I'm not that interested in programming, so I think it's a great language. All those years back when first learning to use it, I remember going through a book and being so happy that it did practically everything itself.
I think this sums up everyone I've met who actually likes PHP. They like that they are able to get stuff done, and look no further. It is just frustrating to those of us who know that PHP is one of the most poorly designed (and I use that word loosely) languages ever to be successful.
If you can get over the local maximum of getting stuff done in PHP, the grass actually IS greener in Python and Ruby land.
That says more about the people you associate with then with the language.
The people I know care about programming, care about doing it well, care about elegant solutions, and care about a wonderful end product. What they don't care about are stupid language wars.
> the grass actually IS greener in Python and Ruby land.
I never got serious with Ruby, so I'll confess, I might be missing something. But, going by what I see in Destroy All Software's screencasts, I don't feel like I'm missing anything.
I can't help it, but ever since Rails came on the scene, I can't help but feel like the PHP people that make up the PHP community has dramatically improved. This, of course, is purely based on the people I've met.
> I've never seriously learned a second language, so I think it's a great language
Do the people you know have experience with other comparable* languages, and still think PHP is a well-designed language and platform?
I concede that the PHP community, and PHP itself, has dramatically improved in the last few years. PHP 5 is a revelation compared to PHP 4.
[*] i.e. not "The other language I know is C, and I love that PHP is so high level!"
For the most part, yeah. There are the obvious quibbles you get with any language, but for it's domain, it's the best bang for the buck. Does that mean it's the only language in our stack? No. But for my money, for the web side, it can't be beat. If I were to do a site in a non PHP language, it would be Python hands down. That being said, it all depends on what the project is, and what it entails.
Listen, I can't help but wonder if your imparting some past on the current crop of PHP developers (and by current, I mean those that moved to PHP5 some 8 years ago). Maybe you had experiences with another group of people that focus on just one language.
The PHP community of today is far from that. It's made up of practical people, who focus on more than just PHP. More to the point, calling someone a PHP developer these days just reflects that when they do the server side web code, they are using PHP. Not that it's their only language.
To be honest, my personal experience is that everyone I've met who pans PHP and proclaims to have switched happily to Rails (because that's what they switch to first, never Ruby), or Python is that they needed the extra structure these languages enforced. Basically, the PHP code they deride so much was code they helped write.
That, of course, is just my point of view. I don't know many people who use Ruby for web development, so it would be unfair for me to suggest the entire community was like that.
Is this the only thing upon which to base your opinion of a language? As someone who's seen at least a glimpse of the world beyond PHP, I'd concede that the design of the language, especially in earlier versions, is probably not its biggest selling point. But as you and I agreed below, PHP derives its value in other areas.
Maybe it's implicit in a question like "What's your most disliked programming language?" that those other areas should be excluded from consideration, but if that's not the case, then focusing solely on language design is a bit unfair to PHP.
Keep in mind, the design of the language wasn't to create a new language, but instead, make using various libraries easily usable in a web environment. Hence the reason for the multitude of c or c-like functions. Eventually, the shift moved in a different direction.
I like to think that while PHP wasn't intelligently designed, it did evolve. And for my money, evolution beats out intelligent design.
I was just thinking this same thing. My background is mostly in PHP, C#, and more recently JavaScript.
Each of these languages is completely different from each other, but I haven't gotten to point where I curse the fact that one program is written in one language versus the other.
Each language has it features and pitfalls, but as long as you can accomplish the task you've set out on, I'm not sure that it really matters.
For example, I absolutely love the ease of passing functions around in JavaScript, but you can also make a real stinkin' pile if you don't structure things right.
Having used JavaScript, I find myself thinking about using delegates and anonymous functions a lot more in C# than I did before because I've seen the benefit of them in JS.
You can't tell a good programmer by their choice in language but in how they leverage that language to make awesome software.
You can't program if you use a broken window as a measure of whether you use the language or not. I do not know of a language without issues, ugliness, or mistakes.
I see PHP as a language comparable to English. Both languages have a bunch of inconsistencies, peculiar idiosyncrasies, a humongous base of speakers/users, etc. In both languages, a lot of what people write is not of high quality, but writing high-quality stuff is certainly possible. If I had to choose one language for the world to speak, it probably wouldn't be English, and if I had to choose one programming language to be used in a given field (say, server-side web development), it probably wouldn't be PHP. But given the reality of the situation, PHP, like English, is an incredibly useful language, and PHP code, like English writing, can be of very high quality. I think this makes it a very valuable language.
What I don't think it is, is a well-designed one. It could have been all of those other things, AND a well-designed one, it just wasn't. I think it's a shame if a generation of web programmers come of age thinking that the warts of PHP are inherent to all programming languages. (I myself once felt that way about ColdFusion, since it was the first language I learned and everyone I worked with also only knew ColdFusion.)
And, actually, it's NOT necessarily a bad thing to have a language oriented around people who don't actually care that much about programming when it's also oriented around people who want to ship something useful to an end user (who might care if it's insecure but doesn't care if the code's pretty).
I've encountered a number of orgs now that have PHP on the front speaking XMLRPC or JSONRPC or whatever to a backend daemon (either Java or Perl in the cases I've seen) and since that means messiness on the front end shouldn't be able to violate business rules, it works out really well.
In the past, of course, PHP did have magic_quotes, which was a misguided attempt at mitigating SQL injections. This has since been removed, and there's been a big push in the direction of using prepared statements/parameterized queries through a library like PDO, which I think was introduced in PHP 5.
So was the (I believe now deprecated) mysql library they shipped and the tempting ease of string interpolation.
That sort of a market generally gets swarmed by low price developers very quickly.
For example, you can use include ( ) in so many ways, autoload classes, write getters/setters and override anything, implement views, etc. Everything "just runs", or can be compiled into fast code with HipHop (or cached with APC).
OK, to be fair, I would say that PHP with a framework that takes advantage of it can be very cool. I can't exactly share our codebase, but you can see the open source version from 2 years ago : http://phponpie.com to aprpeciate some of the "beauty" of PHP
And it can be extremely expressive and powerful. Sure, it can't do everything that Node.js can do, but for serving requests it can be awesome. It isolates every script in its own memory space, so you never have to worry about anything! The one thing I do not like about PHP is that it's married to the outdated thread-based webserver model, while the new boys on the block (NGinX, Node.js and the new Apache) all use event-based programming.
Don't downvote just because I said PHP can be cool. Look at our framework at least, before voting :)
On the other hand, all of my programming horror stories and terrible hacks have been written in PHP. I remember having to use an older version of PHP that failed to support closures when it was needed in some legacy code. The code was passing functions as arguments, but because the functions were not bound in the local scope, there were issues with namespace collisions. I had to resort to global variables for a situation that should not have needed it because rewriting everything properly required a non-trivial refactoring that I did not have the time to complete. Granted, this has been addressed in more recent versions of PHP, but there are always old versions floating around where "gotcha's" like this show up.
More recently, I ran into an issue porting PHP 5 code across different linux distributions where, for some strange reason, libraries on the include path failed to be found. Debugging something like that is ridiculously frustrating. Problems like this are bound to show up with any technology you use frequently, but my work involves using many languages and technologies and, of them, PHP is the only one that leads to these sorts of problems with such regularity.
"This language really sucks." -- paraphrased, intro to PHP on Facebook's internal Wiki
It's true that most software makes me either angry or sad, but PHP (where even "==" is wrong after Perl had gotten it right) was a singularly memorable peek into Special Hell.
I think they have to use that subset so it can be compiled by HipHop down to C code.
My two biggest gripes with PHP:
1) No standard package management system. I worked with some VERY smart developers at a PHP-only company, but nearly every part of their complex system was coded in-house, from the ORM up. Rubyists practically never code things that are available as well-tested gems, saving tons of effort, debugging, and training new people. That's a huge boost to Getting Things Done.
2) Little discoverability. If you can't remember the string method you want, you'll have to Google - and make sure you notice the order of the arguments. In Ruby, you can do `'foo'.methods.sort` and see all the methods available on strings. Since it's OO, you don't have to pass in the string itself, so there are fewer arguments to know in the first place.