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Comment by Produce | Hacker News Reader

PHP is broken in many little aspects but if you use a high quality framework, it's quite enjoyable to work with. The main gripes I have with it are in the details, like:

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?

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Speed isn't an issue, at least in my experience, compared to similar languages. Raw PHP usually beats Rails handsdown, and most PHP frameworks are usually comparable. PHP performance has increased markedly over the past few years, and particularly in v5.4. And if you really need a speed bump you can use the APC cache or HipHop compiler. Its never going to be as snappy as, say, C, but in the class of languages its in these days it holds it head up high.

I like the namespace separator, but I'll accept I’m in the minority on that one.

I really hated the namespace separator and I ranted against it pretty heavily before PHP 5.3 was released. But I've been using PHP 5.3 pretty heavily for a new project and now I don't mind the backslash at all.

I also understand the technical need for a new character (which doesn't exist for static languages or some other dynamic languages) and once you need a new character then the backslash is a reasonable choice.

I've had to implement a feature in C (it was a batch process analysing some data and spitting out ~250k rows) because it was incredibly slow in PHP. As others have said, Ruby sucks for speed too.

>Raw PHP usually beats Rails handsdown, and most PHP frameworks are usually comparable

Being able to keep up with the slowest competitor in existence isn't very good.

The reason I cited Rails is that its usually proposed as the better alternative in these anti-PHP threads. Most "high" performance PHP doesn't use one of the usual-suspects in the framework world and can easily beat Rails (and usually plain ruby too).

Edit: I should add "in my experience" to the end of that, I have no stats to hand.

>Most "high" performance PHP doesn't use one of the usual-suspects in the framework world and can easily beat Rails (and usually plain ruby too).

If you skip a framework on both languages, they end up as the two slowest languages. Hard to say if either is faster overall, but they are both awful. Using jruby provides a huge performance increase, and PHP really has nothing to compare with that.

To be honest I've not used jruby. It would be interesting to see how it compares to implementations PHP on the JVM such as IBM's WebSphere sMash, and Caucho's Quercus. Do you have any views on the performance of jruby vs hiphop'd PHP?

Hiphop doesn't really compete in the same space, as it only converts a subset of PHP into C++, and has very limited support for various PHP modules. I don't think any of the common PHP apps like wordpress, joomla, etc work under hiphop. Stuff like Quercus is the jruby of PHP, being an actual implementation of PHP rather than a source -> source translator. But I haven't seen any benchmarks showing it actually beating regular PHP. It does have a much better security record than the official PHP though, and is probably a worthwhile project on that grounds alone.

"You can't do: $something->doStuff()[0]"

Yes you can.

"Speed"

Care to expand on this one?

"You can't do: $something->doStuff()[0]" Yes you can. -------------

AFAIK, yes, in PHP 5.4 only so far, which is only about 4 months old. The first 15+ years of PHP's life, no, that wasn't possible. I'm glad it's there now, but frustrated it took so long.

Did not know this!

PHP has array dereferencing, closures, and array short syntax since 5.4.

  $func = function() { return ['a', 'b', 'c']; };
  echo $func()[0];

Nice to hear that they fixed those.

I just read about the new closures. Too bad, scoping is still somewhat broken: You have to explicitly declare the variables you want to use from the outer scope.

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