

Ask HN: Why not PHP posts in HN? - HeinZawHtet


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lmm
Honestly? Because PHP sucks. Part of it is tribal loyalty - not wanting to be
seen as the sort of person who would write PHP; I suspect more people know it
than admit as much here. But mostly it really is a really bad language.

~~~
finalight
please explain why PHP sucks

I am a php developer for years and truthfully, I don't find it sucky

~~~
smt88
PHP = your Blub[1]. You don't find it "sucky" because you haven't used
something better. Or, if you have used something better, you didn't spend
enough time to learn how to use it properly.

I'm an unashamed PHP expert. There's a ton of money to make in fixing other
people's PHP, and it's often easy work.

That doesn't mean PHP is "good". With discipline, you can write readable, DRY,
easy-to-maintain PHP. That doesn't mean the same code wouldn't be _more_
readable and _easier_ to maintain in another language. While PHP has great
documentation and is "easy" to write, it has lots of surprises and
inconsistencies.

Although IDEs with autocomplete, static analysis, and XDebug support have made
PHP much better, its typing is still a problem. When you're writing extremely
large systems, you end up with some very sneaky bugs due to PHP's weak typing.

Google "PHP sucks" if you want to read more.

(Note that Python, Ruby, and JavaScript also suck. I'm really excited for the
Go/Dart/Scala/Rust/others era where we've built languages that fix the
mistakes we discovered while writing huge applications in the last few
decades.)

[1] [http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html)

