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While I agree that PHP does have pros as well as cons, I find it disconcerting that I've read MANY assertions here on HN, that PHP detractors just haven't used

While I agree that PHP does have pros as well as cons, I find it disconcerting that I've read MANY assertions here on HN, that PHP detractors just haven't used it very much or are mostly complaining about things like bad standard library function names. I've used PHP in earnest. It and JavaScript are tied for worst programming languages I've used. JavaScript gets more of a "pass" from me because I'm just not a dynamic-typing fan and I'll admit that it might be less awful for someone who enjoys/prefers Python or Ruby or whatever. PHP, on the other hand, is basically just worse-Java. And Java isn't a great language, either. The built-in PHP array is a constant source of frustration. Keys are sometimes strings, sometimes ints. And you don't always know which it is! This makes working with the array_* functions cumbersome at best. The fact that you can't typehint everywhere also sucks. No generics sucks. No threads sucks. No (real) async sucks. Globals suck (including different language behavior based on a config file on your machine...........). It's just not a strong language. And I'm super-tired of hearing "it's not the tool, it's the user." There is such a thing as a shitty tool. And just because some human somewhere CAN write working code in Brainfuck, does NOT mean that anybody SHOULD. I'm similarly tired of "all languages have warts". Do I even need to actually explain the fallacy there? On the other hand, I agree 100% that PHP's deployment story is awesome! But is that because PHP did anything useful, or because Apache and Nginx support PHP out of the box?

nobleach 6y ago
Just like I tell people that buy cordless drills at Harbor Freight, "sometimes it IS the tool". Does that mean you can't build fast, meaningful, cool things with it? Of course you can. But, the deeper you get, the more problems you'll have to solve with weird esoteric knowledge. I'll agree with all of your points on horribly inconsistent and broken language features. I get that people that have grown up with the language, or folks who have used it full time for years, don't see these blemishes as that big of a deal. But to newcomers, or folks from other languages, it's an affront. I hate to pile on an old, worn out issue but, as a language designer/implementer, the moment you start working on `mysql_real_escape_string()`, a huge warning bell should have gone off! I'm fine if people want to question my competence in writing code. It happens all the time on HN. I've been at it for 20 years... so some rando telling me that I don't know what I'm doing is pretty common. What we find in PHP though is quite a bit of tribal/tacit knowledge. And it's wrong to blame the user.
- ragnese 6y ago
  And I think you've hit the nail on the head here. People who defend PHP as "not that bad" are probably people who have used it for so long that they just work around its insanity by muscle memory. It is NOT okay that `foreach` leaves an allocated reference to the loop-local value.
  - DonHopkins 6y ago
    And probably people who haven't used anything else, so they have no frame of reference to compare it to, which they would need to realize how terribly and unnecessarily bad it actually is.
    - ragnese 6y ago
      I didn't want to say it for fear of coming across as condescending... but, yes.
- spacedcowboy 6y ago
  I mean, who uses mysql_real_escape_string when you have PDO and bindings ? PHP isn’t perfect. As OP said, no language is, and any competent software engineer uses the parts of the language that work well for them, and just ignores the things that don’t work for them. I don’t believe for a second that the abuse the language has suffered over the years has anything to do with mysql_real_escape_string, it’s more to do with crappy code. You can write crappy code in any language, and it’s more a reflection of the programmer than the programming language IMHO. Part of PHP’s problem is that it’s so easy to use. Any C programmer can pick up the basics pretty easily, hack together something that scratches an itch, and move on. Later someone will criticize the quick hack and say “you didn’t use mysql_real_escape_string so that code has a SQL vulnerability. Don’t use PHP”. In reality, there are mechanisms for preventing SQL injection and they just weren’t used. Is that a failing of the language ? Partly, perhaps, for providing the unsafe way of doing things, but a lot of blame also lies with the coder. I’ll admit to a soft spot for PHP - I was putting database-driven websites on the web when that wasn’t much of a thing (back in 1981, if foggy memory recalls true). I wrote the asset management system that was used by Lucasfilm on Star Wars, by Manix on the Matrix, by various post-production houses in Soho, etc. etc. - all in PHP. We had video-streaming from remote locations before RealNetworks were mainstream. All because of PHP. I also used PHP to write a content management system for the RiskWaters Group - around 100 magazines in the CMS, with forums, mailmerge, access-rights per page or per view-count or per time-period, with back-end admin pages, with macros the editors could use, etc. etc. Used properly and judiciously, PHP is a powerful tool. It comes with a few areas that ought to be marked ‘here be dragons’, but frankly so do most languages. These days, I mostly use PHP for shell-scripting (it comes installed as standard on my Mac), nothing so grandiose as the halcyon days of yore, but I still have PHP to thank for getting the job I’ve had for the last 15 years, in R&D at Apple (“these are the guys that Lucas was talking about”, said the VP who bought my small company). I’ll finish with a line from a song “Baby, life’s what you make it, celebrate it”. That applies to PHP as well.
JAlexoid 6y ago
I've built a lot of servers... and PHP support isn't "out of the box". It's just such a low cost of investment, that admins install it without much of a fuss... Until you start asking for additional support.
TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
> PHP, on the other hand, is basically just worse-Java It’s much more like C than Java. And Java was in its infancy when PHP came out so it makes sense that it’s inspired more by C than Java.
- ragnese 6y ago
  Incorrect. Old PHP was more like C. If you see a modern, best practices, PHP code base today, it reads like Java 7 did in 2011.
  - waheoo 6y ago
    Whats old is new again. Laravel et al read like java. Nobody wants that crap anymore. Everyones moving codebases back to more procedural styles with a good dose of functional leanings towards immutable values.
    - ragnese 6y ago
      Which is basically impossible to do in PHP. How do you make a deep copy of an input argument to avoid mutating it? How do you do a map+(filter|reduce)(+array_values) on an array without looping over it THREE times?
      - leadingthenet 6y ago
        You’ve convinced me never to use PHP if I can help it
    - DCoder 6y ago
      I'd say that Symfony reads like Java, whereas Laravel reads like a weird copy of Rails.
  - jimmaswell 6y ago
    PHP is way less verbose. I wouldn't say it really looks like Java, maybe more like C++.
waheoo 6y ago
I dont agree with you at all. Why are you building arrays with mixed key types? Why do you want type hints? Why do you need generics in a dynamically typed language? Php has pthreads. They just arent needed that often. Async is being worked on You didnt mention it but immutable types are also being worked on. Everything people complain about php over tends to actually make its way into the language eventually. I dont know when you tried php, but I dont really think it was in earnest. It sounds like you had problems keeping your types straight. I agree its not super natural to deal with the php type system but once you learn it its pretty simple to keep things in order. I see most messes arise when people mix types, mutate variables carelessly, or otherwise over leverage things they shouldnt (e.g. globals) But these are hygiene problems, and all languages have these. Ive seen garbage java, ive seen hairballed rust, ive seen pretty much any c, ive seen wanky golang and ive seen babel-typescri-rea-tsx The only thing that really annoys me about php these days is the dollar signs. That and the frameworks are all trash.
- ragnese 6y ago
  > Why are you building arrays with mixed key types? It happens on accident. All keys are converted to ints if they can be. So if you read a file that is called "123", it'll suddenly become an int key whereas all the rest will be strings. That's absolutely insane. > Why do you want type hints? The same reason anybody does. It is a contract and it makes your code more well-documented, more robust, and more correct. There's a reason that PHP has typehints and the consensus in all major, current, PHP projects is that they are good. > Php has pthreads. They just arent needed that often. Pthreads is garbage. Always has been. Never worked on servers. Is deprecated, finally: https://github.com/krakjoe/pthreads/issues/929 https://github.com/krakjoe/pthreads/issues/929 https://www.php.net/manual/en/intro.pthreads.php https://www.php.net/manual/en/intro.pthreads.php > Async is being worked on You didnt mention it but immutable types are also being worked on. PHP will be less awful when they're done. It's still awful today. I don't revel in PHP being bad. If it's good some day, I'll be happy. > Everything people complain about php over tends to actually make its way into the language eventually. 25 years. 25 years and the language still sucks. Just use Java (or better yet, Kotlin). > I dont know when you tried php, but I dont really think it was in earnest. It sounds like you had problems keeping your types straight. I've been doing PHP dev for years now. Of course I had trouble keeping my types straight. PHP turns everything into a string whenever it can. Except sometimes it turns strings into ints for some unholy reason. Also, the type system (like Java's) sucks. It's not expressive at all and I can't even return a collection of a single type without resorting to language extensions. > I agree its not super natural to deal with the php type system but once you learn it its pretty simple to keep things in order. Not being natural is not the same thing as being broken. And being able to remember all of the gotchas doesn't make it simple. > I see most messes arise when people mix types, mutate variables carelessly, or otherwise over leverage things they shouldnt (e.g. globals) Agreed. So how do we avoid mutation? Use `clone`? Nope. It's shallow and everything is mutable by default. Overload `__clone()` on every class you write? Okay, but you better hope that your classes don't have fields that DON'T implement deep cloning... > But these are hygiene problems, and all languages have these. Bull. No language is perfect. But tell me, what's worse: 1 issue or 1,000 issues? Come on. > Ive seen garbage java, ive seen hairballed rust, ive seen pretty much any c, ive seen wanky golang and ive seen babel-typescri-rea-tsx See above. This is the most bottom-of-the-barrel excuse I keep reading over and over. PHP ENCOURAGES garbage code. Rust does not. Not even in the same ballpark. Not even playing the same GAME. > The only thing that really annoys me about php these days is the dollar signs. lol
drunkpotato 6y ago
I agree with everything you say here about PHP the language, having programmed in it myself (though not as long as you). It’s a big pile of terrible warts with hidden gotchas everywhere. I think it’s important to distinguish between a language, and its environment and ecosystem. That’s where PHP shines. I wouldn’t choose PHP for my own projects, but with the tooling and frameworks available I actually don’t mind working on it for money.
meritt 6y ago
People who demand a dynamic language needs to add strict typing and once it does, demand that it now add generics need to stay the fuck away from dynamic languages.
- ragnese 6y ago
  For sure. But let's be clear- I'm not "demanding" anything. I don't want PHP to change, I don't want to use PHP at all. I don't like dynamic languages. BUT. Today's "best practices" for PHP are to use typehints everywhere. And there are language changes in the works to add MORE typing to PHP.
  - meritt 6y ago
    > I don't want to use PHP at all. I don't like dynamic languages. Okay, so don't? I think individual languages are better when they don't add every feature under the sun that happens to be popular in the moment. PHP doesn't need threads and it sure as hell doesn't need async. PHP multiprocessing works the old way just fine (fork). > Today's "best practices" for PHP are to use typehints everywhere. Yeah, and it's a result of people constantly bitching about PHP lacking features. It's really annoying because it gives credence to complaints like this, I really wish they would have just replied to the strict-types demands with "No, fuck off, this is a dynamic language." If you must use PHP, I would strongly suggest you use it the way it was intended and stop trying to shoehorn other language features and paradigms into it, you will be much happier. If we simply treat PHP as a dynamically typed C, everything is so much easier.
    - ragnese 6y ago
      The problem isn't about a preference between dynamic types and static types. I do think the tacked-on type system of PHP is pretty poor. But even without the mediocre type system, PHP still sucks. You want dynamic? Do Clojure, Lisp, Python (eh), Elixir. PHP and its broken foreach loops and lack of concurrency need not apply (and who in the world believes that forking a process is a good enough for EITHER concurrency OR parallelism for a backend programming language in this day and age?).
lillesvin 6y ago
> Keys are sometimes strings, sometimes ints. And you don't always know which it is! Could you give an example? Because I've never had any issues with it and find it very predictable. > The fact that you can't typehint everywhere also sucks. Type-hinting is being implemented and is already available in most places. But why you'd expect that in a dynamically typed language is beyond me. > No generics sucks. Again, dynamic language. > No threads sucks. pthreads has been considered stable since early 2014: https://pecl.php.net/package/pthreads https://pecl.php.net/package/pthreads > Globals suck Are you talking about "register_globals" which had its default setting changed to "off" 18 years ago and was completely removed 8 years ago: https://www.php.net/manual/en/security.globals.php https://www.php.net/manual/en/security.globals.php ? > But is that because PHP did anything useful, or because Apache and Nginx support PHP out of the box? Do they? Last I checked you had to install and enable support for PHP just like anything else. Unless you're talking about bundles like MAMP, but then it doesn't really make much sense. You may claim that you've used PHP in earnest, but I honestly find that a little hard to believe when seeing these claims. And I don't mean that I expect you to understand all the little edge-cases of type-coercion, but if you'd really needed threads I'm sure you'd have stumbled upon pthreads, and if you've been using globals, then you've been following some oooooold guides.
- ragnese 6y ago
  Your response is almost exactly the same as waheoo's. Please see my reply to his for everything you asked here.
  - lillesvin 6y ago
    Yeah, I noticed after I'd missed your reply there the first time around. Sorry. I'm still confused about the array keys though. I'm not sure I understand the example you gave in your other comment. And I'm also curious which Apache and Nginx has PHP installed and enabled by default.
    - ragnese 6y ago
      The array key thing doesn't crop up often, but I've had it happen. Sometimes you are parsing something, such as "all files in this directory" and want to use the filename as the key and maybe store metadata or something as the value. Well, the second one of those filenames looks like a number, you're basically screwed. Now your array has some string keys and some int keys and operating on it is inconsistent at best. And, you're right, of course that Apache and Nginx don't actually support PHP out of the box. It's been a bit since I've configured a server and I forgot that mod_php is an extra step. That is definitely the main "pro" to using PHP, though- the deployment is great and so easy I can literally forget it. ;)
rawoke083600 6y ago
No sir PHP is nothing like java ! PHP while not perfect gets out of your way and lets you code. Sure it's not perfect but start with one file and one tag , upload to server and you have have something. Java: the amount of files and java-knowledge and xml files crap one has to go through... No thanks.. PHP might not be perfect ! But it's NOTHING like java.
- ragnese 6y ago
  First of all, I was talking about the language. Not the dev-ops. The language semantics are almost exactly Java. Also, if you're talking about a single-file project, you can do that in Java, too, using plain old javac. It's not quite as simple as dropping a file on a server (but it's really damn close- first run javac, THEN plop the file on the server). But you're fooling yourself if you think you don't have to do any setup to get a publicly facing PHP app to work. If you don't configure your Apache or Nginx or fiddle with your .htaccess junk, then you're not actually doing anything. So it's not fair to complain about "xml files crap" for Java and not discuss the equivalent for PHP, which is fiddling with php.ini and installing php_mod and configuring that in your Apache or whatever. I am currently working on a Kotlin backend project and I haven't touched any XML. I've done plenty of Java/Kotlin and PHP.
- mikeyjk 6y ago
  Java has gotten much better on the xml front. A lot of the tooling can abstract you from the brunt of it. Have you ever played around with Kotlin? Never say never my friend, as someone who has used PHP in the past I prefer Java by far. The streams concept/interface they have in Java is really cool.
wlll 6y ago
You might be interested in this study I found. There might be more, but this was the first one: https://www.i-programmer.info/news/98-languages/11184-which-languages-are-bug-prone.html https://www.i-programmer.info/news/98-languages/11184-which-... "The languages with the strongest positive coefficients - meaning associated with a greater number of defect fixes are C++, C, and Objective-C, also PHP and Python. On the other hand, Clojure, Haskell, Ruby and Scala all have significant negative coefficients implying that these languages are less likely than average to result in defect fixing commits."

nobleach 6y ago

Just like I tell people that buy cordless drills at Harbor Freight, "sometimes it IS the tool". Does that mean you can't build fast, meaningful, cool things with it? Of course you can. But, the deeper you get, the more problems you'll have to solve with weird esoteric knowledge. I'll agree with all of your points on horribly inconsistent and broken language features. I get that people that have grown up with the language, or folks who have used it full time for years, don't see these blemishes as that big of a deal. But to newcomers, or folks from other languages, it's an affront. I hate to pile on an old, worn out issue but, as a language designer/implementer, the moment you start working on `mysql_real_escape_string()`, a huge warning bell should have gone off! I'm fine if people want to question my competence in writing code. It happens all the time on HN. I've been at it for 20 years... so some rando telling me that I don't know what I'm doing is pretty common. What we find in PHP though is quite a bit of tribal/tacit knowledge. And it's wrong to blame the user.

ragnese 6y ago
And I think you've hit the nail on the head here. People who defend PHP as "not that bad" are probably people who have used it for so long that they just work around its insanity by muscle memory. It is NOT okay that `foreach` leaves an allocated reference to the loop-local value.
- DonHopkins 6y ago
  And probably people who haven't used anything else, so they have no frame of reference to compare it to, which they would need to realize how terribly and unnecessarily bad it actually is.
  - ragnese 6y ago
    I didn't want to say it for fear of coming across as condescending... but, yes.
spacedcowboy 6y ago
I mean, who uses mysql_real_escape_string when you have PDO and bindings ? PHP isn’t perfect. As OP said, no language is, and any competent software engineer uses the parts of the language that work well for them, and just ignores the things that don’t work for them. I don’t believe for a second that the abuse the language has suffered over the years has anything to do with mysql_real_escape_string, it’s more to do with crappy code. You can write crappy code in any language, and it’s more a reflection of the programmer than the programming language IMHO. Part of PHP’s problem is that it’s so easy to use. Any C programmer can pick up the basics pretty easily, hack together something that scratches an itch, and move on. Later someone will criticize the quick hack and say “you didn’t use mysql_real_escape_string so that code has a SQL vulnerability. Don’t use PHP”. In reality, there are mechanisms for preventing SQL injection and they just weren’t used. Is that a failing of the language ? Partly, perhaps, for providing the unsafe way of doing things, but a lot of blame also lies with the coder. I’ll admit to a soft spot for PHP - I was putting database-driven websites on the web when that wasn’t much of a thing (back in 1981, if foggy memory recalls true). I wrote the asset management system that was used by Lucasfilm on Star Wars, by Manix on the Matrix, by various post-production houses in Soho, etc. etc. - all in PHP. We had video-streaming from remote locations before RealNetworks were mainstream. All because of PHP. I also used PHP to write a content management system for the RiskWaters Group - around 100 magazines in the CMS, with forums, mailmerge, access-rights per page or per view-count or per time-period, with back-end admin pages, with macros the editors could use, etc. etc. Used properly and judiciously, PHP is a powerful tool. It comes with a few areas that ought to be marked ‘here be dragons’, but frankly so do most languages. These days, I mostly use PHP for shell-scripting (it comes installed as standard on my Mac), nothing so grandiose as the halcyon days of yore, but I still have PHP to thank for getting the job I’ve had for the last 15 years, in R&D at Apple (“these are the guys that Lucas was talking about”, said the VP who bought my small company). I’ll finish with a line from a song “Baby, life’s what you make it, celebrate it”. That applies to PHP as well.

JAlexoid 6y ago

I've built a lot of servers... and PHP support isn't "out of the box". It's just such a low cost of investment, that admins install it without much of a fuss... Until you start asking for additional support.

TedDoesntTalk 6y ago

> PHP, on the other hand, is basically just worse-Java It’s much more like C than Java. And Java was in its infancy when PHP came out so it makes sense that it’s inspired more by C than Java.

ragnese 6y ago
Incorrect. Old PHP was more like C. If you see a modern, best practices, PHP code base today, it reads like Java 7 did in 2011.
- waheoo 6y ago
  Whats old is new again. Laravel et al read like java. Nobody wants that crap anymore. Everyones moving codebases back to more procedural styles with a good dose of functional leanings towards immutable values.
  - ragnese 6y ago
    Which is basically impossible to do in PHP. How do you make a deep copy of an input argument to avoid mutating it? How do you do a map+(filter|reduce)(+array_values) on an array without looping over it THREE times?
    - leadingthenet 6y ago
      You’ve convinced me never to use PHP if I can help it
  - DCoder 6y ago
    I'd say that Symfony reads like Java, whereas Laravel reads like a weird copy of Rails.
- jimmaswell 6y ago
  PHP is way less verbose. I wouldn't say it really looks like Java, maybe more like C++.

waheoo 6y ago

I dont agree with you at all. Why are you building arrays with mixed key types? Why do you want type hints? Why do you need generics in a dynamically typed language? Php has pthreads. They just arent needed that often. Async is being worked on You didnt mention it but immutable types are also being worked on. Everything people complain about php over tends to actually make its way into the language eventually. I dont know when you tried php, but I dont really think it was in earnest. It sounds like you had problems keeping your types straight. I agree its not super natural to deal with the php type system but once you learn it its pretty simple to keep things in order. I see most messes arise when people mix types, mutate variables carelessly, or otherwise over leverage things they shouldnt (e.g. globals) But these are hygiene problems, and all languages have these. Ive seen garbage java, ive seen hairballed rust, ive seen pretty much any c, ive seen wanky golang and ive seen babel-typescri-rea-tsx The only thing that really annoys me about php these days is the dollar signs. That and the frameworks are all trash.

ragnese 6y ago
> Why are you building arrays with mixed key types? It happens on accident. All keys are converted to ints if they can be. So if you read a file that is called "123", it'll suddenly become an int key whereas all the rest will be strings. That's absolutely insane. > Why do you want type hints? The same reason anybody does. It is a contract and it makes your code more well-documented, more robust, and more correct. There's a reason that PHP has typehints and the consensus in all major, current, PHP projects is that they are good. > Php has pthreads. They just arent needed that often. Pthreads is garbage. Always has been. Never worked on servers. Is deprecated, finally: https://github.com/krakjoe/pthreads/issues/929 https://github.com/krakjoe/pthreads/issues/929 https://www.php.net/manual/en/intro.pthreads.php https://www.php.net/manual/en/intro.pthreads.php > Async is being worked on You didnt mention it but immutable types are also being worked on. PHP will be less awful when they're done. It's still awful today. I don't revel in PHP being bad. If it's good some day, I'll be happy. > Everything people complain about php over tends to actually make its way into the language eventually. 25 years. 25 years and the language still sucks. Just use Java (or better yet, Kotlin). > I dont know when you tried php, but I dont really think it was in earnest. It sounds like you had problems keeping your types straight. I've been doing PHP dev for years now. Of course I had trouble keeping my types straight. PHP turns everything into a string whenever it can. Except sometimes it turns strings into ints for some unholy reason. Also, the type system (like Java's) sucks. It's not expressive at all and I can't even return a collection of a single type without resorting to language extensions. > I agree its not super natural to deal with the php type system but once you learn it its pretty simple to keep things in order. Not being natural is not the same thing as being broken. And being able to remember all of the gotchas doesn't make it simple. > I see most messes arise when people mix types, mutate variables carelessly, or otherwise over leverage things they shouldnt (e.g. globals) Agreed. So how do we avoid mutation? Use `clone`? Nope. It's shallow and everything is mutable by default. Overload `__clone()` on every class you write? Okay, but you better hope that your classes don't have fields that DON'T implement deep cloning... > But these are hygiene problems, and all languages have these. Bull. No language is perfect. But tell me, what's worse: 1 issue or 1,000 issues? Come on. > Ive seen garbage java, ive seen hairballed rust, ive seen pretty much any c, ive seen wanky golang and ive seen babel-typescri-rea-tsx See above. This is the most bottom-of-the-barrel excuse I keep reading over and over. PHP ENCOURAGES garbage code. Rust does not. Not even in the same ballpark. Not even playing the same GAME. > The only thing that really annoys me about php these days is the dollar signs. lol

drunkpotato 6y ago

I agree with everything you say here about PHP the language, having programmed in it myself (though not as long as you). It’s a big pile of terrible warts with hidden gotchas everywhere. I think it’s important to distinguish between a language, and its environment and ecosystem. That’s where PHP shines. I wouldn’t choose PHP for my own projects, but with the tooling and frameworks available I actually don’t mind working on it for money.

meritt 6y ago

People who demand a dynamic language needs to add strict typing and once it does, demand that it now add generics need to stay the fuck away from dynamic languages.

ragnese 6y ago
For sure. But let's be clear- I'm not "demanding" anything. I don't want PHP to change, I don't want to use PHP at all. I don't like dynamic languages. BUT. Today's "best practices" for PHP are to use typehints everywhere. And there are language changes in the works to add MORE typing to PHP.
- meritt 6y ago
  > I don't want to use PHP at all. I don't like dynamic languages. Okay, so don't? I think individual languages are better when they don't add every feature under the sun that happens to be popular in the moment. PHP doesn't need threads and it sure as hell doesn't need async. PHP multiprocessing works the old way just fine (fork). > Today's "best practices" for PHP are to use typehints everywhere. Yeah, and it's a result of people constantly bitching about PHP lacking features. It's really annoying because it gives credence to complaints like this, I really wish they would have just replied to the strict-types demands with "No, fuck off, this is a dynamic language." If you must use PHP, I would strongly suggest you use it the way it was intended and stop trying to shoehorn other language features and paradigms into it, you will be much happier. If we simply treat PHP as a dynamically typed C, everything is so much easier.
  - ragnese 6y ago
    The problem isn't about a preference between dynamic types and static types. I do think the tacked-on type system of PHP is pretty poor. But even without the mediocre type system, PHP still sucks. You want dynamic? Do Clojure, Lisp, Python (eh), Elixir. PHP and its broken foreach loops and lack of concurrency need not apply (and who in the world believes that forking a process is a good enough for EITHER concurrency OR parallelism for a backend programming language in this day and age?).

lillesvin 6y ago

> Keys are sometimes strings, sometimes ints. And you don't always know which it is! Could you give an example? Because I've never had any issues with it and find it very predictable. > The fact that you can't typehint everywhere also sucks. Type-hinting is being implemented and is already available in most places. But why you'd expect that in a dynamically typed language is beyond me. > No generics sucks. Again, dynamic language. > No threads sucks. pthreads has been considered stable since early 2014: https://pecl.php.net/package/pthreads https://pecl.php.net/package/pthreads > Globals suck Are you talking about "register_globals" which had its default setting changed to "off" 18 years ago and was completely removed 8 years ago: https://www.php.net/manual/en/security.globals.php https://www.php.net/manual/en/security.globals.php ? > But is that because PHP did anything useful, or because Apache and Nginx support PHP out of the box? Do they? Last I checked you had to install and enable support for PHP just like anything else. Unless you're talking about bundles like MAMP, but then it doesn't really make much sense. You may claim that you've used PHP in earnest, but I honestly find that a little hard to believe when seeing these claims. And I don't mean that I expect you to understand all the little edge-cases of type-coercion, but if you'd really needed threads I'm sure you'd have stumbled upon pthreads, and if you've been using globals, then you've been following some oooooold guides.

ragnese 6y ago
Your response is almost exactly the same as waheoo's. Please see my reply to his for everything you asked here.
- lillesvin 6y ago
  Yeah, I noticed after I'd missed your reply there the first time around. Sorry. I'm still confused about the array keys though. I'm not sure I understand the example you gave in your other comment. And I'm also curious which Apache and Nginx has PHP installed and enabled by default.
  - ragnese 6y ago
    The array key thing doesn't crop up often, but I've had it happen. Sometimes you are parsing something, such as "all files in this directory" and want to use the filename as the key and maybe store metadata or something as the value. Well, the second one of those filenames looks like a number, you're basically screwed. Now your array has some string keys and some int keys and operating on it is inconsistent at best. And, you're right, of course that Apache and Nginx don't actually support PHP out of the box. It's been a bit since I've configured a server and I forgot that mod_php is an extra step. That is definitely the main "pro" to using PHP, though- the deployment is great and so easy I can literally forget it. ;)

rawoke083600 6y ago

No sir PHP is nothing like java ! PHP while not perfect gets out of your way and lets you code. Sure it's not perfect but start with one file and one tag , upload to server and you have have something. Java: the amount of files and java-knowledge and xml files crap one has to go through... No thanks.. PHP might not be perfect ! But it's NOTHING like java.

ragnese 6y ago
First of all, I was talking about the language. Not the dev-ops. The language semantics are almost exactly Java. Also, if you're talking about a single-file project, you can do that in Java, too, using plain old javac. It's not quite as simple as dropping a file on a server (but it's really damn close- first run javac, THEN plop the file on the server). But you're fooling yourself if you think you don't have to do any setup to get a publicly facing PHP app to work. If you don't configure your Apache or Nginx or fiddle with your .htaccess junk, then you're not actually doing anything. So it's not fair to complain about "xml files crap" for Java and not discuss the equivalent for PHP, which is fiddling with php.ini and installing php_mod and configuring that in your Apache or whatever. I am currently working on a Kotlin backend project and I haven't touched any XML. I've done plenty of Java/Kotlin and PHP.
mikeyjk 6y ago
Java has gotten much better on the xml front. A lot of the tooling can abstract you from the brunt of it. Have you ever played around with Kotlin? Never say never my friend, as someone who has used PHP in the past I prefer Java by far. The streams concept/interface they have in Java is really cool.

wlll 6y ago

You might be interested in this study I found. There might be more, but this was the first one: https://www.i-programmer.info/news/98-languages/11184-which-languages-are-bug-prone.html https://www.i-programmer.info/news/98-languages/11184-which-... "The languages with the strongest positive coefficients - meaning associated with a greater number of defect fixes are C++, C, and Objective-C, also PHP and Python. On the other hand, Clojure, Haskell, Ruby and Scala all have significant negative coefficients implying that these languages are less likely than average to result in defect fixing commits."