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Comment by mattew | Hacker News Reader

I think PHP suffers from some of the same issues that VB6 suffered from in terms of inexperienced programmers. With VB6, someone who was not as much of a programmer as we all are could write themselves into a massive mess. I have found when writing PHP code if you are careful, you can build things with decent design patterns and consistency. Sure, its not as clean as a lot of languages, but it sure is easier for me to figure out what is going on with PHP code someone else wrote compared to Perl or Ruby code.

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This single biggest issue I've found when working with PHP for larger projects is that even if you are a disciplined programmer you get to the point where the includes will eat up your performance and your memory requirements will become larger. See drupal as an example of this.

You can get around some of that by using a php accelerator but it would seem to me that something like that ought to be part of the basic distribution.

That's what autoload is for. It's been around since PHP 5.0. http://php.net/manual/en/language.oop5.autoload.php and allows you to require the necessary files or classes only when you need them. Seems like they solved this problem to me.

I use frameworks (Zend, CodeIgniter) for all PHP projects except protoyping HTML templates (like, when knocking out a quick page with placeholder data and functionality to show a client). The hate poured on PHP for functionality that I have never, ever used (read pretty much any "PHP sucks because..." post and notice that the majority of the complaints are for things that real PHP developers are well aware of and effortlessly deal with) gets tiresome to hear about. Use it following some basic, current, best practices and it is fast, easy and perfectly fine for developing with.

Thank you! I must have missed that bit in the announcements.

Same largely applies to "classic" ASP and VBScript. You can write fairly well architected systems in that environment, but you have to discipline yourself to do it; the language won't really help you.

If you understand PHP and not Perl or Ruby, then I suppose you don't master regular expressions.

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