two years of paid hosting on a decent hoster. Ruby on the contrary used
to require specialized hosting or a dedicated server. With the rise of heroku,
this point became moot.

> cheap to find decently priced & skilled programmers

The lesson I took from being technical lead for a 50+ dev team is that it's
easy to find cheap php developers, but they often turn out to be Net Negative
Programmers. Decent PHP programmers take decent salaries (just as decent
ruby/python/java programmers) and - as every decent programmer - are quite
well capable of picking up other languages in a short amount of time. If
you're just doing "standard websites" cheap developers might be just what you
need though (you could go for cheap rails developers as well, they exist).

> quick to code in if you know what you’re doing

There were times when I considered myself a skilled php programmer, but
compared to what I can churn out in ruby, php flat out looses. There are too
many beartraps and tarpits that you can step in, borked php configurations or
stupid bugs ruining your whole day [2].

[1] figuring out how the borked configuration influenced the application,
finding workarounds, ... [2] I recall this one costing me hours and hours of
head-scratching <https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=40691> (I love the "This is
intended behavior" comment)

------
10098
> While you all bitch and moan about how bad PHP... I’ll be making easy money
> and stealing your clients.

Someone tell this guy to stop embarrassing himself, seriously.

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codesuela
He's talking about building cookie cutter websites where the customer has a 10
USD hosting budget. For that PHP (including all the PHP CMS) is unbeatable
however if this not the domain you want to be in there is no reason for you to
be worried about getting your clients stolen by this guy

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ericclemmons
This article chooses PROs for PHP that are hardly and issue, especially when
developing a non-trivial app.

Hosting, for example, is a breeze with PHP because of the wide support on
budget hosts. However, devs typically follow 5-year old workflows and FTP
their changes to the site. Heroku and the like did not exist for PHP for some
time and perfected the ease of deployment and hosting better than budget hosts
could.

I still develop primarily in PHP and JS everyday, and the majority of my code
is all about the architecture of the app and domain models. PHP's quirks are
never an issue when the bulk of your work is with abstracted objects.

PHP can be elegant with frameworks like Symfony2 and Doctrin, which in my
opinion, hold developed and their pull-requests to extremely high standards
for th PHP community.

The coder and the architecture have much more to do with the elegance or
"suckiness" of a language.

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arb99
This has always been my argument. A hell of a lot of very popular sites (eg
tube sites and of course all the many very popular WP blogs) are written in
php. It gets the job done just as easily as other languages. Just not as
elegant.

I run my own network of sites, and almost all webmasters I also work with all
know the ins and outs of php. Its just quicker and more efficient to code in
php. But on here and a few other sites php gets a lot of flak. If i'm ever
asked how to get started in programming I'd always recommend php (or maybe JS)
because it is very simple and there are so many resources for it.

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xnarf
i see a lot of show-stoppers for PHP
<http://www.cvedetails.com/vendor/74/PHP.html>

~~~
DigitalSea
For the year of 2011 there were only 37 vulnerabilities in PHP, so far in 2012
there have only been 7 (according to that site). Doesn't the link you posted
suggest that PHP is getting better? It seems PHP has had a lot less
vulnerabilities than I thought it did considering it's a proven fact the more
people using something the more bugs and vulnerabilities will be discovered
(Windows is a perfect example, bugs galore).

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soc88
I can't stand this apologetic bullshit anymore. If you think defending PHP
makes you look witty: KILL YOURSELF. Thanks.

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twiceaday
So give me karma.

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ing33k
_PHP Sucks: So What?_

We all should try to improve it.

~~~
DigitalSea
Nah man, are you crazy? If we improve PHP, who will we have left to pick on?
It's like taking the fat nerdy kid that gets picked on in school, putting him
on a diet, giving him a gym membership and some acne cream. PHP is the fat
nerdy kid of the web.

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lucian1900
So, use something less shit.

Python and Ruby are exactly as easy to host and arguably easier to find
skilled programmers for.

