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I won’t dispute that PHP is an objectively terribly-designed language and has many fundamental and unfixable flaws throughout its implementations and throughout

I won’t dispute that PHP is an objectively terribly-designed language and has many fundamental and unfixable flaws throughout its implementations and throughout the language itself. I’ll also agree that the popularity argument is completely facile (bots cloning old WP stacks to create SEO spam does not make you popular, that spam being responsive does not make you the biggest mobile app language, etc), the people making those arguments know it, and they continue to say these things anyway... But, why do you think it’s impossible to write good software in PHP? How long has it been since you’ve written something big with it? I would agree that it’s unlikely for a PHP project to result in good software, especially if it’s big and has had many contributors. But in 2018, PHP has typing, it has packagist and composer, its community has agreed on a standards org and is rapidly adopting those standards. The ecosystem offers tons of solid open source libs and frameworks. PHP has all the language constructs you need to organize your code and scale it to multiple devs (namespaces, encapsulation, etc). Facebook is still using PHP as it’s primary language (as hack, which is basically PHP7 with some differing notation). Laravel is directly competing with Rails and Django and is easily in the same league. So why can’t good (web-based) software be written in PHP in 2018?

mywittyname 8y ago
> I would agree that it’s unlikely for a PHP project to result in good software, especially if it’s big and has had many contributors. I disagree. I've contributed to several large open source PHP projects and never had any trouble figuring things out. It's surprising how quickly I can get comfortable with a massive, foreign PHP codebase. In fact, I think the structure of PHP makes designing certain systems, such as plugins, much more intuitive. It also helps that the PHP community is often united on tooling. Unlike the Java community, whose tooling seems to oscillate between verbose & power to simple & rudimentary and back again.

mywittyname 8y ago

> I would agree that it’s unlikely for a PHP project to result in good software, especially if it’s big and has had many contributors. I disagree. I've contributed to several large open source PHP projects and never had any trouble figuring things out. It's surprising how quickly I can get comfortable with a massive, foreign PHP codebase. In fact, I think the structure of PHP makes designing certain systems, such as plugins, much more intuitive. It also helps that the PHP community is often united on tooling. Unlike the Java community, whose tooling seems to oscillate between verbose & power to simple & rudimentary and back again.