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Comment by sedev | Hacker News Reader

Life is too short to read another half-hearted defense of a terrible language. This author lost me when he started out by only acknowledging the critiques of PHP that he could handwave away. If he actually had a coherent response to "Fractal Of Bad Design," that would be something worth reading on its own.

To the author: doesn't the fact that you have to point out all of these things to avoid say something to you about core issues with the language?

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Only 1 paragraph deals with PHP's reputation, the rest is geared towards those who actually want to learn PHP and/or improve their skills.

To you: doesn't the fact that you myopically dismissed the entire article due to a single paragraph say something about you? Why are you looking for a flamewar where one doesn't exist?

I get it -- you don't like PHP. That's your prerogative, and you're of course entitled to it, but this article isn't just another skirmishing ground for the flamewar that is "PHP SUCKS" vs. "NO IT DOESN'T". Rather, it looks to me to be more of a braindump from a PHP dev looking to enlighten new PHP devs with what he's learned.

Is that so patently offensive to you that you have to attempt and interject the played-out flamewar that is now a decade old?

>Only 1 paragraph deals with PHP's reputation, the rest is geared towards those who actually want to learn PHP and/or improve their skills.

Do we really expect the language elitists to actually read articles now? Just say something bad about PHP here and you'll get 20 instant upvotes. We're getting as bad as reddit here.

As someone who uses PHP, I found this article very enlightening.

No. Fact is, the language is used by a lot of people who have no clue what they're doing. This article is not for them. Come to think of it, it's not for you either. It's for people who use PHP with some degree of competence.

I think PHP is to a large degree a victim of its own success. The runtime's ubiquity means that a lot of very incompetent people are fiddling around with things they don't understand. If you look at, say, PHP-related questions on Stack Overflow, you'll notice they are of extremely low quality that have nothing to do with PHP itself, but have everything to do with the person behind them not understanding the simplest things about programming.

Simply put, the strength of PHP is also it's greatest failure. It's got a very low barrier for entry, but a very high learning curve for doing things correctly (efficiently, securely, etc...).

I know I've fallen into many of the traditional PHP traps simply due to what I call language laziness. "Why do it this way when the other way is so much faster". PHP allows you to do quite a few things wrong very quickly.

I'm a closet PHP fan, but not compared to "better" languages like Python.

> a very high learning curve for doing things correctly

What? Can you give a single example?

Zend Framework.

No one with any sort of ability uses the Zend Framework. It's a piece of shit.

Try tell that to my product guys. They are doing things properly from the business side of the story. But yea, it's a piece of shit.

Give some examples as to why.

To your half-hearted comment: show me a language where an unexperienced programmer can't create security issues, bugs, memory leaks and so on.

The author is just giving some good advice to PHP programmers. If you don't like it, just don't read it.

I agree that the vast majority of PHP code is terrible and that the language itself is full of annoying flaws but take a look at Symfony 2 if you care to. It's a well architectured framework which uses best practices borrowed from other languages/frameworks and ends up as something coherent, well designed, reliable and a pleasure to work with.

> a coherent response to "Fractal Of Bad Design,"

There have been numerous responses already that debunk many of the claims presented there. Suffice it to say, you came to this with your mind already made, and nothing is going to change it.

So, why bother?

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