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Comment by lbj | Hacker News Reader

Also a good read in the same vein: https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/

This is a) ten years old, b) fairly out of date, and c) much more passive-aggressive and opinionated than people sharing it seem to think it is.

I mean, in the "stances", just as an example -- "a language must be concise"?

Really? It must? I think this is inappropriately assertive. IMO the better JS I have seen has avoided some of the more unnecessary conciseness. And that is before we discuss the worst example of "conciseness" thinking in a generation: JSX.

PHP and its community is, if you want a different opinion, more mature, more pragmatic and entirely less screwed up than Node.js, which is, to borrow the terminology, a fractal of indiscipline.

PHP's developers and its wider community have gone about fixing problems while NPM just seems to create new ones.

(The author of that post is in fact a Python fan, which makes it even more chucklesome when looked at over a ten-year timescale. One of the two languages managed to bring developers along for that whole decade with a campaign of carefully planned major improvements and deprecations, without causing major schisms, and it wasn't Python.)

> This is a) ten years old, b) fairly out of date,

No, most of the problems listed still exist in the language. PHP Core didn't fix these, they just added more features on top of them.

Take this part:

https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/#...

Can you tell me which assertions aren't true as of 2022?

> [] can be used on any variable, not just strings and arrays. It returns null and issues no warning.

It warns, will likely become an error in a later version (these are being slowly increased in error level to give people time to migrate): https://3v4l.org/qQdSP

> The [] indexing operator can also be spelled {}.

Not anymore: https://3v4l.org/jtjCj

> Unlike (literally!) every other language with a similar operator, ?: is left associative. So this:

Not anymore: https://3v4l.org/t8io2

Regarding string/number comparisons:

https://wiki.php.net/rfc/string_to_number_comparison

Most of the things in that article that are still true don't actually come up on a day to day basis for professional coders with a good framework and a decent IDE (basically PhpStorm).

It’s not really in the same vein, since the OP is referring to modern PHP and your article was written over a decade ago.

Many of the points in the decade-old article still stand, but the ecosystem around PHP has papered over a lot of the cracks in a variety of ways.

It's not just papering over cracks, though. (There's a bit of that, but they do try to avoid it)

It's a slow, deliberative process to properly fix the most widely deployed server-side web programming language. It's not going to be easy, and it is being done by fairly wise heads.

While I enjoyed that article many years ago, and even identified with those sentiments. I've kept an eye on PHP over the years. It's not that same language. Certainly PHP, like all languages are not perfect. But I gotta hand it to the team. The evolution has been awesome.

This dead horse again?

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