Some of the people who raise the biggest fuss about PHP are also people who never dealt with it (except through Wordpress).
I mostly program in Python these days, but I used PHP for years beforehand without much drama. I even enjoyed it at times. Yes, I do have a Comp Sci bachelors degree and I probably should care more - but I found it a lot more interesting not to have to deal with fiddling around with servers in order to perform my job.
The critiques of the language aren't baseless, but plenty of large startups manage to do just fine with PHP.
TLDR: Languages are meaningless penis measuring contests of the IT world. If you will ship faster and better with language X, go ahead and use it.
> If you will ship faster and better with language X, go ahead and use it.
Absolutely, by all means, go for it. Godspeed.
> Languages are meaningless penis measuring contests of the IT world.
No they're not, and this is just insulting. I'm only an amateur PL nerd but there are people who have devoted their lives and careers to studying languages and thinking about the differences between them and how to design something practical, consistent, logically sound, beautiful, etc. To brush aside that work as meaningless is pretty narrow-minded. After all, some of that work helped even lowly PHP to stand taller on the shoulders of giants, and make it even possible to be a reasonable tool.
He meant that not in the context of Language Research, which is super-awesome and every developer should be super grateful to researches in this space, but in applied programming, where people piss on whatever language they aren't used to using/think sucks for some arbitrary reason.
But the lines between research and industry or "applied programming" aren't that clear cut (look at how much Rich Hickey's been able to mine the veins of research and bring awesome ideas to a practical and well-designed language like Clojure). I think some healthy debate, which includes pointing out languages that have severe flaws, is important and I wouldn't want to discourage it from happening, especially not on HN. I certainly don't think it needs to be dismissed as "meaningless penis measuring contests". That debate should definitely be carried out politely, of course. I'm not defending incoherent language flame wars.
I'll bite. PHP's automatic type conversion is a severe flaw.
The intent was to make it easier for beginners to pick up the language without worrying about technical details like types, but it violates the "fail fast" principle. It might make it easier for beginners to write code that works some of the time, but at a cost of making it harder to write code that doesn't break in surprising ways later. It's not just that automatic coercion exists, but that the behavior is biased toward returning values that don't produce errors. Treating the string "three" as equal to the number 0 is very unlikely to be the desired behavior. Even if not emitting an error is desired, a contagious NaN value would make a lot more sense.
There are certainly ways for an experienced user to mitigate the problem, but beginners don't know them, using them effectively requires discipline and a great deal of production code doesn't use them. The latter problem is cultural, but the language being tolerant of sloppy code naturally attracts people who write sloppy code to the language.
No, I absolutely was not defending language like "piddly shit". I was attacking language like "meaningless penis measuring contest". I think neither has a place on HN.
I have nothing to say about PHP (because I've never used it) I was reacting to a specific comment in jbm's post, which generalized languages and debates around them. Sorry for derailing the thread from the topic of PHP, and I probably shouldn't have made a little dig with "severe flaw".
>Some of the people who raise the biggest fuss about PHP are also people who never dealt with it (except through Wordpress).
That's clearly nonsense. The people who point out how terrible PHP is have huge, very detailed and very accurate lists of the problems with PHP. They don't get that from "never dealing with it".
>If you will ship faster and better with language X, go ahead and use it.
We do. Why do you think that means we shouldn't point out how bad PHP is? Did you know that for every stubborn dumbass that sticks his fingers in his ears and screams "LALALALA I CAN'T HEAR YOU!", there's an inexperienced developer who didn't know how bad PHP was or why, who was inspired to learn more because of that "PHP bashing" post, and who subsequently saved years of hardship by switching to a sane language? Just because you don't want to hear about how shitty PHP is, doesn't mean nobody else does.
Actually, most of those lists are based on PHP4 or older (meaning their opinions are fully eight years out of date; a LOT has changed) or are made irrelevant by changing one or two quite well-documented confit settings. The little that's left over are mostly complains that PHP isnt something that it's not trying to be (strongly typed, most commonly)
The only legitimate complaints I read as someone who uses an up-to-date version tend to revolve around the wildly inconsistent naming conventions, and a couple of extensions with rather poor documentation. The recent releases (5.3, 5.4) really did a lot to make it just as feature rich as other scripting languages.
If you want to use something else, be my guest. But I for one am tired of the misinformation that PHP bashers spread. I happen to like a language that doesn't get in my way, has extremely thorough documentation, and almost any question is answered in the first search result. At the same time, I hate the lack of documentation on the actual source (I have a few things that are a huge pain to do in user land, so writing a native extension is a huge pain), and of course the wacky parameters and return values on the old functions.
>Actually, most of those lists are based on PHP4 or older (meaning their opinions are fully eight years out of date; a LOT has changed) or are made irrelevant by changing one or two quite well-documented confit settings. The little that's left over are mostly complains that PHP isnt something that it's not trying to be (strongly typed, most commonly)
Sounds an awful lot like you are just ignoring the things you don't want to hear. It isn't just that PHP is weakly typed, it is that it has absurd type conversions that no other weakly typed language does, that aren't even consistent, and explicit casts don't serve the expected purpose of forcing the correct type:
PHP is full of bugs. Ancient bugs that have existed since PHP3, and which are still there. Serious bugs where the lexer or parser is outright broken:
$ perl -le 'print 07'
7
$ perl -le 'print 08'
Illegal octal digit '8' at -e line 1, at end of line
Execution of -e aborted due to compilation errors.
$ python -c 'print 07'
7
$ python -c 'print 08'
File "", line 1
print 08
^
SyntaxError: invalid token
$ php -r 'print 07;'
7
$ php -r 'print 08;'
0
$ perl -le '$foo = 1; print(($foo == 1) ? "uno" : ($foo == 2) ? "dos" : "tres");'
uno
$ php -r '$foo = 1; print(($foo == 1) ? "uno" : ($foo == 2) ? "dos" : "tres");'
dos
PHP is written by absolutely incompetent developers. There were 37 exploitable vulnerabilities in 2011. Compare that to 3 for python, 3 for perl, and 7 for ruby. Steffan Esser was the only person attempting to make the PHP project give a shit about security, and he ended up giving up on it because the other PHP devs absolutely refused to consider security as important.
These are not problems that are fixed in recent versions of PHP. They are not misinformation. If you want to revel in your ignorance, feel free. But don't expect the rest of the world to tip toe around the facts to avoid inconveniencing you with reality.
"Some of the people who raise the biggest fuss about PHP are also people who never dealt with it (except through Wordpress)."
Well that's the biggest piece of bullshit I've ever seen spewing out of someone's keyboard here on HN. I've been developing in PHP pretty much since it came out. At least, since it was stable/useful enough for people other than Rasmus to use. I've been using it for so long that I absolutely hate it. The inconsistencies, the "bolted-on" OOP, the amount of time I'm just sitting there scratching my head wondering where the fuck my data went to, and not even being able to test the thing since there's no good testing libraries built for PHP. It's all a confusing mess that I refuse to even be paid for at this point.
Often, the best tool in web software is the one you can get the most/cheapest labor for so you can actually get your product completed and on the market.
No one cares if your software is programed in the latest tech with the very best techniques - all they care about is if your business is viable. PHP fills this niche excellently.
As a developer I make my living off PHP. I'd rather play with nicer languages, but frankly that isn't where the money is where I am.
The bigotry from this community when it comes to PHP has left me sick to my stomach.