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It's been 10 years since "PHP: a fractal of bad design" [1] was written. It's remarkable how the language evolved, and how many of the issues mentioned have be

It's been 10 years since "PHP: a fractal of bad design" [1] was written. It's remarkable how the language evolved, and how many of the issues mentioned have been fixed and improved over the last ten years. 1. 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/

archerx 4y ago
It’s funny because when I think of “fractal of bad design”, Javascript is the first thing that comes to mind. I love Javascript but it makes me ask “why?” a lot.
- dubcanada 4y ago
  PHP is kind of the same league, a lot of hate comes because some senior employee told a bunch of juniors after years of working in Wordpress that PHP is a garbage language and you should not touch it. "It's cool to hate PHP!" PHP can make absolute garbage, and it can make a elegant product. Just like Javascript can. And same with Python and Ruby and what ever else everyone recommends. It may be a lot harder to make garbage in Rust, but it's possible. PHP has a problem where it gets out of your way, gives you the entire toolbox to build a house. But the problem is which one of the 17 types of hammers do I use to hammer in one of the 104 different types of nails. Where as Ruby, gives you 3 hammers and 4 different nails, and 7 magic nails that appear after you're done hammering.
- awestroke 4y ago
  Just use typescript
  - archerx 4y ago
    No.
- azangru 4y ago
  Php's inconsistencies in regards to needle vs haystack make me weep. Javascript doesn't have anything remotely like that.
  - lordgroff 4y ago
    I hope you realize that "fixing" these types of early mistakes is almost impossible for PHP, a language which tries hard not to break things, especially something that's going to be used everywhere. But if this is such a deal-breaker and your IDE is dumb as a stump and can't remind you nothing prevents you from wrapping the stdlib or using something like psl to do it for you.
    - azangru 4y ago
      > I hope you realize that "fixing" these types of early mistakes is almost impossible for PHP I do, yes; which means early mistakes stay in the language forever; same as in javascript. More's the pity.
      - unity1001 4y ago
        If its powering 80% of the internet, 30% of all ecommerce websites, its not a mistake.
    - iLoveOncall 4y ago
      I think fixing as in "removing and replacing" is indeed impossible, but defining a new convention and making alternative names for the same function would work fine. Let's say the new convention is that functions are named str_*(), then keep strpos(), but create a new one called str_pos() that is the same, and mark the old one as deprecated (but don't remove it). I am sure there are edge cases where both str_* and str* exist already and do different things, but we can figure something out.
    - dbbk 4y ago
      I think you actually could fix this forward by using named arguments instead of positional ones?
abujazar 4y ago
Many of the statements in that article were misleading or outdated already in 2012, though. E.g. the part about PHP being tied to Apache… At that time I had been using php-fpm behind nginx for years.
awestroke 4y ago
Which ones have been fixed?
makeitdouble 4y ago
I didn’t go back to all the points, but I get the feeling the configuration and security parts are mostly fixed, while the functions related issues and type looseness stayed mostly the same. Am I missing other important parts ?

archerx 4y ago

It’s funny because when I think of “fractal of bad design”, Javascript is the first thing that comes to mind. I love Javascript but it makes me ask “why?” a lot.

dubcanada 4y ago
PHP is kind of the same league, a lot of hate comes because some senior employee told a bunch of juniors after years of working in Wordpress that PHP is a garbage language and you should not touch it. "It's cool to hate PHP!" PHP can make absolute garbage, and it can make a elegant product. Just like Javascript can. And same with Python and Ruby and what ever else everyone recommends. It may be a lot harder to make garbage in Rust, but it's possible. PHP has a problem where it gets out of your way, gives you the entire toolbox to build a house. But the problem is which one of the 17 types of hammers do I use to hammer in one of the 104 different types of nails. Where as Ruby, gives you 3 hammers and 4 different nails, and 7 magic nails that appear after you're done hammering.
awestroke 4y ago
Just use typescript
- archerx 4y ago
  No.
azangru 4y ago
Php's inconsistencies in regards to needle vs haystack make me weep. Javascript doesn't have anything remotely like that.
- lordgroff 4y ago
  I hope you realize that "fixing" these types of early mistakes is almost impossible for PHP, a language which tries hard not to break things, especially something that's going to be used everywhere. But if this is such a deal-breaker and your IDE is dumb as a stump and can't remind you nothing prevents you from wrapping the stdlib or using something like psl to do it for you.
  - azangru 4y ago
    > I hope you realize that "fixing" these types of early mistakes is almost impossible for PHP I do, yes; which means early mistakes stay in the language forever; same as in javascript. More's the pity.
    - unity1001 4y ago
      If its powering 80% of the internet, 30% of all ecommerce websites, its not a mistake.
  - iLoveOncall 4y ago
    I think fixing as in "removing and replacing" is indeed impossible, but defining a new convention and making alternative names for the same function would work fine. Let's say the new convention is that functions are named str_*(), then keep strpos(), but create a new one called str_pos() that is the same, and mark the old one as deprecated (but don't remove it). I am sure there are edge cases where both str_* and str* exist already and do different things, but we can figure something out.
  - dbbk 4y ago
    I think you actually could fix this forward by using named arguments instead of positional ones?

abujazar 4y ago

Many of the statements in that article were misleading or outdated already in 2012, though. E.g. the part about PHP being tied to Apache… At that time I had been using php-fpm behind nginx for years.

awestroke 4y ago

Which ones have been fixed?

makeitdouble 4y ago

I didn’t go back to all the points, but I get the feeling the configuration and security parts are mostly fixed, while the functions related issues and type looseness stayed mostly the same. Am I missing other important parts ?