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Because there are objective measures by which a programming language can be judged and assesed to be better or worse than others of its peers, and those measure
by Banana699 4y ago
Because there are objective measures by which a programming language can be judged and assesed to be better or worse than others of its peers, and those measures, like a powerful (not necessarily static) type system and consistency of the language's core design and libraries, put PHP at the bottom of a hierarchy of languages.
This need not imply condesenction to the language users or designers, not as individuals at any rate.
- eru 4y agoYes. And you might quibble about the exact criteria. But by almost any metric, old-style PHP was an awful language. (Facebook's re-invented Hack isn't nearly as bad. It's about the best language they could have made starting from PHP.)
- KronisLV 4y agoThere was an article about PHP that summarized some of its issues back in the day: 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/ I think that it was excellently written and actually mentioned concrete issues, rather than vague personal dislikes. That is good, because you can revisit those in 10 years or so and see how many of those have been fixed in the actual language. Someone actually tried to address a few of those: http://maettig.com/2020-09-16-revisiting-a-fractal-of-bad-design http://maettig.com/2020-09-16-revisiting-a-fractal-of-bad-de...
- eru 4y agoThanks for the second link! It's good to see someone (sympathetic to PHP) address the issues reasonably objectively. That's part of why I carefully wrote 'old-style PHP'.