12 ms·

It's not just people in general who think PHP sucks, but the original creator himself. Some of his quotes are a goldmine (if this was addressed in the article a

It's not just people in general who think PHP sucks, but the original creator himself. Some of his quotes are a goldmine (if this was addressed in the article apologies, it is receiving the HN hug of death right now): https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Rasmus_Lerdorf https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Rasmus_Lerdorf "PHP is about as exciting as your toothbrush. You use it every day, it does the job, it is a simple tool, so what? Who would want to read about toothbrushes?" "I'm not a real programmer. I throw together things until it works then I move on. The real programmers will say "Yeah it works but you're leaking memory everywhere. Perhaps we should fix that." I’ll just restart Apache every 10 requests." "PHP 8 is significantly better because it contains a lot less of my code."

screamingninja 4y ago
I also remember my time at Yahoo! where he repeatedly expressed his disdain of frameworks on the internal mailing lists. Yahoo! heavily relied on PHP but did not have a web development framework. Rasmus's intent for each developer was to start from scratch every single time. Result was a much steeper learning curve, significantly lower efficiency, and plethora of security issues that a framework would typically mitigate behind the scenes. By the time Yahoo! adopted Symfony (~2009), it was way too late in my opinion.
blowski 4y ago
Wow, do people have this "joke" as an auto-reply? To put this quote in context, over the last decade, a lot of legacy PHP features were deprecated and removed. Some in the community were opposed, and wanted Rasmus Ledorf to ape Linus Torvalds and reject the changes. His comment here was him explicitly saying he wasn't precious about the original design, and welcomed the changes. The most annoying thing about PHP criticisms is people wheeling out these hackneyed old articles and quotes that don't say anything at all.
- GauntletWizard 4y ago
  Yes, people have this as their autoreply. There are real, obviously-wrong things about PHP that the PHP community rejected and stated as "Design Requirements". Things like `mysql_real_escape_string` and `T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM` are real warts that are easy to talk about and research; Many people decided "This language merits no further discussion" from those alone and they're not wrong. PHP had great documentation... in the comments of their docsite. The fact that the comments were not integrated into the documentation and marked as resolved was a real detriment. Important caveats and ways to shoot yourself in the foot (including major security risks and features!) were only documented through comments that could fall off the frontpage at any moment. PHP is a joke language. It's most major usage is a joke company. Making jokes about it is apt.
  - ransom1538 4y ago
    Curious what backend stack you use?
  - blowski 4y ago
    Yawn. For a joke, it's generated a huge amount of value for the world, so I'll laugh and carry on using it. EDIT: Including your PHP WordPress blog. Curious.
    - happytoexplain 4y ago
      In the software world, being widespread is pretty obviously not compelling evidence that something doesn't deserve harsh criticism. The sarcasm is bad, too.
      - blowski 4y ago
        It is perhaps evidence that the subjective "it sucks" opinion is meaningless. Code is not art. Commercial usage means a lot. And if someone calls PHP a joke, but then personally chooses it for themselves, there is certainly some inconsistency there.
        autotune 4y ago
        Maybe once PHP finally becomes a language of the past you will be one of the few holdouts pulling in $300-$400k per year or more for working on a legacy code base, like COBOL programmers for banks. Nothing wrong with that mindset if you actually enjoy working with it and can stand being on the constant butt end of PHP jokes.
      - yuhc 4y ago
        "PHP is a joke." "PHP is widespread." It's good to see humorous developers love spreading jokes.
- sieabahlpark 4y ago

screamingninja 4y ago

I also remember my time at Yahoo! where he repeatedly expressed his disdain of frameworks on the internal mailing lists. Yahoo! heavily relied on PHP but did not have a web development framework. Rasmus's intent for each developer was to start from scratch every single time. Result was a much steeper learning curve, significantly lower efficiency, and plethora of security issues that a framework would typically mitigate behind the scenes. By the time Yahoo! adopted Symfony (~2009), it was way too late in my opinion.

blowski 4y ago

Wow, do people have this "joke" as an auto-reply? To put this quote in context, over the last decade, a lot of legacy PHP features were deprecated and removed. Some in the community were opposed, and wanted Rasmus Ledorf to ape Linus Torvalds and reject the changes. His comment here was him explicitly saying he wasn't precious about the original design, and welcomed the changes. The most annoying thing about PHP criticisms is people wheeling out these hackneyed old articles and quotes that don't say anything at all.

GauntletWizard 4y ago
Yes, people have this as their autoreply. There are real, obviously-wrong things about PHP that the PHP community rejected and stated as "Design Requirements". Things like `mysql_real_escape_string` and `T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM` are real warts that are easy to talk about and research; Many people decided "This language merits no further discussion" from those alone and they're not wrong. PHP had great documentation... in the comments of their docsite. The fact that the comments were not integrated into the documentation and marked as resolved was a real detriment. Important caveats and ways to shoot yourself in the foot (including major security risks and features!) were only documented through comments that could fall off the frontpage at any moment. PHP is a joke language. It's most major usage is a joke company. Making jokes about it is apt.
- ransom1538 4y ago
  Curious what backend stack you use?
- blowski 4y ago
  Yawn. For a joke, it's generated a huge amount of value for the world, so I'll laugh and carry on using it. EDIT: Including your PHP WordPress blog. Curious.
  - happytoexplain 4y ago
    In the software world, being widespread is pretty obviously not compelling evidence that something doesn't deserve harsh criticism. The sarcasm is bad, too.
    - blowski 4y ago
      It is perhaps evidence that the subjective "it sucks" opinion is meaningless. Code is not art. Commercial usage means a lot. And if someone calls PHP a joke, but then personally chooses it for themselves, there is certainly some inconsistency there.
      - autotune 4y ago
        Maybe once PHP finally becomes a language of the past you will be one of the few holdouts pulling in $300-$400k per year or more for working on a legacy code base, like COBOL programmers for banks. Nothing wrong with that mindset if you actually enjoy working with it and can stand being on the constant butt end of PHP jokes.
    - yuhc 4y ago
      "PHP is a joke." "PHP is widespread." It's good to see humorous developers love spreading jokes.
sieabahlpark 4y ago