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> The last few years have brought insane progress to the PHP language I’ve been hearing this for ~20 years, and yet somehow I still find it more painful to use

> The last few years have brought insane progress to the PHP language I’ve been hearing this for ~20 years, and yet somehow I still find it more painful to use than other languages that didn’t even exist 10 years ago… (Except for “being easy to deploy on any random bargain-basement shared web host”, which is a hugely important factor where PHP is genuinely best-in-class and no other language even seems to care about competing, and is the reason that I still regularly need to use it)

Beltalowda 4y ago
The real problem with PHP was always the standard library and its many caveats, outright bugs, and inadequacies, rather than the PHP language itself (there's a few language issues as well, but I found those less painful than the standard library). A few of these things have been fixed, but by and large the situation has remained unchanged for a long time. It's not an easy problem due to compatibility reasons; adding new language features and such is comparatively easy.
vegai_ 4y ago
This. PHP is PHP just like Javascript is Javascript. Their growth process was a bunch of people needing things and just implementing them one by one without a grand design. It kinda works, but it'll never be Good in a theoretical sense. Disturbingly for us language geeks, it doesn't seem to matter at all that they're not very good.
- astrange 4y ago
  PHP has value types - the one "every data structure at once" type gets deep copied when you pass it to another function. That's enough to make it a good programming language, whereas Python is unnecessarily 90s class-based OOP with reference types.
  - vegai_ 4y ago
    I don't quite understand what you mean here. Do you have an example?
    - astrange 4y ago
      If you have a dictionary and pass it around to someone else's code and it gets changed, those changes affect your code too instead of copying it, which is annoying and less safe.

Beltalowda 4y ago

The real problem with PHP was always the standard library and its many caveats, outright bugs, and inadequacies, rather than the PHP language itself (there's a few language issues as well, but I found those less painful than the standard library). A few of these things have been fixed, but by and large the situation has remained unchanged for a long time. It's not an easy problem due to compatibility reasons; adding new language features and such is comparatively easy.

vegai_ 4y ago

This. PHP is PHP just like Javascript is Javascript. Their growth process was a bunch of people needing things and just implementing them one by one without a grand design. It kinda works, but it'll never be Good in a theoretical sense. Disturbingly for us language geeks, it doesn't seem to matter at all that they're not very good.

astrange 4y ago
PHP has value types - the one "every data structure at once" type gets deep copied when you pass it to another function. That's enough to make it a good programming language, whereas Python is unnecessarily 90s class-based OOP with reference types.
- vegai_ 4y ago
  I don't quite understand what you mean here. Do you have an example?
  - astrange 4y ago
    If you have a dictionary and pass it around to someone else's code and it gets changed, those changes affect your code too instead of copying it, which is annoying and less safe.