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Comment by bigquama | Hacker News Reader

I have to know. Is this a play on the ever-so-popular https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/

Yes it is, good catch. It's even linked under the text "especially at the time" in the post. I probably should have referenced it more prominently, but I thought it was a fun Easter egg under a more subtle link.

As the post mentions, I worked on the DAG (an on-prem IdP implementation) for many years, which was based on simpleSAMLphp. So "PHP: a fractal of bad design" was our other north star after the SAML specs for avoiding critical security issues. I spent many hours poring over that blog post trying my best to avoid PHP bugs.

Here was a fun one that occurred due to PHP's wonky in_array behavior: https://simplesamlphp.org/security/201710-01

Because you asked that, the article is now called "SAML Considered Harmful"

This is one of my favorite articles. I refer back to it whenever the subject of PHP comes up.

Have you kept up with the improvements in the latest PHP versions?

Nobody calls me McGregor the Bridgebuilder.

I have not. As above, I just find the article humorous.

I hope its referred to as "this is the article idiots who know nothing about modern php reference in a futile attempt to make it appear they know what they are talking about" as every time someone mentions that article it seems to be when they want to show everyone how daft they are.

There's a lot of hype-chasing morons who diss old languages without knowing the first thing about them.

You'd be shocked at the number of developers that believe C has no types.

Yeah it's an instant red flag when someone links that outdated article.

Signals their ease to spit out incorrect information with confidence. That has no place in engineering.

I use a 20 year old web framework with an 18 year old build system and it was good the moment it came out. That's 66% of the lifespan of old PHP (its still around) and 181% of the lifespan of modern PHP.

You guys are in an awkward position where you are both the old grandpa and the new kid on the block simultaneously while there are competent middle aged workers around.

"You guys"? lol it's just a tool. I don't identify as "a PHP guy" for the same reason I don't identify as a "Rust guy". And labeling others like that is yet another red flag.

I use many languages. Some more than PHP. But that's besides the point.

I just thought it was funny. But ok.

I've not got a huge amount to appreciation for PHP but I'm not sure it makes sense in 2026 to refer back to an article which suggests Perl with Catalyst as an alternative to PHP with Symfony or Laravel.

I suppose you are more a fan of the histrionic tone of the criticism than anything? In which case, I'm with you there. It's equal to the most unhinged but technically correct rants of Zed Shaw for me.

Same. I toss this link out probably more than any other article reference I've got. I remember the first time I read it very shortly after it was written.

It's a classic that everyone should at least know about and have read at least once.

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