Ewww, You Use PHP? (2010)

It's not that PHP (or virtually any other non-purposefully-arcane/obscene language) is inherently "terrible", it's just that the syntax, organization, standard library, and most of all mainstream community do not encourage well written, well architected, well "conventioned" systems.

Because PHP really is so trivial to cut and paste, and will often "just work" (as in, be interpreted w/o syntax errors and produce some output), the vast majority of PHP code actually out there in the wild is absolutely terrible and leads to an insane number of vulnerabilities on the Internet, not to mention complacent developers who do not really understand how/why their code is working.

Obviously it's POSSIBLE to write excellent, performant, secure PHP code - see Facebook and, presumably, Mailchimp - it's just that virtually everything in the PHP ecosystem is fighting against you.

While I suppose Laravel and co are trying to reverse this trend, they just aren't what the "average PHP developer" is actually using - the median PHP developer is almost certainly copy pasting snippets from Stack Overflow into their hobbled-together Wordpress theme.

Even though PHP was the first programming language I learned, I feel the same way about it. Like, OMG, totally gross!

Mind you, this position isn't due to any logical or rational reason. I've recently had the opportunity to take a deep dive into Laravel after a long hiatus from PHP. It's come a long way. I simply find the preponderance of '$' characters in the code to be visually and aesthetically unpleasant. Every time I look at PHP code, I literally feel like my eyes are being assaulted.

(2010)