Coding Horror: The PHP Singularity

> Except now it's 2012, and fellow programmers are still writing long screeds bemoaning the awfulness of PHP!

Yes, and not only did Jeff write one in 2008, but he wrote another one just now. You can't write 10 paragraphs about what a blight PHP is and then pretend like you're being constructive by admonishing us to create better tools.

In fact what everyone is doing with these rants is bike-shedding about an easy-to-hate language. It makes an easy topic that drives a lot of traffic because everyone has an opinion. It's just tabloid garbage for the hacker set.

A more objective view of things is that PHP is a capable-if-ugly language, and it co-exists just fine with thousands of other programming languages and frameworks all with their own visions, communities, and production applications. The existence of PHP is not harming other "better" languages at all. And if you really want to make an argument about languages hurting the state of programming, how about asserting that the dominance of imperative languages is irreparably damaging the ability of most programmers to work in functional languages where solutions are fundamentally more robust. Or what about the damage that proprietary platforms like .NET (which Jeff uses if I'm not mistaken) or iOS do to the programming world by restricting progress to a single company.

I won't belittle Jeff's contributions to the software world, because Stack Overflow is an amazing service, but despite the fact that I hate PHP, Rasmus' contribution to the software world is certainly much more important than Jeff's feel-good blog fluff.

The problem is that the developers of rails / grails / Wt / SproutCore / Flex / Struts / GWT / Django / Flask / Zope / Merb / Zotonic might be sure their framework is the greatest ever, and clearly worth a couple of days (or even a couple of hours) of someone's time to get it all configured and get started. However, I just see this giant list of options, each of which is in it's time the 'best thing ever'. How am I supposed to know which one to choose? Getting people started quickly and easily should be priority 1 if you want more users.

EDIT: Oh, one other strength of PHP. Many people when they start want to turn a static website they already have into a dynamic one. This is how I started on PHP, just including fixed headers and footers in a website. Then slightly customised headers which knew which page I was currently on. Then adding cookies to remember what users had already done. Then finally full user support.

In general, one thing PHP excels at adding the '1% dynamic' to an existing static website. However, I don't think this is as big a market as it once was, I don't think that many people learn a lot of HTML and make big static website anymore, then try to add dynamic elements later (or perhaps, I just associate with different people nowadays)

How much PHP do you use Jeff? Lets assume none. How is PHP hurting you? I mean seriously, how much contact do you even have with PHP?

PHP is easy to learn, easy to make websites with. There are a tonne of paying jobs which require PHP. PHP runs a lot of websites.

I am a PHP developer. I prefer Python but my PHP job pays me just fine. There are a lot of things about PHP that I don't like but it gets the job done just fine. You can write reasonable code with PHP. You can write secure code with PHP.

The main people who have problems with PHP are either ex-PHP developers who usually have gone on to Ruby and look back and fire a few shots at PHP. Or people like Jeff Atwood. Undeniably smart and talented programmers who for some reason are irked by the mere existence of PHP.

Please get over yourself.

> build compelling alternatives and make sure these alternatives are equally pervasive, as easy to set up and use as possible.

A bite later:

> We've got a long way to go. [...] The best way to fix the PHP problem at this point is to make the alternatives so outstanding that the choice of the better hammer becomes obvious.

Basically, Jeff just agreed that PHP is simply better than the rest. The problem is that he cannot accept that thanks to PHP anybody can code something pretty fast. I am always amazed when I see my brother, without programming knowledge improving his wife website like gardening. Small changes here and there. End at the end the website is making money. He never complained about the "awfulness of PHP".

You choose a problem that you think PHP can't solve[well]. You solve it using your high level language of choice and I'll solve it using PHP. Let's compare the outcome on reliability, ease of re-factoring, speed, whatever .. then, when it becomes apparent that there is little in the way of difference of the end product let's stop the fucking childishness.

There's a lot of frameworks that make many types of web site or web app development easier than PHP. There aren't any languages that were created explicitly with the goal of being used to create web pages (and later, by extension, web sites). OK, there might be a few that have gone by the wayside (ihtml, htmlos, etc), but nothing mainstream.

PHP is "content-type: text/html" by default, which can be overridden for other tasks. Everything else needs to make some adaptation (however subtle) to 'play' with HTML. Potentially something like mod_ruby or mod_python could take off, but probably not even then, as you'd be worrying about including base library stuff or extra modules, the majority of which are already baked in to PHP (gd, etc).

You have a web page up and just want to add a dynamic copyright date to the bottom? Copyright <?=date("Y");?> and change extension to .php (or play with some mod_rewrite rules on apache). Want to capture the output of every HTML page and rewrite some links (while logging those changes to a db?)? automatically prepend a php ob_start() call then append an ob_get_clean() function in the footer, then process away.

Doing these sorts of things in any other tech stack requires a lot more configuration and meddling, or possibly rewriting core site code. PHP can scale down to be nice additional decoration in a site, or can power the whole thing soup to nuts (and can scale up much easier than some other platforms can scale down).

Related: I recently had a basic site and needed to rethink it in terms of mobile toolkit. It was much easier to take what I had an add in jquery Mobile stuff than it was to work with Sencha (as one example) because other tools like Sencha assumed I was starting greenfield, which I wasn't, and I didn't have time to learn enough of their stack to try to extract the bits I wanted. jQuery made it easy to add the bits I wanted, and PHP does that for HTML/serverside aspects of things as well.

Want to kill PHP? Build alternatives to PHPBB, Wordpress etc that compete on ease of use (incl installing, that means have host gator etc support the language used) and PHP will slowly die out.

  "PHP works great for me! It runs tons of websites! I don't know what you're complaining about..."

If you are into .NET and build .NET sites, then cool. I work with a bunch of WordPress sites and WordPress uses PHP...so that's what I use. Until they decide to switch languages, I'm sticking with PHP. Until then, shut the fuck up and let me work without making me feel like an asshole for not conforming to your way of doing things.

Tools evolve over time and saying screw drivers are useless and everyone should use a battery powered screw driver doesn't change the fact that a screw driver drives screws.

If you don't like the tool move on to other tools or make your own and get people to adopt them. Don't bash the brilliant people who worked hard to make the tool in the first place.

My father is 71 years old and codes in PHP! He was never going to learn python, ruby or anything else but PHP was approachable for him. Provide a language with that low barrier to entry and let's talk. Meanwhile I love my dad but we won't be writing the next google and that's ok by him and I both. If he wants that he'll ask me to write it in COBOL! :-)

  One of the explicit goals of my next project is to do whatever we can to 
  buff up a ... particular ... open source language ecosystem such that it can
  truly compete with PHP in ease of installation and deployment.

I was expecting an elitist diatribe about PHP (because this is perennially popular amongst particular programmers) but that's not what this post is intended to be.

Interestingly Jeff does take the usual potshots at PHP almost like he thinks he'll lose street cred if he doesn't but the basic message I agree with: if you want someone to stop doing something you consider undesirable give them better alternatives.

That being said, I simply disagree with the premise. PHP has a lot going for it:

1. The CGI type model of creating everything, servicing an HTTP request and tearing everything down is a powerful one (and used in Python, Ruby and elsewhere). Once you go stateful (eg Java servlets) you have to worry about resource leakage;

2. PHP has a stateless core of API functions. IMHO this is basically ideal for Web programming given (1). It makes startup/teardown cheap and reduces resource usage (making it cheaper to provide for hosting);

3. Imperative programming is IMHO a natural fit for Web programming. One thing that's wrong with PHP is all the bloated OO mega-frameworks people create on top of it to try and make it Java, Rails, whatever; and

4. Inline code in HTML is a powerful technique. The learning curve for PHP is quite gentle.

So if you want to make a better PHP (something I'd encourage anyone to do rather than simply jumping on the PHP hating bandwagon) you should tick all the above boxes. Of course if you do this, you will probably want to fix some of the following:

- argument order consistency

- API function naming consistency

- default to HTML escaping on output

- effectively default to SQL parameter binding

- no register globals

- and so on

Side note: all of the above is well known. Pointing it out in yet another PHP hating blog post is both pointless and boring.

Jeff also asserts that PHP's popularity is sheep mentality. What nonsense. (1)-(4) above explain it far more than that, particularly the cheap hosting and inline coding.

I like to point out that 4 of the top 20 sites are built using PHP (Facebook, Yahoo, Flickr, Wikipedia) so--like it or not--it must be doing something right.

Homer (Simpson) once said "sometimes the only way you can feel good about yourself is by making other people look bad and I'm sick of making people feel good about themselves". I see a lot of that with (us) geeks but it's just so unproductive and pointless. You don't need to hate on "not X" to justify your choice of "X" (X = Python, Ruby, Lisp, Clojure, Scala, GPU type, phone type, tablet type, camera type, you get the idea).

EDIT: as far as Facebook goes, they didn't "give up" and use HipHop, they decided to have their cake and eat it too. They get the productivity benefits of programming Web pages in a "fit for purpose" language while getting most of the performance benefits of native code and they only had to give up some small subset of PHP to do it.

If you argue the subset thing is a problem try working in any C++ shop where using only a small subset of the language is de rigeur.

- why the lucky stiff

- Packaging in python seems to have been a nightmare up until quite recently. It appears things are a little more sane now that pip is emerging as the new standard but there's still documentation all over the web referencing easy_install. Of course, then there's distutils2 to muddy the waters...

- The Python 2 to Python 3 transition was and continues to be an almighty upheaval. At the moment huge swathes of the python ecosystem have yet to introduce python3 support (e.g. Flask).

- Virtualenv is a fairly ugly hack in itself but even worse than that, trying to move a virtualenv directory somewhere else on the file system turns out to be impossible unless you use another third party tool.

- The python language has no switch statement. I refused to believe it when I first discovered this but it is actually true.

So, two weeks or so in and those are my main gripes thus far. Apart from that, I'm enjoying python. My favourite "python thing" discovered so far is all the cool list iteration syntax.

----

Simplicity: The design must be simple, both in implementation and interface. It is more important for the implementation to be simple than the interface. Simplicity is the most important consideration in a design.

Correctness: The design must be correct in all observable aspects. It is slightly better to be simple than correct.

Consistency: The design must not be overly inconsistent. Consistency can be sacrificed for simplicity in some cases, but it is better to drop those parts of the design that deal with less common circumstances than to introduce either complexity or inconsistency in the implementation.

Completeness: The design must cover as many important situations as is practical. All reasonably expected cases should be covered. Completeness can be sacrificed in favor of any other quality. In fact, completeness must be sacrificed whenever implementation simplicity is jeopardized. Consistency can be sacrificed to achieve completeness if simplicity is retained; especially worthless is consistency of interface.

----

I don't know about you, but IMHO, this is PHP in a nutshell.

Edit: One other little thing I forgot to mention. PHP is like Java in that it is really hard for a metaprogramming or type system nerd to do something tricky and clever that another novice programmer brought in to replace him would not have a chance of unravelling.

And it isn't just a bad programmer thing. PHP's bad habits encourage novice (or uncaring) programmers to pick up bad habits, especially if they are not particularly inclined to study how to use their tools well. Given a language where the obvious thing to do is right vs. one where it's wrong (see PHP < 5 database queries - no prepared statements, mysql_escape_string) vs. an environment where the obvious thing, encouraged by the introductory tutorials, is right, I think that the more correct/safer language will encourage programmers to write better code.

But reading the comments here and on Jeff's post, it is humbling to remember that people are using it, every day, to build more and better software than I ever have. I may have a visceral dislike for the language, but good programmers are able to do good work even with a double-clawed hammer.

I'm pleasantly surprised at the high rates my PHP consultancy work commands; it's obviously helped by the number of hit-it-till-it-works web devs out there.

I am a full time Rails Developer. So here we go...

If you want to produce free-as-in-whatever code that runs on virtually every server in the world with zero friction or configuration hassles, PHP is damn near your only option.

That is the crux of this whole debate summed up in one beautiful sentence. I almost cried.

Until someone builds a better solution, where better includes as easy or easier to setup on than php. Php is going to be the defacto standard.

And for the love of God please don't say well all you have to do install Blub then configure foo server and...

You've already failed to be easier to get started on than with php. And if you want php to go away you have to do just that.

Where do I install Blub? What happens when there are 30 different servers that can run it which one do I pick? Why? What are the trade offs? Version Y is on the website but everyone really uses version X because the the dependencies haven't been up dated to Y yet. And the major framework just had a huge fork/merge/catfight and now its future is uncertain ...

Fuck it I can pay Shithost $5 a month for php and I can toss a few variables in this html <insert wysiwyg editor> crapped out.

Your average person who needs something to show up on a website

and lets be very clear if you want to see php go away these are the people you need to go after

does not care about: - lambdas

- good language design

- namespacing etc,

they don't read Jeff Attwood, Hacker News or any of that.

One thing the php community as a whole has always focused on is ease of getting started. Take Wordpress. The 5 minute install? That gets up an running an allowing me to do what I care about (getting my client's content on the internet) I still use it long after converting to other languages for most development.

If you can't compete with that it does not matter how many templating languages or css precompilers or what the hell ever you got. You don't stand a chance.

TL, DR: Long Story Short. php and its children make it easy to drop in and play. Thats what you are up against. Not language design beauty/ purity or features. Ease of getting started.

Because honestly the only people who care enough to switch are people who care enough to overcome that in other languages.

But yes, we get it, you don't like it. Move the fuck on. These "This is what's wrong with PHP" articles are starting to get redundant... Everyone shouting in to a empty cave that nobody cares about.

Full disclosure: I am an average programmer compared to many here. I come to this site to improve my self and read about what brilliant and amazing things you all do. Now you have a reference.

I use PHP on a daily basis, have been for years. I am a freelance developer who has been able to carve out a living with a lot of hard work and a lot of luck. I just met the right people at the right time. Over the last 7 years since I started developing professionally, I have seen nothing but people shitting on PHP constantly. I am in no way suggesting PHP is a perfect language, but I still never get the hate. It just seems so ivory tower to me sometimes. Let's look at reality.

I'm starting a small project for a client. They are keeping track of all their scheduling and doing all their reporting in excel. They want to move this to the web with basic security so the right people can see the right information with ability to access it from anywhere. That's it. You know what works for that? PHP does. It works fine and it works on almost any server in the entire world with no issues. I don't need a .vimrc file with a million special configurations, I don't need a hot new framework where my time is spent figuring out how to do basic CRUD operations, it won't matter if PHP is statically typed or not, it won't matter if... you get the idea. I just need to start developing and getting this project done so this business can start saving time and money. That's what matters most to me.

PHP works, and it works damn well for millions of situations every day. No one is suggesting you use PHP to build a super computer. If your project requires something different than use something different. PHP is not the "Nickleback" of programming. PHP is useful. PHP is practical. PHP is easy, and that's not a bad thing. Facebook, the biggest site in the world, uses PHP. Think about that.

Finally, let's use his tool analogy. PHP is a double-clawed hammer. What if your job was to remove nails from wood all day? What a wonderful tool a double-clawed hammer would be! You wouldn't have to worry about which way the hammer is facing! That would save you real time and real effort. It's the right tool for that job. Tools are about how you use them. If someone uses a tool incorrectly it's not the fault of the tool.

PHP can use improvement. Every language can. I imagine a meeting of otherwise incredibly smart people sitting around in smoking jackets and sipping fine brandy standing around with smug smiles on their face. "PHP is horrible!" One will say. "Hmmmm... Yes... Quite..." A small laughter emerges. They all pat themselves on the back and enjoy their intellectual circle-jerk. All the while countless developers are using it every day for the right reasons making real applications that help real businesses save real time and real money. Laugh at me all you want, I get Christmas cards from my clients. They like me just fine.

Bjarne Stroustrup

The barrier to entry with any other popular language such as Python or ROR is that's it's hard to just toss a script up and see results.

But which open source language ecosystem? Is he talking about mono? ruby? python? erlang? something else?

Either he thinks it's obvious what he's talking about (hint: it isn't to me) in which case it's probably mono; or he's being deliberately coy and holding back for a big reveal later.

You can't do:

$something->doStuff()[0]

if(empty($something->doStuff()))

Overload fucking functions. Fuck.

What sucks:

The namespace separator.

The naming conventions of the core functions.

The speed.

But, overall it works and elegant solutions can be written.

Also, being competent in a market full of incompetents makes you valuable and getting a well paying job is easy. What's not to like about that?

I wrote a little thing that worked, and then said, "oh wait, this could be a problem with SQL injection, here's how you fix that".

And his response was "umm can you just send me the first thing you wrote".

Quit being so fucking lazy, entitled, and expectfull of silver bullet.

Good tools require maint, they require good environment, they require a modicum of skill and/or effort.

The problem with PHP is not PHP. It is the PHP community. Which is filled (not all) with ignorant, don't wanna learn/understand, minimal effort expending schlubs.

The attitude "I'm a dev shouldn't have to know about sysadim", is fail, is fucked. No, you create a product. Should be aware, if not knowledgeable, of every aspect of that product and the team that creates it.

I agree with Jeff that the way to replace PHP is to create a better alternative. Not just for PHP itself, but more importantly to stuff like Drupal and Wordpress and Magento.

Yet this is isn't happening. Django and Rails are about 7 years old (Python and Ruby both pre-date PHP) and haven't produced any CMS or blog engine remotely comparable in popularity.

How come? Maybe because perception of PHP differs so greatly between people who code and people who write about coding.

We've taken our two-claw hammer and done some fairly nice work with it.

PHP is simple to configure and deploy, I can get a client Wordpress site migrated from my local environment to their server all setup and ready to go in less than 5 minutes. I'm tired of the argument of: "Well, I just use Heroku to push my Python and RoR projects live so your argument is invalid" the real issue here is that the only argument haters of PHP have against it being easy to deploy, is using a third party deployment app like Heroku which costs you money as opposed to being able to push a Wordpress site live via SCP or FTP without paying a cent.

I think when people hate on PHP they're confusing applications like Wordpress or PHP frameworks with the language itself. Wordpress is not PHP, it's an application built on PHP and we all know WP is poorly written but works this isn't the fault of PHP.

Don't like the language? Improve it or shut up. It's like being who complain about the war, but keep voting for the same political party..

Comments for "Adobe confirms it won't support Android" [1] are typical. Achshar writes[2], "I think the problem isnt flash itself but the fact that it's proprietary. This is the reason we have such news in the first place. If adobe drops support, it's dead. No such thing with open stuff. No one entity has all the control. This is where html5 upper leg, no one can suddenly start charging you for using it or dictate it's development."

K, so if being open is what prevents crap, then why are we here talking about PHP? Maybe its that there are too many hands in the cookie jar. Maybe too many people working on fundamental design is the problem.

Whether its A/B testing of choices or how many people should work in a group together – numbers matter. And maybe being too open, rather, too many (different) people working on the same spec, can also be bad as well.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4175399

[2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4176485

One "feature" of PHP that really no other language or platform has touched is the vast amount of pre-existing software that is out there written in it that you can quickly and easily tweak to suit your needs. This is how I got started programming in the mid-to-late 90's as a kid in high school.

There was some auction software written in PHP, and I setup an auction site and spent tons of nights making small tweaks to the software to make it a really cool and fully-featured auction site. Nobody listed a damn thing on the site, of course, but I was hooked.

- Bad habits can be unlearned (I've unlearned enough to know)

- You can go back and learn CS basics

- You can gain an appreciation for well-designed languages and tradeoffs in design

But it is really, really hard to replicate that awesome feeling when you start out with some substantial piece of software and are able to incrementally make it better - making bigger and bigger changes as you learn more and become confident. The fact that so much open-source PHP software exists, the development cycle is so short, and it is so quick and easy to host makes it pretty good for that. Honestly, as much as I like Java now, if I'd started out trying to use it, who knows what I'd be doing now.

As crappy as the language is, it is good enough at a lot of things. You won't "kill" PHP by making a better language any more than you would beat CraigsList by designing a better UI.

The handful of advantages that make PHP popular are also some of its worst liabilities. Yes, you can deploy with just FTP... but then you have upload security to worry about, and have to protect all your library files, and yadda yadda. Yes, you can do SQL right off the bat... but you have to take care of SQL injection yourself. Yes, you can stick your code right in your HTML... as hard to read as that may be. Yes, there's no resource leakage... but every request has to recompile the code and reconnect to your database.

None of these things are problems at first, but they become problems quickly once your software expands beyond two pages or a hundred hits a day. Some of them may not even be obvious problems, but you'll pay the cost anyway when some kid steals your database.

Other platforms, meanwhile, tend to have fairly simple solutions to all of these problems, for the price of a minor increase in upfront learning. But since the problems are all things that happen later on, newcomers will just see that language X is harder.

This poses something of a difficulty. How can other languages introduce the ease of PHP that everyone's demanding? We can't just port exactly the same features over, or we'll have exactly the same problems. mod_python was a bad enough idea that it's dead now. Heroku is a neat thing, but still requires writing configuration files, and nobody enjoys doing that. Nothing is really well-suited for single-page fire-and-forget, either.

I have been thinking about this since writing that damned fractal post, but I'm not clever enough to have thought up a solution yet. So, you know, it would be useful if we could brainstorm on how to fix the learning curve and deployment instead of "just turn everything else into PHP!"

// A Dramatization //

Consider a young developer that knows a bit of PHP and wants to get started on her project. Then she (or "he", or "they" .. whatever) reads HN and finds out that PHP sucks. HN is Mecca to her, so she now spends the next 3 months figuring out that (truly) superior language. She picks whichever framework most HNers are (innocently) promoting at the time.

What she doesn't know is that those karma-gods took their sweet time to figure out 10 other things (== 1000 hours) before using said superior language and framework. It's supposed to be easy, she thinks. She gets frustrated because no-one had told her about those 10 other things. Time is running out on her savings. "I'm not a real hacker", she thinks. She never airs her project.

// End Scene //

Now run the same story, only she doesn't read HN and just codes the thing in PHP. It's actually a pretty cool project and ends up on first page of HN ...

The article would have to show us how to install Python, configure it, get it working on the server, what to upload, how to deal with forms, cookies, etc. I've yet to see this kind of article. I wouldn't mind learning Python for web use, but every book I've seen suggests you just use a framework or has a very small chapter composing of a few pages. Such an article or even a book, would get more people off PHP, if that's what people want. Until then PHP gets stuff done and that's all clients care about, no one cares if I use Windows, Linux or Mac OS X when I work. Granted I'm not a l33t programmer like most on here, I'm just here to learn from better coders.

All I have to do is create a new directory, create a new vhosts file run a few apache commands, reload apache and I'm done. In total, it should take less than a minute to get a directory set up for deployment.

With other languages, they haven't gotten the deployment part down as smoothly as the PHP/Apache experience.

Sure, I can go with Heroku or other IaaS solutions, but I want to run it on my server, I like being able to back up an entire directory that houses all of the sites and projects I'm currently working on, and not have to figure out how to use API's of different services.

Sad and kinda small of them.

I'm willing to win the lottery, mind you, but I'd never waste my time or lower myself down to bashing poor kids.

Is there a simple guide to deploying Python web applications (preferably with Flask)? I know there are quite a few options (WSGI, FastCGI, mod_python), but what is the best way to do it.

I don't do much PHP these days, but PHP has actually added some good stuff in recent years: functions as variables, traits, etc.

Serious question: besides "cred" and just stirring the pot, what is the point of writing a post like this?

As a result, Facebook engineers developed things like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HipHop_for_PHP

Which is an impressive piece of technology, but makes you wonder if Facebook engineers wish their website wasn't written in PHP.

"The best way to fix the PHP problem at this point is to make the alternatives so outstanding that the choice of the better hammer becomes obvious."

That's a terrific point. Alas, it is at the bottom of what is basically another of the "PHP sucks" posts, of which he says we already have too many. And now this comment thread is hip-deep in "Shut up, PHP works fine" posts.

I'm self-taught on Python, and I love it, but as I've moved freelance I've had to learn PHP, and I . . . don't love it. It is what many of my clients use, for reasons that seem good to them, so there you go. I don' enjoy learning it and using it the way I enjoy Python, but as a professional that's Just Too Damn Bad. So I'm kind of with the people irritated by the PHP bitching.

But I wish that Python had those characteristics that make PHP ubiquitous. I'm too new to really state what these are, and I imagine there are some good design reasons for avoiding some of those patterns. But anyone preferring that something like Python or Ruby should see wider adoption has to consider the aspects of PHP that have supported its prevalence, and compete on those aspects.

I am going to guess that Jeff felt the need to critique PHP because he thought there must be some justification for duplicating those functionalities of PHP. I think the community is at a consensus that there isn't, and shouldn't / couldn't be, One True Language, and that it's okay to choose the proper tool for a particular job. And if that's the case, why would it make sense to revise Python or Ruby to duplicate stuff that's already done well by PHP? Why insist that any one language do everything? The best argument would be that PHP gets a lot right, but couples that to a lot it gets wrong. And whether or not that is so drives the question of whether some other language should trouble itself to duplicate the stuff PHP gets right.

It might be enough to say that some people / many people don't like PHP very much and wish that other tools were more prevalent. Among such people, the questions then are: 1) are we just being jerks, is there really that much to be gained by getting away from PHP? and 2) how do other languages have to change (technically, the installed base / trained developer population arguments are beyond this discussion) to compete? And I think the two questions are related. If it isn't hard to make Python as deployable as PHP, then we needn't gain much to make it worthwhile. But if those changes are hard, or they somehow introduce into Python anti-patterns of some kind, or shift the community focus in some negative way, then we would have to see much larger gains to make the shift worthwhile.

I hope Jeff reviews the reaction to this and responds with another post, one that explores why PHP is so frequently adopted. (Again, it's best to put to one side the issues of widespread developer knowledge and default configuration in support of it, if a better alternative is built those things will move.) And, what are the challenges of adapting Python / Ruby / Perl to competing on those technical aspects? And what are the technical / community risks of making those adaptations? At that point I think he's moving the discussion in a much more constructive direction.

Maybe it does suck. You can certainly tell it was not designed by computer scientists. In many ways, it throws away years for programming language best practices.

This being said, what are the practical alternatives? JSP? Servlets? ASP? Python/Django? Ruby/Rails? What?

I am sorry but JSP, Servlets, ASP, Python/Django, Ruby/Rails are just shit of a different kind. But they do not deserve that holier-than-thou aura.

I suggest bad programmers keep blaming their tools for their own shortcomings. I suggest that when bad programmers have produced enough horrors to sully a tool, they blame the tool and move on to the next tool.

Look at this script that uploads a photograph. Every time I see it, it makes me laugh.

I'm not going to argue that PHP is a great language, but the article is a complete disservice to anyone who has bothered to read it. I'm disappointed, but not surprised, that Jeff Atwood linked to it.

Just a few errrors in that article:

> Operators are very fragile in the parser; foo()[0] and foo()->method() are both syntax errors. The former is allegedly fixed in PHP 5.4, but I can’t find mention of a fix for the latter.*

The latter doesn't need a fix because it always worked. Honestly, how hard is it to test that foo()->method() works?

> Objects compare as greater than anything else… except other objects, which they are neither less than nor greater than.

Strict-equals on objects compares the references; but regular equals compares the contents of the objects. Two objects compare equal if the contain exactly the same fields and values. Seems pretty reasonable to me.

> + is always addition, and . is always concatenation.

This is a good thing; JavaScript gets this wrong.

> There is no way to declare a variable. Variables that don’t exist are created with a null value when first used.

Variables that don't exist issue a notice. You can deal with that just like any other error.

> Global variables need a global declaration before they can be used.

Actually there is also the $GLOBALS array for this. I'll agree that's not much a solution. Globals should just not be used; if you want to use static class variables, it's a much better choice with a sane syntax.

> there’s no pass-by-object identity like in Python.

I'm not sure if I understand this but all objects are passed-by-reference in PHP (since 5) and PHP references act appropriately when used as function parameters, etc.

> A reference can be taken to a key that doesn’t exist within an undefined variable (which becomes an array). Using a non-existent array normally issues a notice, but this does not.

An attempt to use the reference will result in a notice but isset() and empty() operate it on it correctly.

> Constants are defined by a function call taking a string; before that, they don’t exist.

You can declare constants in classes and namespaces with the const keyword.

> There’s an (array) operator for casting to array. Given that PHP has no other structure type, I don’t know why this exists.

You can cast scalars to single element arrays and objects to arrays with the same structure. Both are actually very useful.

> include() and friends are basically C’s #include: they dump another source file into yours. There is no module system, even for PHP code.

PHP is interpreted -- namespaces and autoloaders are PHP's module system.

> Appending to an array is done with $foo[] = $bar

This is a good thing.

> empty($var) is so extremely not-a-function that anything but a variable,

Empty is equivalent to the not operator but will also work on undefined variables -- that's why it requires a variable.

> There’s redundant syntax for blocks: if (...): ... endif;, etc.

Useful inside of templates where matching { } is much more difficult.

> PHP’s one unique operator is @ (actually borrowed from DOS), which silences errors.

Sometimes you don't care if a function succeeds; like with the unlink() function which will raise an error if the file you're trying to delete doesn't exist.

> PHP errors don’t provide stack traces.

Not true. Debug_backtrace() will give you a stack trace in an error handler.

> Most error handling is in the form of printing a line to a server log nobody reads and carrying on.

Assuming, of course, the programmer doesn't do anything to handle errors.

> E_STRICT is a thing, but it doesn’t seem to actually prevent much and there’s no documentation on what it actually does.

E_STRICT (or lack of it) is for compatibility with PHP4. When enabled it will "warn you about code usage which is deprecated or which may not be future-proof." -- quote from the manual.

> E_ALL includes all error categories—except E_STRICT.

Unfortunate naming here -- E_ALL is from PHP4 and prior and E_STRICT is all about PHP5. Including it in E_ALL would break PHP4 scripts running on PHP5.

> Weirdly inconsistent about what’s allowed and what isn’t.

This author is confused why syntax errors would be parse errors but logic errors are not.

> PHP errors and PHP exceptions are completely different beasts. They don’t seem to interact at all.

This is sort of true; PHP errors and exceptions exist in different universes but it's easy to unify them and PHP even provides a built-in exception ErrorException to do so. You can turn every PHP error into an exception with 4 lines of code complete with stack traces. You could even turn exceptions into errors but I wouldn't recommend that. PHP supports both procedural and OO programming styles -- this is not a bad thing.

> There is no finally construct

C++ also doesn't have a finally construct. But C++ and PHP support RAII -- class destructors run when the stack is unwound so you can do your cleanup. Finally would be a welcome addition to both languages.

> function foo() { return new __stdClass(); } leaks memory. The garbage collector can only collect garbage that has a name.

PHP is reference counted with a cycle-detecting GC. That would not leak memory.

> Function arguments can have “type hints”, which are basically just static typing. But you can’t require that an argument be an int or string or object or other “core” type

This is true, but it's an ongoing discussion on how to correctly handle scalar type hints. For all the discussion about how PHP isn't designed the author takes issue with the thing they're taking their time on.

> Closures require explicitly naming every variable to be closed-over. Why can’t the interpreter figure this out?

Because of the dynamic abilities of PHP, there is simply no way for the interpreter to ever figure out the variable to close over. The solution is actually a rather simple.

> clone is an operator?!

Of course!

> Object attributes are $obj->foo, but class attributes are $obj::foo. I’m not aware of another language that does this or how it’s useful.

C++ does it. $obj::foo doesn't make any sense, if you're accessing class attributes then you use the class name Class::foo.

> Also, an instance method can still be called statically (Class::method()). If done so from another method, this is treated like a regular method call on the current $this. I think.

Only static methods can be called statically. The other calling methods statically is similar to C++ ... you can call parent class methods explicitly by name by-passing any overriding.

> new, private, public, protected, static, etc. Trying to win over Java developers? I’m aware this is more personal taste, but I don’t know why this stuff is necessary in a dynamic language

This is personal taste not a valid critique.

> Subclasses cannot override private methods.

That is the definition of private methods!

> There is no method you can call on a class to allocate memory and create an object.

You can use reflection to create an object without calling the constructor.

> Static variables inside instance methods are global; they share the same value across all instances of the class

This is the definition of a static property!

> Yet a massive portion of the standard library is still very thin wrappers around C APIs

That is, in fact, the point. PHP is supposed to be a thin scripting language layer over C. It's expanded beyond that. Many of the poor naming conventions are not because of PHP but rather are the exact API of the underlying C library.

> Warts like mysql_real_escape_string, even though it has the same arguments as the broken mysql_escape_string, just because it’s part of the MySQL C API.

Both the C API and PHP have both these functions for backwards compatibility reasons. This entire API is pretty much depreciated with both the mysqli library and PDO replacing it.

> Using multiple MySQL connections apparently requires passing a connection handle on every function call.

Yes, exactly. That's the only way multiple connections could possibly work.

> PHP basically runs as CGI. Every time a page is hit, PHP recompiles the whole thing before executing it.

Unless you use a free code cache like APC. It will eventually be built in. Most people don't need it.

> For quite a long time, PHP errors went to the client by default

If you don't handle your errors, they go somewhere.

> Missing features

Most of these are provided by frameworks just as they are in Python, Ruby, C#, etc.

> Insecure-by-default

Most of these things are now removed from the language after being depreciated for years.

This is clearly not the case. The alternatives are already compelling. They are equal to or better than PHP in every single respect. Yet they are not as widespread. The idea that pointing out the flaws of PHP doesn't help is absolutely incorrect. Demonstrating the flaws of PHP, and the practical impact that has on producing useful software has been very successful for me in convincing PHP users to try something sane. I find only a very small minority of PHP programmers are actually unwilling to try anything else, most of them will give something else a shot if you simply demonstrate why it is in their best interests. Some people certainly get upset when you point out that they are using a bad tool due to ignorance of better tools, but most are able to get over themselves and realize the better tool will make their life easier.

The overall effect of convincing individuals to use better languages is that those alternatives do become as pervasive as PHP. How does someone say "I want the alternatives to be as pervasive as PHP" right after saying "stop trying to make the alternatives as pervasive as PHP" without realizing how ridiculous that is?