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Why Developers Hate PHP

66 points by jesuisundev 6y ago

karxxm 6y ago
There is no web framework out there which comes with such elegant concepts, syntax and feature-richness like Laravel. I have seen them all - Laravel is incredibly good, especially for small - mid sized projects! And this statement comes from a python guy.
- Naac 6y ago
  Why do you prefer it over say, Flask or Django?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - gremlinsinc 6y ago
    Laravel performs way better than Django, I also prefer the migrations/model styles that resemble Rails a bit more. Django might be better w/ 3.3 or whenever they fully integrate async into the view/db layer, but w/ laravel I can plug in swoole and go from 110 reqs/sec to 4600+ on my dev pc - w/ 12 threads and 200 connections hitting a post api logged in, updating the database and the caching layer, and queuing notifications. Just ran some big benchmarks on laravel w/ php-fpm vs swoole last night...as an aside. I also don't like some of the ways django handles auth. If I were to use python, I'd definitely go w/ FastAPI, it seems much more joyful a framework. I'd also love to do something like go for sessions/auth/jwt and hasura, postgraphile, or postgrest or some sort of api from postgres, and then most of the logic would simply be postgres functions/triggers/etc...there's also some nice 'built-ins/ecosystems stuff that even rails lacks'. Auth is built in, vs devise (being almost a requirement). Message queues, notifications, .env, events/listeners, are also all built-ins. Eloquent is nice, though repositories using straight sql or the DB class are probably more performant, but you lose a lot of the magic that makes laravel nice, so there's trade offs. Also all the many drivers for caching/queues/etc and telescope is a very beautiful way to debug and so is ignite for error pages. Horizon is nice to manage queues/etc. I keep trying to move to another framework just for the sake of 'something new' and boredom but after 8 years on laravel, I still keep coming back. Wordpress is a totally different story, I charge 35% markup on my normal rates just to touch wordpress because it sucks so bad and hurts my brain to work w/ it. Also, I don't really need to worry about how to setup vue or react, laravel-mix pretty much handles all the webpack stuff w/ a few exceptions if I'm using Tailwinds or creating aliases for paths, etc...
- fideloper 6y ago
  I'm convinced that Laravel and PHP are (literally!) best-in-class for the user-facing web layer of any HTTP based application. The tooling, resources, first party libraries, and general ecosystem is VERY evolved, and the framework can makes you VERY productive.
  - xellisx 6y ago
    I've used Laravel, not a fan. I believe that it's too wrapped up in magic, it actually gets in the way. Also bad naming choices for patterns and Active Record style DB stuff just leave some more bad tastes in my mouth.
- samcrosoft 6y ago
  I created an account just to reply and say I couldnt agree anymore with your statement. I have used multiple frameworks and Laravel towers above them all in terms of feature-richness. I have spent the few days trying to get into Phoenix and as interesting as it is, it would require me to re-invent the wheel for a lot of things that laravel just offers you out of the box. a quick example is subdomain based routing or even its robust notification based system. For all the hate laravel gets , it level of productivity is unmatched once you know yor way around it.
smacktoward 6y ago
Here to see how many comments don't bother reading the piece and just react to the title.
- njharman 6y ago
  I didn't, skimmed. > PHP is the most widely used language in the world for websites. Being served does not equate to being used to develop new things. Is there really that many new websites, website features being authored in PHP? Sure there is maintenance work and some popular platforms are written in it. But beyond that? I haven't seen a job posting in long time.
  - ceejayoz 6y ago
    There are plenty of job postings. They just mostly say stuff like "Laravel" instead of "PHP".
  - tyingq 6y ago
    It consistently makes the list for any analysis of "top X languages by job posting" I can find.
  - teen 6y ago
    I'm using it at a fresh start up. Having used node, internal Google frameworks, python, and dart previously, I would highly recommend PHP for new projects. Laravel is what makes it worth it imo.
    - artificial 6y ago
      Laravel is pretty sweet, I recently scoped it out (been in Flask land and itching to try some Elixir/Phoenix) and it's got everything, exploring the queues now. I really like the helpers for accessing array elements through dot notation. Example: $data = [ 'more' => [ 'complex' => ['my value'] ] ]; if (array_key_exists('more', $data) && array_key_exists('complex', $data['more']) && array_key_exists(0, $data['more']['complex'])) { echo $data['more']['complex'][0]; } You can do this: echo Arr::get($data, 'more.complex.0'); Plus the bog standard php null coalescing operator "??" is pretty sweet. // fetch the value of $_GET['user'] and returns 'not passed' // if username is not passed $username = $_GET['username'] ?? 'not passed'; Just some little things off the top of my head. *Formatting.
VHRanger 6y ago
PHP being awful annoys me so much more than javascript being awful. At least for the latter the use became mostly unintentional. For PHP, the problem is that it came about at just the right time to be picked up by WordPress and Facebook, hence encrusting itself in most of the web we see. I dislike WordPress the same way I came to dislike Visual Studio or any other monstrosity. It's a slow, massive, lumbering mess but it's also by the most mature tool for the job it does. There's no reason to pick up PHP for a new project. Except, I guess if you're just doing simple CRUD and PHP is what you know. Languages don't matter that much for simple CRUD apps and PHP is a sub par, annoying, inconsistent language that will get the job done.
- robotron 6y ago
  I'm currently on a project building A CQRS system in PHP (not the first time) . I have no idea what you are basing this on.
  - d1str0 6y ago
    he's basing it on PHP 10-20 years ago, just like the article explains. :P
- teen 6y ago
  PHP via HHVM + Laravel is a still top choice for new projects imo.
  - johnnyfaehell 6y ago
    Why with HHVM? PHP7 is pretty fast, I believe the fasted non-compiled language there is.
    - teen 6y ago
      good to know, i hadn't fully dug in yet.
- thinkindie 6y ago
mikece 6y ago
I know it's cool to hate PHP but I can think of other languages (Perl, VB6, Groovy) I dislike more. For a language to be so hated it has to be used a lot, and that's the primary virtue of PHP: it runs damn-near everywhere. Not only web scripting/apps but you can use it for shell scripting, Lambda/Azure Functions... there are even frameworks for creating native mobile applications with PHP. And I wouldn't be surprised if it compiles to JavaScript as well.
- bch 6y ago
  > For a language to be so hated it has to be used a lot, and that's the primary virtue of PHP: it runs damn-near everywhere. “Runs damn-near everywhere” is true of nearly all contemporary scripting languages, though, no? It’s definitely used a lot, though I don’t know how that compares to Perl, Ruby, Python... Without digging in harder, I still think it came at about the right time and had a killer feature: a dynamic nascent web with an incredibly low barrier to entry. You could create a form and ask for a persons name and have it respond “Hello, $name!”. I feel like it got entrenched and never gave that up.
- jakevoytko 6y ago
  Yeah, I think that goes back to something the OP said, which is that it's a victim of its own success. It's old enough that everyone has had a bad experience with it. I've had many that are directly or indirectly tied to PHP - my college blog was a hodgepodge of unmaintainable PHP scripts, I've run Wordpress blogs with plugins that broke in horrible and confusing ways, some things like argument order and operator precedence are confusing. Combine with a long-enough life to have some famous bugs (like the hash collision DOS attack), and you have a recipe for widespread derision. But it kept getting better. I work in PHP at my day job, and I enjoy it. Tools like PhpStorm and Phan make the experience excellent. If PHP 7.4 were launched today as "AWSLang", a stateless object-oriented optionally-typed scripting language that seems designed for working with Lambda functions, we'd love it. "You mean it just dies at the end of the request by default? No shared mutable state between requests? How functional!" Sure, we'd have a few things to complain about. But don't we always?
seccess 6y ago
I couldn't find a date on this article, but I don't think this line is accurate anymore: "Facebook, Wikipedia, Yahoo, Flickr, Tumblr all these sites run in PHP and welcome millions of users every month without flinching." Facebook dropped PHP for their own language called Hack, which I think is based on PHP but with a lot of the things people complain about changed.
- mgkimsal 6y ago
  > but with a lot of the things people complain about changed. and some of those things have changed in base PHP as well too.
  - d1str0 6y ago
    I think it might even cross compile in some fashion.
- basch 6y ago
  Wordpress. Over a third of the web is Wordpress.
- egwynn 6y ago
  FWIW I found this in the RSS feed for this site: <pubDate>Mon, 23 Sep 2019 04:05:19 +0000</pubDate>
- biesnecker 6y ago
  I don't mind PHP (like I don't mind lots of things that I don't really have to deal with), but Hack is by far my favorite web language. It has most of what's nice about PHP (specifically, reload and your changes are there, memory is request-scoped, etc.), without most of what's awful (the HSL fixes most of the goofy inconsistencies, real (although still not as expressive as I'd like it to be) static typing, etc.).
GenerocUsername 6y ago
That "article" spent half its time leading up to explaining why PHP is bad and half its height on GIANT MEMES. The actual content was half a paragraph about how PHP lacks strong conformity... needless waste of bits
- d1str0 6y ago
  I thought it was entertaining had a good bit of history. It does a good job of empathizing with the reader and then shedding light on why they might want to change their opinions on PHP.
- enlyth 6y ago
  Agreed, the author might have a good point but I really dislike this style of writing where I have to scroll through a few megabytes of animated image macros to get to the point. These memes are always forced and never funny.
werber 6y ago
I "hate" my experiences in the aughts debugging other peoples PHP code, which put me off. But I primarily use JS now, and I feel like it's just as hated (but maybe more loved?). But I can't imagine how much people would hate JS if node came out in 2001, could you even?
- msla 6y ago
  I wonder what people would think of Node if it came out right before the tech bubble burst and the company hosting all the package repositories sank without a trace, taking the packages with it. That would have done some lasting damage to the web development world.
triceratops 6y ago
https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/ https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/ is a classic of this genre.
- thinkindie 6y ago
  pick a random language, ruby, python, javascript etc etc and you'll find similar rants/complaints. Yet I think right now it's cool to shoot on PHP therefore everyone is more vocal
  - msla 6y ago
    When someone gives you a long list of reasons why they hate something, why do you conclude they only hate it because it's trendy to hate it?
    - thinkindie 6y ago
      because this kind of rants are pointless, they are not bringing any value. Every language comes with their own inconsistencies or oddity. Most of those points raised are just added to a laundry list for its own sake, it's not something you come along every single day. You might have a WTF moment once in a while but that's something that happens with every language. I'm still not able to understand why everyone hate PHP and then at the same time love Javascript or Python or Ruby.
      - balfirevic 6y ago
        Not every language comes with the same amount of inconsistencies and oddities. As an illustration, compare the amount and severity of WTF moments found in Ruby vs. Javascript in this presentation: https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat
  - cygx 6y ago
    Yet I think right now it's cool to shoot on PHP This is not a recent thing, it has always been cool to mock PHP. It's not entirely unwarranted, but most programming languages have their own warts. For example, for some reason, creators of dynamic languages think they need to mess with variable declaration, to make it more accessible, or whatever, instead of staying with tried and true lexcially-scoped block-level variables with explicit declaration. As far as I can tell, the result always ends up worse.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
hu3 6y ago
> Most developers who hate PHP hate it out of elitism or ignorance. Either way it’s dumb. You have to choose a technology based on what you need. PHP is highly useful and powerful in many scenarios. And taking it out of the equation just because of its reputation is not a good idea. When I conduct hiring interviews, one of the questions I like to ask regardless of the language for the position, is the developer opinion on PHP. It's not uncommon for some to start massive rant based on outdated or outright wrong statements about PHP. Most of them never even used PHP. It's a nice question to filter out elitists. The best candidates usually answer either "can't say because I have never used PHP" or state pros and cons of PHP based on their experience. edit: quick -3 downvotes. I suspect I hit a nerve in some elitists who would not get that Rust or Haskell position because they would have baselessly trashtalked PHP in my interviews.
- winrid 6y ago
  They might think you expect them to dislike it. Also, maybe they fear if they say they like PHP you'll take points off.
  - hu3 6y ago
    That goes for any question in interviews. I expect honesty and I'm straightforward about it.
    - pizza234 6y ago
      This is not really a question like any other, because it's a very polarizing one. It's fair to intentionally ask polarizing questions if the objective is to find how if a candidate can take moderate positions in those contexts, but it's definitely not like "any question in interviews".
      - hu3 6y ago
        Fair enough. It's not comparable to just any question. But hear me, you have to poke the bee's nest with some polarizing questions to really know what's inside otherwise you're stuck hiring an unknown until it's too late and costly (for both parties) to find out they were not a good match.
afarrell 6y ago
I will say this for PHP: Its interaction with my brain had such a nearly-disastrous impact on my life, that it finally allowed me to finally get the mental health treatment I'd been seeking for a decade, and to realize the fundamental and unfixable weakness of my marriage. ------------------------------------------------------- If you enjoy eating pad Thai, that is great for you. I do too. But different people are different and the effect of peanuts on some people are quite dramatic yet real. Choosing not to work with PHP is no more elitist than choosing not to eat gluten or peanuts.
- d1str0 6y ago
  There's an obvious difference between choosing not to use PHP and shitting on an entire language based on a decade's old idea of the language is.
  - afarrell 6y ago
    The PHP project experience which cost me a job that I loved, nearly got me kicked out of my home, and prompted multiple evenings of suicidal ideation, and led my wife to be filled with anger at me even 7 months later is from the end of 2018. I am responsible for how I manage my mental health. Part of exercising that responsibility is my firm choice I will never again work with PHP.
kkwteh 6y ago
There was a tech talk I saw on Youtube a few years ago that I really liked that argued that Facebook succeeded because of PHP, not despite it. IIRC, the main argument was that despite its flaws, PHP has one killer feature, which is that it lets you have really tight iteration loops for web development. This made developing in PHP extremely productive. I searched around for the video, but couldn't find it.
- type0 6y ago
  The type of developers FB wanted were already using PHP and that made it good fit
abellerose 6y ago
I don't like having to hold 'shift' while pressing '4' all the time. Other then that I don't think the language is bad and where you cannot do what you're needing to do. If only I could get rid of the need for $ signs everywhere.
- thinkindie 6y ago
  ...and "->" to access a method or a variable. Maybe in PHP9
- d1str0 6y ago
  at least you don't have $ # and @ to determine object vs list vs. hash map like perl5. :P
  - cygx 6y ago
    Found the non-Perl programmer (the sigils for scalars, arrays and hashes are $, @ and %).
  - xellisx 6y ago
    After I learned PHP 4 right after one of the first books came out, I quickly forgot Perl. So many way to make one liners from symbols. shudders
arnvald 6y ago
> Developers hate PHP because you are more likely to get errors with a language that allows so much freedom. Ruby gives you much more freedom than PHP. You can reopen classes, you can use any kind of object as a key in an associative array, you can write code that will execute when the class (not the instance) is being created. And yet I find it much easier to write stable code in Ruby. > Developers hate PHP because it is the opposite of hype driven development Does C# gets so much hate? Or Python? I don't think either of them is an example of hype driven development, and yet they are rather respected languages that don't get so much hate. > Developers hate PHP because they believe the language has been stagnating for 20 years. Again, I don't think that's it. I've been using PHP7 for the last few months and yes, it is different from PHP4. You have optional static typing, you have better tools, a lot has changed. Yet deep in its core the language is still badly designed. I constantly find some weird behaviours that just don't exist in other languages. Example: $array = [1,2,3,4] array_filter($array, function($x) { return $x %2 === 0; }); In every other language I've used, such function would return [2,4], but not in PHP. array_merge( [ "a" => "w", "1" => "x" ], [ "a" => "y", "1" => "z" ] ) In every other language I know, it would return [ "a" => "y", "1" => "z" ], but PHP returns [ "a" => "y", 0 => "x", 1 => "z" ] I know, these are just random examples and every language has its quirks. The problem is that in PHP there are so many quirks I keep checking how each function works, because after half a year I still can't remember them (and I don't remember whether array is a first or a second argument, because it depends on a function). I wouldn't say that I hate PHP. It's another tool that I know and am able to use. I just think in 2020 in most cases when you start writing a new web application, there are plenty of better options. So maybe that's where the hate comes from? That there are simply many more consistent languages that just remain less popular than PHP?
- thinkindie 6y ago
  php > $array = [1,2,3,4]; php > var_dump(array_filter($array, function($x) { return $x %2 === 0; })); php shell code:1: array(2) { [1] => int(2) [3] => int(4) } what's the problem with array_filter then? That keys are not reindexed?
  - arnvald 6y ago
trixie_ 6y ago
I think there's something people miss when looking at PHP as a system - the fact that it's a collection of hot swappable logic modules (pages) PHP pages themselves can download packages of additional PHP pages and extend functionality as the website runs. For example the user can install a message board from the UI in WordPress, and PHP files themselves will download additional PHP files needed for a message board, and boom your site now has a message board - no recompile, install, or deploy. Your running system has extended itself in real-time with additional functionality. Maybe I'm crazy, but I think there is something special about this that our typical compile/deployed applications aren't designed for. Before the web, applications tended to carry their state in memory, but with the web we stored state in the database. Our logic really only needs to take the request from the user and either pull or modify data from the database and return. A lot of web apps today feel hollow as we rarely store state in them, we just pull, manipulate, and render database data. What if each major code path was its own binary? That's kind of like what PHP is. With PHP the application is almost living as it is never really turned off/on, just modified over time. If there's a bug in one page, I just need to fix that one page. And a single page is lightning fast to deploy to my servers. The rest of the system keeps humming. Now the language itself might not be the best, but do you see how this system is fundamentally different from single binary web applications?
csours 6y ago
PHP is my favorite language to write SQL injection vulnerabilities, just like C is my favorite language to write pointer bugs. (Disclaimer - The last time I used PHP was over a decade ago, and the last time I used C was in college)
- greenshackle2 6y ago
  You don't have to write pointer bugs in PHP, they are already included for free in the language implementation.
iillexial 6y ago
I'm a PHP developer and I really don't like this language. Right now it's paying my bills but I hope my next job won't be related to it. People are saying that PHP has become better and that's very true. But still far behind modern languages like Go, Python, Rust, Elixir. PHP is full of inconsistency, legacy code, and missing features. Core developers are doing great by adding a lot of new stuff and optimizations, but caring too much about backward combability disturbs the language from becoming better IMO.
cafard 6y ago
> Most developers who hate PHP hate it out of elitism or ignorance. I don't think I'm an elitist. I inherited a system that was written by a pretty bright guy without a lot of programming experience: thousand-line files mixing logic and presentation, that sort of thing. It was a bear to maintain, it was a bear and a half to secure. It gave me a distaste for PHP, yes. I don't hate PHP, I'd just rather use something else.
greenshackle2 6y ago
I write very little PHP but I work on a PHP extension written in C for a security product that integrates tightly with the language and some of the reasons I hate it are: The Zend APIs suck, and they have non-existent or severely outdated docs. For example, one of PHP's main internal data structure, zend_hash, is a weird hash table with a string / int union key type and is awkward to access or iterate over. Memory issues. I've had to debug segfaults caused by memory bugs in the language and core libs more than once. For example I hit an uninitialized read error in mbstring, it's been in their bug tracker since 5.x and never fixed. I understand the normal way to deal with memory errors in PHP is to shrug it off because processes are short-lived but if you are security-conscious it is concerning. Compared to that, working on similar integrations for Python, Java, Node.js, the number of times I've hit such bugs is exactly zero. PHP just seems to have lower quality and worse design overall. EDIT: CVE database agrees with my assessment, so many more memory issues in PHP: PHP: https://www.cvedetails.com/product/128/PHP-PHP.html?vendor_id=74 https://www.cvedetails.com/product/128/PHP-PHP.html?vendor_i... Python: https://www.cvedetails.com/product/18230/Python-Python.html?vendor_id=10210 https://www.cvedetails.com/product/18230/Python-Python.html?... Java: https://www.cvedetails.com/product/19117/Oracle-JRE.html?vendor_id=93 https://www.cvedetails.com/product/19117/Oracle-JRE.html?ven...
- timw4mail 6y ago
  Huh, this is one of the first times I've heard critisism about the implementation of PHP, rather than the language itself.
type0 6y ago
> PHP is an old man who doesn’t want to sell his land. An old man who continues to dance insolently. But in this case he is terribly ill and not actually dancing but having a condition called Chorea that is often mistaken for dance like movements https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chorea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chorea
kockic 6y ago
Did anyone here start learning PHP in 2020? How were you introduced to PHP? Are there any good resources to start with? When I was introduced to PHP everything was still in a single file, PHP, HTML, JS, CSS.
throwaway8748 6y ago
I haven't used PHP since 2012 so I don't know if any of the stuff that made me hate it still applies. A lot has probably changed since, but I don't know to what extent. Surprisingly, the technical inconsistencies isn't what I hated most about it. It's rather the fact that questionable practice was rampant and largely left unchecked in its many communities. The only way to realize this is to join another community where peer review is severe enough and bullshit detection high enough that mediocrity is rarely given the opportunity to infect your practice for long and fester. A proper community is supposed to nurture you into becoming a better programmer, so that you can take those lessons and carry them with you wherever you decide to go next. By contrast, my experience with PHP over the 6 years or so that I used it was that you learn 3 things today and you'll have to unlearn 2 tomorrow. Eventually I got fed up of the cyclical learning pattern and I moved on. Some years after my move away from it, I decided to take a look back at some of the code that I had written with PHP. I was freshly appraising the sum of my past experience. I remember thinking that the language seemed to have a crisis of identity. It was dynamically and weakly typed, but with serious Java envy and so some of the less desirable aspects of Java were basically just cargoculted in, but in a shitty incomplete way. Private, protected, public class members, what a joke. If you're a PHP programmer, did you ever ask yourself why would Python or Ruby programmers somehow be able to get by without this shit and not you? Do you know that because of the way its interpreter works there are some technical benefits for Java to have these besides the fallacious architectural "advantages" of hiding access from the programmer? Does the same thing apply to PHP? Interfaces and inheritance, without the possibility to overload methods, which can cause a lot of grief when a zealous and inexperienced library designer hasn't properly thought things through (which happened more than I'd like to remember in PHP projects). That was just at the language level, but many of the big frameworks followed suit with the Java obsession, by implementing a slew of circuitous patterns aimed at convincing programmers that they were now coding "Enterprise Style". Front Controller, Action Controller, Dispatcher, and a whole other lot straight out of pattern catalogs. When you think about it, most of those efforts were fallacious in PHP. If the problems that you were trying to solve were beyond the constraints of what PHP is typically good for, namely cms-type admin web apps, then you were probably better off with another language. On the other hand, if they applied, why bother with all the enterprisey bullcrap? But, but, but Facebook... Ah, shut up! Even Facebook had to invent a whole other language to fix that mistake. The other projects that didn't buy into this sort of architectural zeal went the other extreme, with their own experimentations and idiosyncrasies. Bastardizations of concepts that someone had seen somewhere else, but only half-understood, was common. Lots of Rails envy and no shortage of fame-driven wannabes that had failed to make a name for themselves in other communities, but somehow always found a way to shine in PHP. Ensued just more bullshit. Anyways, that was a long time ago. I hope things have changed. I'm not sure I'd be back if they did, in hindsight what PHP has for it is one of the easiest "hello world" tutorials, but you end up paying for years the half-hour you saved to see these two words on a web page. And for what it's worth there are worse languages, but there are better ones too.
barnaclejive 6y ago
ugh. You lost me when I saw the first of several huge gifs and memes inserted throughout the article.
alexandernst 6y ago
I'm still not entirely sure why, in plain 2020, PHP seems to be the only language missing a debugger able to run in a shell. Python, Ruby, Javascript and others have a "debugger;" statement of some sort that, when hit by the execution flow, will pause the code and let you type stuff in your shell, letting you inspect the code, step forward, etc... Why does PHP need me to configure an entire IDE or my browser? (I'm looking at you, xdebug). Why can't it have a cli-debugger?
Carpetsmoker 6y ago
The article is correct in stating that PHP has moved quite a bit in the last ~10 years; even back when I was using PHP in the 5.1/5.2/5.3 days things were already steadily improving. But ... that doesn't mean that PHP is a good language, or that people hate in PHP "just because it's cool". There are still many issues that remain. For example the very loose typing checking remains an issue and source of real bugs; e.g. a while ago a SAML library could be bypassed because it forgot to add the flag to in_array() to enable strict comparisons. Much of the problems in PHP are with the standard library, and this is not easy to fix. Even the mysql deprecation (in favour of mysqli/PDO) took ages. I wrote a thing looking at fopen() in PHP a while ago, and I think it's a good example of the problems that remain in PHP: https://www.arp242.net/php-fopen-is-broken.html https://www.arp242.net/php-fopen-is-broken.html There are still many issues with the standard library like this which are clumsy and just plain design errors, and many of them are too fundamental to work around or fix. Has PHP evolved? Sure, and that's great! But that doesn't mean it's now an especially good language. In general, I'd rather have a poor language with a good standard library than a good language with a poor standard library. Aside: one weird thing about PHP's stdlib is that it's all written in C; I don't know any other comparable language where all of the standard library is written in C. I think this seriously hamper's the evolution of PHP's stdlib to a more modern experience. There is no easy fix for any of this btw, because a revamping of the stdlib would likely lead to a "Python 3 scenario", so I don't blame the PHP devs for not fixing it (although I do blame them for introducing new flawed parts to the stdlib, like the whole DateTime fiasco), but that doesn't mean it's not a problem.
benharrison 6y ago
For a few years now I have been using PHP as a thin-client UI layer on top of C# Web API (dotnet core) projects running on Ubuntu/Docker. In my experience this has worked out very well, and has been easy to separate the areas of responsibility between Software Engineers and Designers. All of our sophistication and unit tests live inside the C# back-end projects. While the PHP in the UI layer is limited to very simple code like for loops and templating; otherwise they're mostly design projects centered around HTML/CSS/UI/UX. Keeping it so simple makes it rather easy for designers to pick up on and work with. I started a small website to document this pattern: http://rapstack.io http://rapstack.io I have advocated for its use on most of my projects, but obviously the mere mention of PHP stirs up a lot of knee-jerk reactions.

66 points by jesuisundev 6y ago

There is no web framework out there which comes with such elegant concepts, syntax and feature-richness like Laravel. I have seen them all - Laravel is incredibly good, especially for small - mid sized projects! And this statement comes from a python guy.

Naac 6y ago
Why do you prefer it over say, Flask or Django?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- gremlinsinc 6y ago
  Laravel performs way better than Django, I also prefer the migrations/model styles that resemble Rails a bit more. Django might be better w/ 3.3 or whenever they fully integrate async into the view/db layer, but w/ laravel I can plug in swoole and go from 110 reqs/sec to 4600+ on my dev pc - w/ 12 threads and 200 connections hitting a post api logged in, updating the database and the caching layer, and queuing notifications. Just ran some big benchmarks on laravel w/ php-fpm vs swoole last night...as an aside. I also don't like some of the ways django handles auth. If I were to use python, I'd definitely go w/ FastAPI, it seems much more joyful a framework. I'd also love to do something like go for sessions/auth/jwt and hasura, postgraphile, or postgrest or some sort of api from postgres, and then most of the logic would simply be postgres functions/triggers/etc...there's also some nice 'built-ins/ecosystems stuff that even rails lacks'. Auth is built in, vs devise (being almost a requirement). Message queues, notifications, .env, events/listeners, are also all built-ins. Eloquent is nice, though repositories using straight sql or the DB class are probably more performant, but you lose a lot of the magic that makes laravel nice, so there's trade offs. Also all the many drivers for caching/queues/etc and telescope is a very beautiful way to debug and so is ignite for error pages. Horizon is nice to manage queues/etc. I keep trying to move to another framework just for the sake of 'something new' and boredom but after 8 years on laravel, I still keep coming back. Wordpress is a totally different story, I charge 35% markup on my normal rates just to touch wordpress because it sucks so bad and hurts my brain to work w/ it. Also, I don't really need to worry about how to setup vue or react, laravel-mix pretty much handles all the webpack stuff w/ a few exceptions if I'm using Tailwinds or creating aliases for paths, etc...
fideloper 6y ago
I'm convinced that Laravel and PHP are (literally!) best-in-class for the user-facing web layer of any HTTP based application. The tooling, resources, first party libraries, and general ecosystem is VERY evolved, and the framework can makes you VERY productive.
- xellisx 6y ago
  I've used Laravel, not a fan. I believe that it's too wrapped up in magic, it actually gets in the way. Also bad naming choices for patterns and Active Record style DB stuff just leave some more bad tastes in my mouth.
samcrosoft 6y ago
I created an account just to reply and say I couldnt agree anymore with your statement. I have used multiple frameworks and Laravel towers above them all in terms of feature-richness. I have spent the few days trying to get into Phoenix and as interesting as it is, it would require me to re-invent the wheel for a lot of things that laravel just offers you out of the box. a quick example is subdomain based routing or even its robust notification based system. For all the hate laravel gets , it level of productivity is unmatched once you know yor way around it.

smacktoward 6y ago

Here to see how many comments don't bother reading the piece and just react to the title.

njharman 6y ago
I didn't, skimmed. > PHP is the most widely used language in the world for websites. Being served does not equate to being used to develop new things. Is there really that many new websites, website features being authored in PHP? Sure there is maintenance work and some popular platforms are written in it. But beyond that? I haven't seen a job posting in long time.
- ceejayoz 6y ago
  There are plenty of job postings. They just mostly say stuff like "Laravel" instead of "PHP".
- tyingq 6y ago
  It consistently makes the list for any analysis of "top X languages by job posting" I can find.
- teen 6y ago
  I'm using it at a fresh start up. Having used node, internal Google frameworks, python, and dart previously, I would highly recommend PHP for new projects. Laravel is what makes it worth it imo.
  - artificial 6y ago
    Laravel is pretty sweet, I recently scoped it out (been in Flask land and itching to try some Elixir/Phoenix) and it's got everything, exploring the queues now. I really like the helpers for accessing array elements through dot notation. Example: $data = [ 'more' => [ 'complex' => ['my value'] ] ]; if (array_key_exists('more', $data) && array_key_exists('complex', $data['more']) && array_key_exists(0, $data['more']['complex'])) { echo $data['more']['complex'][0]; } You can do this: echo Arr::get($data, 'more.complex.0'); Plus the bog standard php null coalescing operator "??" is pretty sweet. // fetch the value of $_GET['user'] and returns 'not passed' // if username is not passed $username = $_GET['username'] ?? 'not passed'; Just some little things off the top of my head. *Formatting.

VHRanger 6y ago

PHP being awful annoys me so much more than javascript being awful. At least for the latter the use became mostly unintentional. For PHP, the problem is that it came about at just the right time to be picked up by WordPress and Facebook, hence encrusting itself in most of the web we see. I dislike WordPress the same way I came to dislike Visual Studio or any other monstrosity. It's a slow, massive, lumbering mess but it's also by the most mature tool for the job it does. There's no reason to pick up PHP for a new project. Except, I guess if you're just doing simple CRUD and PHP is what you know. Languages don't matter that much for simple CRUD apps and PHP is a sub par, annoying, inconsistent language that will get the job done.

robotron 6y ago
I'm currently on a project building A CQRS system in PHP (not the first time) . I have no idea what you are basing this on.
- d1str0 6y ago
  he's basing it on PHP 10-20 years ago, just like the article explains. :P
teen 6y ago
PHP via HHVM + Laravel is a still top choice for new projects imo.
- johnnyfaehell 6y ago
  Why with HHVM? PHP7 is pretty fast, I believe the fasted non-compiled language there is.
  - teen 6y ago
    good to know, i hadn't fully dug in yet.
thinkindie 6y ago

mikece 6y ago

I know it's cool to hate PHP but I can think of other languages (Perl, VB6, Groovy) I dislike more. For a language to be so hated it has to be used a lot, and that's the primary virtue of PHP: it runs damn-near everywhere. Not only web scripting/apps but you can use it for shell scripting, Lambda/Azure Functions... there are even frameworks for creating native mobile applications with PHP. And I wouldn't be surprised if it compiles to JavaScript as well.

bch 6y ago
> For a language to be so hated it has to be used a lot, and that's the primary virtue of PHP: it runs damn-near everywhere. “Runs damn-near everywhere” is true of nearly all contemporary scripting languages, though, no? It’s definitely used a lot, though I don’t know how that compares to Perl, Ruby, Python... Without digging in harder, I still think it came at about the right time and had a killer feature: a dynamic nascent web with an incredibly low barrier to entry. You could create a form and ask for a persons name and have it respond “Hello, $name!”. I feel like it got entrenched and never gave that up.
jakevoytko 6y ago
Yeah, I think that goes back to something the OP said, which is that it's a victim of its own success. It's old enough that everyone has had a bad experience with it. I've had many that are directly or indirectly tied to PHP - my college blog was a hodgepodge of unmaintainable PHP scripts, I've run Wordpress blogs with plugins that broke in horrible and confusing ways, some things like argument order and operator precedence are confusing. Combine with a long-enough life to have some famous bugs (like the hash collision DOS attack), and you have a recipe for widespread derision. But it kept getting better. I work in PHP at my day job, and I enjoy it. Tools like PhpStorm and Phan make the experience excellent. If PHP 7.4 were launched today as "AWSLang", a stateless object-oriented optionally-typed scripting language that seems designed for working with Lambda functions, we'd love it. "You mean it just dies at the end of the request by default? No shared mutable state between requests? How functional!" Sure, we'd have a few things to complain about. But don't we always?

seccess 6y ago

I couldn't find a date on this article, but I don't think this line is accurate anymore: "Facebook, Wikipedia, Yahoo, Flickr, Tumblr all these sites run in PHP and welcome millions of users every month without flinching." Facebook dropped PHP for their own language called Hack, which I think is based on PHP but with a lot of the things people complain about changed.

mgkimsal 6y ago
> but with a lot of the things people complain about changed. and some of those things have changed in base PHP as well too.
- d1str0 6y ago
  I think it might even cross compile in some fashion.
basch 6y ago
Wordpress. Over a third of the web is Wordpress.
egwynn 6y ago
FWIW I found this in the RSS feed for this site: <pubDate>Mon, 23 Sep 2019 04:05:19 +0000</pubDate>
biesnecker 6y ago
I don't mind PHP (like I don't mind lots of things that I don't really have to deal with), but Hack is by far my favorite web language. It has most of what's nice about PHP (specifically, reload and your changes are there, memory is request-scoped, etc.), without most of what's awful (the HSL fixes most of the goofy inconsistencies, real (although still not as expressive as I'd like it to be) static typing, etc.).

GenerocUsername 6y ago

That "article" spent half its time leading up to explaining why PHP is bad and half its height on GIANT MEMES. The actual content was half a paragraph about how PHP lacks strong conformity... needless waste of bits

d1str0 6y ago
I thought it was entertaining had a good bit of history. It does a good job of empathizing with the reader and then shedding light on why they might want to change their opinions on PHP.
enlyth 6y ago
Agreed, the author might have a good point but I really dislike this style of writing where I have to scroll through a few megabytes of animated image macros to get to the point. These memes are always forced and never funny.

werber 6y ago

I "hate" my experiences in the aughts debugging other peoples PHP code, which put me off. But I primarily use JS now, and I feel like it's just as hated (but maybe more loved?). But I can't imagine how much people would hate JS if node came out in 2001, could you even?

msla 6y ago
I wonder what people would think of Node if it came out right before the tech bubble burst and the company hosting all the package repositories sank without a trace, taking the packages with it. That would have done some lasting damage to the web development world.

triceratops 6y ago

https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/ https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/ is a classic of this genre.

thinkindie 6y ago
pick a random language, ruby, python, javascript etc etc and you'll find similar rants/complaints. Yet I think right now it's cool to shoot on PHP therefore everyone is more vocal
- msla 6y ago
  When someone gives you a long list of reasons why they hate something, why do you conclude they only hate it because it's trendy to hate it?
  - thinkindie 6y ago
    because this kind of rants are pointless, they are not bringing any value. Every language comes with their own inconsistencies or oddity. Most of those points raised are just added to a laundry list for its own sake, it's not something you come along every single day. You might have a WTF moment once in a while but that's something that happens with every language. I'm still not able to understand why everyone hate PHP and then at the same time love Javascript or Python or Ruby.
    - balfirevic 6y ago
      Not every language comes with the same amount of inconsistencies and oddities. As an illustration, compare the amount and severity of WTF moments found in Ruby vs. Javascript in this presentation: https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat
- cygx 6y ago
  Yet I think right now it's cool to shoot on PHP This is not a recent thing, it has always been cool to mock PHP. It's not entirely unwarranted, but most programming languages have their own warts. For example, for some reason, creators of dynamic languages think they need to mess with variable declaration, to make it more accessible, or whatever, instead of staying with tried and true lexcially-scoped block-level variables with explicit declaration. As far as I can tell, the result always ends up worse.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

hu3 6y ago

> Most developers who hate PHP hate it out of elitism or ignorance. Either way it’s dumb. You have to choose a technology based on what you need. PHP is highly useful and powerful in many scenarios. And taking it out of the equation just because of its reputation is not a good idea. When I conduct hiring interviews, one of the questions I like to ask regardless of the language for the position, is the developer opinion on PHP. It's not uncommon for some to start massive rant based on outdated or outright wrong statements about PHP. Most of them never even used PHP. It's a nice question to filter out elitists. The best candidates usually answer either "can't say because I have never used PHP" or state pros and cons of PHP based on their experience. edit: quick -3 downvotes. I suspect I hit a nerve in some elitists who would not get that Rust or Haskell position because they would have baselessly trashtalked PHP in my interviews.

winrid 6y ago
They might think you expect them to dislike it. Also, maybe they fear if they say they like PHP you'll take points off.
- hu3 6y ago
  That goes for any question in interviews. I expect honesty and I'm straightforward about it.
  - pizza234 6y ago
    This is not really a question like any other, because it's a very polarizing one. It's fair to intentionally ask polarizing questions if the objective is to find how if a candidate can take moderate positions in those contexts, but it's definitely not like "any question in interviews".
    - hu3 6y ago
      Fair enough. It's not comparable to just any question. But hear me, you have to poke the bee's nest with some polarizing questions to really know what's inside otherwise you're stuck hiring an unknown until it's too late and costly (for both parties) to find out they were not a good match.

afarrell 6y ago

I will say this for PHP: Its interaction with my brain had such a nearly-disastrous impact on my life, that it finally allowed me to finally get the mental health treatment I'd been seeking for a decade, and to realize the fundamental and unfixable weakness of my marriage. ------------------------------------------------------- If you enjoy eating pad Thai, that is great for you. I do too. But different people are different and the effect of peanuts on some people are quite dramatic yet real. Choosing not to work with PHP is no more elitist than choosing not to eat gluten or peanuts.

d1str0 6y ago
There's an obvious difference between choosing not to use PHP and shitting on an entire language based on a decade's old idea of the language is.
- afarrell 6y ago
  The PHP project experience which cost me a job that I loved, nearly got me kicked out of my home, and prompted multiple evenings of suicidal ideation, and led my wife to be filled with anger at me even 7 months later is from the end of 2018. I am responsible for how I manage my mental health. Part of exercising that responsibility is my firm choice I will never again work with PHP.

kkwteh 6y ago

There was a tech talk I saw on Youtube a few years ago that I really liked that argued that Facebook succeeded because of PHP, not despite it. IIRC, the main argument was that despite its flaws, PHP has one killer feature, which is that it lets you have really tight iteration loops for web development. This made developing in PHP extremely productive. I searched around for the video, but couldn't find it.

type0 6y ago
The type of developers FB wanted were already using PHP and that made it good fit

abellerose 6y ago

I don't like having to hold 'shift' while pressing '4' all the time. Other then that I don't think the language is bad and where you cannot do what you're needing to do. If only I could get rid of the need for $ signs everywhere.

thinkindie 6y ago
...and "->" to access a method or a variable. Maybe in PHP9
d1str0 6y ago
at least you don't have $ # and @ to determine object vs list vs. hash map like perl5. :P
- cygx 6y ago
  Found the non-Perl programmer (the sigils for scalars, arrays and hashes are $, @ and %).
- xellisx 6y ago
  After I learned PHP 4 right after one of the first books came out, I quickly forgot Perl. So many way to make one liners from symbols. shudders

arnvald 6y ago

> Developers hate PHP because you are more likely to get errors with a language that allows so much freedom. Ruby gives you much more freedom than PHP. You can reopen classes, you can use any kind of object as a key in an associative array, you can write code that will execute when the class (not the instance) is being created. And yet I find it much easier to write stable code in Ruby. > Developers hate PHP because it is the opposite of hype driven development Does C# gets so much hate? Or Python? I don't think either of them is an example of hype driven development, and yet they are rather respected languages that don't get so much hate. > Developers hate PHP because they believe the language has been stagnating for 20 years. Again, I don't think that's it. I've been using PHP7 for the last few months and yes, it is different from PHP4. You have optional static typing, you have better tools, a lot has changed. Yet deep in its core the language is still badly designed. I constantly find some weird behaviours that just don't exist in other languages. Example: $array = [1,2,3,4] array_filter($array, function($x) { return $x %2 === 0; }); In every other language I've used, such function would return [2,4], but not in PHP. array_merge( [ "a" => "w", "1" => "x" ], [ "a" => "y", "1" => "z" ] ) In every other language I know, it would return [ "a" => "y", "1" => "z" ], but PHP returns [ "a" => "y", 0 => "x", 1 => "z" ] I know, these are just random examples and every language has its quirks. The problem is that in PHP there are so many quirks I keep checking how each function works, because after half a year I still can't remember them (and I don't remember whether array is a first or a second argument, because it depends on a function). I wouldn't say that I hate PHP. It's another tool that I know and am able to use. I just think in 2020 in most cases when you start writing a new web application, there are plenty of better options. So maybe that's where the hate comes from? That there are simply many more consistent languages that just remain less popular than PHP?

thinkindie 6y ago
php > $array = [1,2,3,4]; php > var_dump(array_filter($array, function($x) { return $x %2 === 0; })); php shell code:1: array(2) { [1] => int(2) [3] => int(4) } what's the problem with array_filter then? That keys are not reindexed?
- arnvald 6y ago

trixie_ 6y ago

I think there's something people miss when looking at PHP as a system - the fact that it's a collection of hot swappable logic modules (pages) PHP pages themselves can download packages of additional PHP pages and extend functionality as the website runs. For example the user can install a message board from the UI in WordPress, and PHP files themselves will download additional PHP files needed for a message board, and boom your site now has a message board - no recompile, install, or deploy. Your running system has extended itself in real-time with additional functionality. Maybe I'm crazy, but I think there is something special about this that our typical compile/deployed applications aren't designed for. Before the web, applications tended to carry their state in memory, but with the web we stored state in the database. Our logic really only needs to take the request from the user and either pull or modify data from the database and return. A lot of web apps today feel hollow as we rarely store state in them, we just pull, manipulate, and render database data. What if each major code path was its own binary? That's kind of like what PHP is. With PHP the application is almost living as it is never really turned off/on, just modified over time. If there's a bug in one page, I just need to fix that one page. And a single page is lightning fast to deploy to my servers. The rest of the system keeps humming. Now the language itself might not be the best, but do you see how this system is fundamentally different from single binary web applications?

csours 6y ago

PHP is my favorite language to write SQL injection vulnerabilities, just like C is my favorite language to write pointer bugs. (Disclaimer - The last time I used PHP was over a decade ago, and the last time I used C was in college)

greenshackle2 6y ago
You don't have to write pointer bugs in PHP, they are already included for free in the language implementation.

iillexial 6y ago

I'm a PHP developer and I really don't like this language. Right now it's paying my bills but I hope my next job won't be related to it. People are saying that PHP has become better and that's very true. But still far behind modern languages like Go, Python, Rust, Elixir. PHP is full of inconsistency, legacy code, and missing features. Core developers are doing great by adding a lot of new stuff and optimizations, but caring too much about backward combability disturbs the language from becoming better IMO.

cafard 6y ago

> Most developers who hate PHP hate it out of elitism or ignorance. I don't think I'm an elitist. I inherited a system that was written by a pretty bright guy without a lot of programming experience: thousand-line files mixing logic and presentation, that sort of thing. It was a bear to maintain, it was a bear and a half to secure. It gave me a distaste for PHP, yes. I don't hate PHP, I'd just rather use something else.

greenshackle2 6y ago

I write very little PHP but I work on a PHP extension written in C for a security product that integrates tightly with the language and some of the reasons I hate it are: The Zend APIs suck, and they have non-existent or severely outdated docs. For example, one of PHP's main internal data structure, zend_hash, is a weird hash table with a string / int union key type and is awkward to access or iterate over. Memory issues. I've had to debug segfaults caused by memory bugs in the language and core libs more than once. For example I hit an uninitialized read error in mbstring, it's been in their bug tracker since 5.x and never fixed. I understand the normal way to deal with memory errors in PHP is to shrug it off because processes are short-lived but if you are security-conscious it is concerning. Compared to that, working on similar integrations for Python, Java, Node.js, the number of times I've hit such bugs is exactly zero. PHP just seems to have lower quality and worse design overall. EDIT: CVE database agrees with my assessment, so many more memory issues in PHP: PHP: https://www.cvedetails.com/product/128/PHP-PHP.html?vendor_id=74 https://www.cvedetails.com/product/128/PHP-PHP.html?vendor_i... Python: https://www.cvedetails.com/product/18230/Python-Python.html?vendor_id=10210 https://www.cvedetails.com/product/18230/Python-Python.html?... Java: https://www.cvedetails.com/product/19117/Oracle-JRE.html?vendor_id=93 https://www.cvedetails.com/product/19117/Oracle-JRE.html?ven...

timw4mail 6y ago
Huh, this is one of the first times I've heard critisism about the implementation of PHP, rather than the language itself.

type0 6y ago

> PHP is an old man who doesn’t want to sell his land. An old man who continues to dance insolently. But in this case he is terribly ill and not actually dancing but having a condition called Chorea that is often mistaken for dance like movements https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chorea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chorea

kockic 6y ago

Did anyone here start learning PHP in 2020? How were you introduced to PHP? Are there any good resources to start with? When I was introduced to PHP everything was still in a single file, PHP, HTML, JS, CSS.

throwaway8748 6y ago

I haven't used PHP since 2012 so I don't know if any of the stuff that made me hate it still applies. A lot has probably changed since, but I don't know to what extent. Surprisingly, the technical inconsistencies isn't what I hated most about it. It's rather the fact that questionable practice was rampant and largely left unchecked in its many communities. The only way to realize this is to join another community where peer review is severe enough and bullshit detection high enough that mediocrity is rarely given the opportunity to infect your practice for long and fester. A proper community is supposed to nurture you into becoming a better programmer, so that you can take those lessons and carry them with you wherever you decide to go next. By contrast, my experience with PHP over the 6 years or so that I used it was that you learn 3 things today and you'll have to unlearn 2 tomorrow. Eventually I got fed up of the cyclical learning pattern and I moved on. Some years after my move away from it, I decided to take a look back at some of the code that I had written with PHP. I was freshly appraising the sum of my past experience. I remember thinking that the language seemed to have a crisis of identity. It was dynamically and weakly typed, but with serious Java envy and so some of the less desirable aspects of Java were basically just cargoculted in, but in a shitty incomplete way. Private, protected, public class members, what a joke. If you're a PHP programmer, did you ever ask yourself why would Python or Ruby programmers somehow be able to get by without this shit and not you? Do you know that because of the way its interpreter works there are some technical benefits for Java to have these besides the fallacious architectural "advantages" of hiding access from the programmer? Does the same thing apply to PHP? Interfaces and inheritance, without the possibility to overload methods, which can cause a lot of grief when a zealous and inexperienced library designer hasn't properly thought things through (which happened more than I'd like to remember in PHP projects). That was just at the language level, but many of the big frameworks followed suit with the Java obsession, by implementing a slew of circuitous patterns aimed at convincing programmers that they were now coding "Enterprise Style". Front Controller, Action Controller, Dispatcher, and a whole other lot straight out of pattern catalogs. When you think about it, most of those efforts were fallacious in PHP. If the problems that you were trying to solve were beyond the constraints of what PHP is typically good for, namely cms-type admin web apps, then you were probably better off with another language. On the other hand, if they applied, why bother with all the enterprisey bullcrap? But, but, but Facebook... Ah, shut up! Even Facebook had to invent a whole other language to fix that mistake. The other projects that didn't buy into this sort of architectural zeal went the other extreme, with their own experimentations and idiosyncrasies. Bastardizations of concepts that someone had seen somewhere else, but only half-understood, was common. Lots of Rails envy and no shortage of fame-driven wannabes that had failed to make a name for themselves in other communities, but somehow always found a way to shine in PHP. Ensued just more bullshit. Anyways, that was a long time ago. I hope things have changed. I'm not sure I'd be back if they did, in hindsight what PHP has for it is one of the easiest "hello world" tutorials, but you end up paying for years the half-hour you saved to see these two words on a web page. And for what it's worth there are worse languages, but there are better ones too.

barnaclejive 6y ago

ugh. You lost me when I saw the first of several huge gifs and memes inserted throughout the article.

alexandernst 6y ago

I'm still not entirely sure why, in plain 2020, PHP seems to be the only language missing a debugger able to run in a shell. Python, Ruby, Javascript and others have a "debugger;" statement of some sort that, when hit by the execution flow, will pause the code and let you type stuff in your shell, letting you inspect the code, step forward, etc... Why does PHP need me to configure an entire IDE or my browser? (I'm looking at you, xdebug). Why can't it have a cli-debugger?

Carpetsmoker 6y ago

The article is correct in stating that PHP has moved quite a bit in the last ~10 years; even back when I was using PHP in the 5.1/5.2/5.3 days things were already steadily improving. But ... that doesn't mean that PHP is a good language, or that people hate in PHP "just because it's cool". There are still many issues that remain. For example the very loose typing checking remains an issue and source of real bugs; e.g. a while ago a SAML library could be bypassed because it forgot to add the flag to in_array() to enable strict comparisons. Much of the problems in PHP are with the standard library, and this is not easy to fix. Even the mysql deprecation (in favour of mysqli/PDO) took ages. I wrote a thing looking at fopen() in PHP a while ago, and I think it's a good example of the problems that remain in PHP: https://www.arp242.net/php-fopen-is-broken.html https://www.arp242.net/php-fopen-is-broken.html There are still many issues with the standard library like this which are clumsy and just plain design errors, and many of them are too fundamental to work around or fix. Has PHP evolved? Sure, and that's great! But that doesn't mean it's now an especially good language. In general, I'd rather have a poor language with a good standard library than a good language with a poor standard library. Aside: one weird thing about PHP's stdlib is that it's all written in C; I don't know any other comparable language where all of the standard library is written in C. I think this seriously hamper's the evolution of PHP's stdlib to a more modern experience. There is no easy fix for any of this btw, because a revamping of the stdlib would likely lead to a "Python 3 scenario", so I don't blame the PHP devs for not fixing it (although I do blame them for introducing new flawed parts to the stdlib, like the whole DateTime fiasco), but that doesn't mean it's not a problem.

benharrison 6y ago

For a few years now I have been using PHP as a thin-client UI layer on top of C# Web API (dotnet core) projects running on Ubuntu/Docker. In my experience this has worked out very well, and has been easy to separate the areas of responsibility between Software Engineers and Designers. All of our sophistication and unit tests live inside the C# back-end projects. While the PHP in the UI layer is limited to very simple code like for loops and templating; otherwise they're mostly design projects centered around HTML/CSS/UI/UX. Keeping it so simple makes it rather easy for designers to pick up on and work with. I started a small website to document this pattern: http://rapstack.io http://rapstack.io I have advocated for its use on most of my projects, but obviously the mere mention of PHP stirs up a lot of knee-jerk reactions.