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It's not a particularly elegant language. Even with the RFC process, php-internals still resists adding language features useful only to advanced developers.

It's not a particularly elegant language. Even with the RFC process, php-internals still resists adding language features useful only to advanced developers. The standard library is full of warts, including odd spelling, inconsistent argument order, etc. The killer though, as mentioned in the article, it has a low barrier to entry, so lots of neophytes write lots of bad code in it. There's also a tremendous amount of horrid, obsolete code out there, written by people that didn't know any better at the time, and kept up because the internet never forgets. PHP is far less of a joke than it used to be, but people will continue to hate on it and look down on people that make a living writing it.

wvenable 12y ago
The thing that gets me is that JavaScript has all these same problems yet, because everyone is forced to use it, it doesn't get as much hate.
- McGlockenshire 12y ago
  Another major difference is that Javascript has trendy things with hype machines. PHP is not trendy, and there's pretty much no hype around any PHP project.
  - TheAnimus 12y ago
    It's not the hype, for me I use JavaScript because I have no choice. I dislike many things about it, but I have no choice, I need my code to run in the web browser, no plug in, no Flash or Silverlight etc. For my start up, I can't see a single reason why we'd use PHP, try to not think of it as me saying PHP is bad, it's just other languages and frameworks offer us more value.
    - wvenable 12y ago
      JavaScript is creeping into more places too; I'm going to be starting a project in JS soon because it needs to run the JavaScript sandbox provided by mobile OS's. And that is specifically to get around platform restrictions involving downloaded code and to make it easily cross-platform. If I had the choice, I'd use something else. So this also leads to using node.js (for early development and testing).

wvenable 12y ago

The thing that gets me is that JavaScript has all these same problems yet, because everyone is forced to use it, it doesn't get as much hate.

McGlockenshire 12y ago
Another major difference is that Javascript has trendy things with hype machines. PHP is not trendy, and there's pretty much no hype around any PHP project.
- TheAnimus 12y ago
  It's not the hype, for me I use JavaScript because I have no choice. I dislike many things about it, but I have no choice, I need my code to run in the web browser, no plug in, no Flash or Silverlight etc. For my start up, I can't see a single reason why we'd use PHP, try to not think of it as me saying PHP is bad, it's just other languages and frameworks offer us more value.
  - wvenable 12y ago
    JavaScript is creeping into more places too; I'm going to be starting a project in JS soon because it needs to run the JavaScript sandbox provided by mobile OS's. And that is specifically to get around platform restrictions involving downloaded code and to make it easily cross-platform. If I had the choice, I'd use something else. So this also leads to using node.js (for early development and testing).