What are the worst parts of PHP?
Would you ever consider a job in PHP? Are the worst parts of PHP blockers for you? Tell me about your experiences!
Here are some of the reasons I don't use PHP anymore:
1. Code bases often written by near-amateurs, so almost always a headache to work on
2. Terrible type system (and unpredictable type coercion) mean that the code has to be written with great discipline or it's going to be buggy
3. Inconsistent signatures of built-in classes/methods/functions means that it's almost impossible to remember anything, so you need to consult documentation (or inline completion) constantly
4. Very generally, a community that likes magic (see: Laravel) -- ease/speed is prioritized over correctness/explicitness, which means maintaining large PHP projects is often a nightmare
Ask to see a code sample if possible.
I had a fantastic experience writing a thoroughly-typed, functional-style REST API using TypeScript -> Node recently, and I'd highly recommend that for someone who is practically-minded.
Heh. Most of the programming work I get is with PHP. I wish I could find work not in PHP. I'm still paying off a degree for building business applications in C# - and trying not to forget C# because I never use it. I can't seem to get a chance to forget PHP.
To me, the worst parts of PHP are, first, that the language was designed and intended to be used the way Wordpress (and many small hacky sites) use it - with PHP, HTML, Javascript and CSS all mixed together.
And second, that PHP isn't aware of context - it doesn't treat XML as objects (the way Hack does with XHP) and doesn't escape variables by default. One either has to manually escape every instance of every variable with a function whose name is too damn long (htmlspecialchars) or use a framework which does that for you.
The second point entirely undermines the purpose of PHP, and turns the first into an utter minefield.
You don't have to use a framework, just use one of the many composer packages available like Twig for example...
Yeah there is quite a bit of legacy code still there (the application is over a decade old), but all the new OOP code is nice to work with and we are getting rid of the old one slowly over time.
Seriously though, I would think long and hard and be unlikely to take a job requiring more than a trivial amount of php. For me its tough to structure well, the stdlib is inconsistent so it means constantly having to look at the documentation, etc.