

10 concepts regarding PHP that are wrong? - sgerrand
http://www.phpclasses.org/blog/post/155-Top-10-Wrong-Ideas-About-PHP-That-You-Should-Get-Right.html

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sgerrand
This article suffers from a lack of editing - it could do with a rewrite to
improve the readability alone Apart from this, some of the points are somewhat
glib, if not outright specious:

* PHP can do more than 'web' - the functions that fall outside of 'web' (process control and semaphore come immediately to mind) have wildly inconsistent quality and are generally not supported outside of POSIX based operating systems. This reflects on PHP as a language on the whole - part of the language and its extensions are well written and documented, many other parts are not. Prolonged use of the language just repeatedly reminds the developer of this, which becomes tiresome.

* PHP projects are not reusable - While the example given (Wordpress) is widely used, the project is somewhat cumbersome to extend because of the mix of application and presentation logic. Also, using Wordpress is not the best example to use, given the amount of security issues it has faced[1].

* PHP is not good for high performance scalable Web sites or applications - There is a claim regarding the HipHop for PHP (H4P) project being solely about making PHP into a citizen of the multi-threaded web server module world. The performance improvements in execution speed provided by H4P show that the benefits of compiling PHP scripts via interpretation into C++ are far more than just providing multi-threaded instances. This part of the article also continually refers to CPU being the key benchmark for intensively used websites. In the real world, applications generally consume more memory than CPU. PHP handles memory use poorly. That alone appears to have been the motivator behind the H4P project at Facebook. Using PHP in the real world means that a series of caching technologies (opcode - e.g. APC, frontside - e.g. Varnish, memory - e.g. memcache) are required to support large amounts of simultaneous users.

In summary, the article detailed and answered many fallacies regarding PHP
that are littered across the web. The inclusion of statements that are
'loosely' true and glossing over innate inadequacies in the language reduced
the article as a whole. As a result, it underlined the reasons why I do not
choose to write any programming code in PHP at all any more.

While I can see the reason for responding to a series of specious assertions
regarding PHP[2], a better response could have been made.

[1]
[https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=wordpress+security+iss...](https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=wordpress+security+issues)

[2] <http://java.dzone.com/news/i-php#comment-54511>

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manuellemos
+1

