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Here's the deal: all languages have downsides. It's called "tradeoffs". Depending on what's important to you, those tradeoffs could be Really Bad. Take for exa

Here's the deal: all languages have downsides. It's called "tradeoffs". Depending on what's important to you, those tradeoffs could be Really Bad. Take for example my current bread and butter, C++. Because it was designed during a time when people still really cared about speed, a number of design decisions were made for the language (eg, non-virtual by default) that may not make sense today. This is just the tip of the iceberg; I trust I don't need to go on about exceptions or the various things left out of the spec or "left as a decision for the compiler implementers". Now, I know many of the problems with C++, and I'm willing to admit them. It only seems logical, if you are competent at using a tool, you are familiar with its limitations and will admit to them, and maybe justify them in the context of tradeoffs. This cannot be said of many who defend PHP. I'm not going to rehash criticisms of PHP, but it seems to me that the shortcomings of the language can't be justified by tradeoffs because there were no benefits gained by the downsides that are in PHP. It really seems like an ad-hoc spaghetti mess. That many defend this by citing irrelevant facts ("it's popular!") or debatable facts ("it's easy!") while not addressing the shortcomings at all, tends to lead me to believe that defenders of PHP are lacking in professionalism and probably have little experience of other programming languages. That articles like this one keep coming up is a sign that people (mainly PHP defenders) can't just admit their language has downsides like everyone else's (okay, maybe more than everyone else's) and move on. EDIT: A little less inflammatory.

cpt1138 14y ago
There are only two types of languages, those that people complain about and those no-one uses. Given that my own personal favorite has been described as "a DSL for changing large blocks of XML into stack traces" and I laugh at this, I think you'd be hard-pressed to objectively evaluate "more than anyone else's."
smsm42 14y ago
>> but it seems to me that the shortcomings of the language can't be justified by tradeoffs because there were no benefits gained by the downsides that are in PHP You are wrong. There are a lot of justifications for the tradeoffs, and if you want to know what they are, just ask real developers who wrote the code or maintain it. Somehow this is very rarely done, people just assume because they saw a couple of pages of bad PHP code, they know everything about the language now and can tell if certain tradeoffs were justified or not. PHP is simple, but it's not that simple. >> debatable facts ("it's easy!") Calling the fact "debatable" in order to make a proven fact seem dubious may be effective at first, but only if the readers do not have a habit to think about what they read. I think most of the people here do have this habit. So it would be nice to respect the audience and if you mean to dispute known facts - fine, dispute them. By using proof and argument, not just by attaching an epithet to them. >> That articles like this one keep coming up is a sign that people (mainly PHP defenders) can't just admit their language has downsides like everyone else's Sorry, this is baloney. Everybody admits that. What PHP defenders would not admit is exactly what you are saying above - that PHP is unique among languages not in having downsides, but in all of these downsides having no justifications at all. What they don't admit is that anybody who sees that is stupid (or, as you prefer to say, "lacking in professionalism") just because they see more than you see. That's just nonsense and there's absolutely no reason to "admit" it.

cpt1138 14y ago

There are only two types of languages, those that people complain about and those no-one uses. Given that my own personal favorite has been described as "a DSL for changing large blocks of XML into stack traces" and I laugh at this, I think you'd be hard-pressed to objectively evaluate "more than anyone else's."

smsm42 14y ago

>> but it seems to me that the shortcomings of the language can't be justified by tradeoffs because there were no benefits gained by the downsides that are in PHP You are wrong. There are a lot of justifications for the tradeoffs, and if you want to know what they are, just ask real developers who wrote the code or maintain it. Somehow this is very rarely done, people just assume because they saw a couple of pages of bad PHP code, they know everything about the language now and can tell if certain tradeoffs were justified or not. PHP is simple, but it's not that simple. >> debatable facts ("it's easy!") Calling the fact "debatable" in order to make a proven fact seem dubious may be effective at first, but only if the readers do not have a habit to think about what they read. I think most of the people here do have this habit. So it would be nice to respect the audience and if you mean to dispute known facts - fine, dispute them. By using proof and argument, not just by attaching an epithet to them. >> That articles like this one keep coming up is a sign that people (mainly PHP defenders) can't just admit their language has downsides like everyone else's Sorry, this is baloney. Everybody admits that. What PHP defenders would not admit is exactly what you are saying above - that PHP is unique among languages not in having downsides, but in all of these downsides having no justifications at all. What they don't admit is that anybody who sees that is stupid (or, as you prefer to say, "lacking in professionalism") just because they see more than you see. That's just nonsense and there's absolutely no reason to "admit" it.