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Well, I doubt it would ever become popular if it wasn't useful and easy to use. Actually, I think it is exactly because it's popular. All languages have odd en

by troels 14y ago

Well, I doubt it would ever become popular if it wasn't useful and easy to use. Actually, I think it is exactly because it's popular. All languages have odd ends, but you rarely hear people rant over Pythons lack of lambdas and weird explicit "self" parameter or Ruby's incomprehensible scoping rules. I'm betting that once they fall out of fashion, we will. And no, I disagree. The main sentiment of the article is negative. It's a call to figure out how to dethrone PHP, but without telling us why this would be such an important goal.

brudgers 14y ago
>"Well, I doubt it would ever become popular if it wasn't useful and easy to use." Like Windows 3.1?
mikeash 14y ago
I hear about them a lot. The difference is that PHP is so much worse. Yes, every language has warts. But PHP is the only popular language I know of which is essentially nothing but warts. Of course that's subjective, and people disagree, but there really does seem to be a real, qualitative difference between the warts on a mostly nice language like Python, and the ubiquitous bizarro world that makes up just about the entirety of PHP.
- wvenable 14y ago
  > But PHP is the only popular language I know of which is essentially nothing but warts. This is entirely untrue. PHP isn't even a bad language on the scale of actual bad languages. It has some warts but they don't really impede the development of good software. There are many languages that make developing good software nearly impossible.
  - mikeash 14y ago
    What other popular language is as bad? COBOL? I don't know about impeding the development of good software. Warts can always be worked around as long as you know about them and how to handle them. But that doesn't mean they don't matter, and PHP has so many that it's difficult to enumerate them. What other popular languages silently convert strings to floats and then do math or floating-point comparisons on them? What other popular languages have literally hundreds of failing unit tests in their mainline implementation, allowing ridiculous and insecure regressions that were actually caught by testing but never noticed to ship in an official release? I doubt there's any one wart that's exclusive to PHP. What's remarkable about PHP is how it manages to gather so many in one place. Each one alone is not that bad, but the sheer number of them is astounding.
    - wvenable 14y ago
      > What other popular languages silently convert strings to floats and then do math or floating-point comparisons on them? JavaScript. Most of the "issues" around comparisons/conversions/etc equally applies to JavaScript as it does to PHP. But PHP does some very stupid casts but it's really just one problem. In the lists of "failures" tend to show that same problem 15 different ways to show how screwed up things are. If your code is well designed and secure you don't encounter these problems anyway. > What other popular languages have literally hundreds of failing unit tests in their mainline implementation... I'll give you that. Since that happened, the PHP developers have worked to ensure it won't happen in the future. No platform is free of particularly big security fails (Rails).
      - mikeash 14y ago
        Yes, JavaScript has the same string comparison problems as PHP. And it gets a ton of criticism for it. JS doesn't have all these other problems, though. For the unit tests, it looks like there are still 100 unexpected failures in the latest release: http://gcov.php.net/viewer.php?version=PHP_5_4&func=tests http://gcov.php.net/viewer.php?version=PHP_5_4&func=test... Am I misinterpreting that? Yes, no platform is free of security problems. But the way a security problem happens is as important as what the problem is. That PHP's unit tests are so noisy that important regressions can't even be noticed even when a test exists to catch them speaks extremely poorly of PHP compared to other languages.
        wvenable 14y ago
        I actually clicked on several of those failed tests and there doesn't seem to be anything critical there. Looks like some access problems (test setup) and at least one needed the test to be updated. I'm not sure when these where run but it would be easy for someone went through all of them and give them a pass. A failed test doesn't necessarily mean that deployment should be held up. 700 failed tests is a different story. > JS doesn't have all these other problems, though. JavaScript has plenty of it's own problems. It has legacy things you should never do. PHP has different problems (not necessarily worse ones) and things you should never do. Lists of the horrors of PHP generally include all things you shouldn't ever do mixed together to make it look much worse than it really is. I've seen similar lists made for JavaScript (you can get some really crazy results) but that doesn't mean shit for day to day use.

by troels 14y ago

brudgers 14y ago

>"Well, I doubt it would ever become popular if it wasn't useful and easy to use." Like Windows 3.1?

mikeash 14y ago

I hear about them a lot. The difference is that PHP is so much worse. Yes, every language has warts. But PHP is the only popular language I know of which is essentially nothing but warts. Of course that's subjective, and people disagree, but there really does seem to be a real, qualitative difference between the warts on a mostly nice language like Python, and the ubiquitous bizarro world that makes up just about the entirety of PHP.

wvenable 14y ago
> But PHP is the only popular language I know of which is essentially nothing but warts. This is entirely untrue. PHP isn't even a bad language on the scale of actual bad languages. It has some warts but they don't really impede the development of good software. There are many languages that make developing good software nearly impossible.
- mikeash 14y ago
  What other popular language is as bad? COBOL? I don't know about impeding the development of good software. Warts can always be worked around as long as you know about them and how to handle them. But that doesn't mean they don't matter, and PHP has so many that it's difficult to enumerate them. What other popular languages silently convert strings to floats and then do math or floating-point comparisons on them? What other popular languages have literally hundreds of failing unit tests in their mainline implementation, allowing ridiculous and insecure regressions that were actually caught by testing but never noticed to ship in an official release? I doubt there's any one wart that's exclusive to PHP. What's remarkable about PHP is how it manages to gather so many in one place. Each one alone is not that bad, but the sheer number of them is astounding.
  - wvenable 14y ago
    > What other popular languages silently convert strings to floats and then do math or floating-point comparisons on them? JavaScript. Most of the "issues" around comparisons/conversions/etc equally applies to JavaScript as it does to PHP. But PHP does some very stupid casts but it's really just one problem. In the lists of "failures" tend to show that same problem 15 different ways to show how screwed up things are. If your code is well designed and secure you don't encounter these problems anyway. > What other popular languages have literally hundreds of failing unit tests in their mainline implementation... I'll give you that. Since that happened, the PHP developers have worked to ensure it won't happen in the future. No platform is free of particularly big security fails (Rails).
    - mikeash 14y ago
      Yes, JavaScript has the same string comparison problems as PHP. And it gets a ton of criticism for it. JS doesn't have all these other problems, though. For the unit tests, it looks like there are still 100 unexpected failures in the latest release: http://gcov.php.net/viewer.php?version=PHP_5_4&func=tests http://gcov.php.net/viewer.php?version=PHP_5_4&func=test... Am I misinterpreting that? Yes, no platform is free of security problems. But the way a security problem happens is as important as what the problem is. That PHP's unit tests are so noisy that important regressions can't even be noticed even when a test exists to catch them speaks extremely poorly of PHP compared to other languages.
      - wvenable 14y ago
        I actually clicked on several of those failed tests and there doesn't seem to be anything critical there. Looks like some access problems (test setup) and at least one needed the test to be updated. I'm not sure when these where run but it would be easy for someone went through all of them and give them a pass. A failed test doesn't necessarily mean that deployment should be held up. 700 failed tests is a different story. > JS doesn't have all these other problems, though. JavaScript has plenty of it's own problems. It has legacy things you should never do. PHP has different problems (not necessarily worse ones) and things you should never do. Lists of the horrors of PHP generally include all things you shouldn't ever do mixed together to make it look much worse than it really is. I've seen similar lists made for JavaScript (you can get some really crazy results) but that doesn't mean shit for day to day use.