If you where in the pub and someone spent some time listing the virtues of the pint they where drinking, and then someone joined in the conversation and called it disgusting with no basis .. wouldn't you find that to be odd behavior?
And hell, the fact that people have that opinion stems from somewhere. And that is a fact we should all take a note of -- to build better tools. You see, PHP is nothing but a tool, and as a tool, it's not very liked one due to it's flaws. Solution? Abandon it! Build new, better tools instead of feeling threathened.
Le PHP sink and die it's well deserved death and make way for better tools, because professionals shouldn't feel attached to their tools, instead they should be critical towards them and look to find better ones.
"it's not very liked one due to it's flaws", PHP is very well liked, just not by everyone .. which goes for most things in life.
If you really need it, here's a very good write-up which should cover that in an impressively detailed manner:
http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-de...
He has updated the article over time which is good of him, but much of it is still subjective and from a quick glance there are points that no longer hold true.
http://forums.devshed.com/php-development-5/php-is-a-fractal...
But from a glance, it looks like the one writing the rebuttal didn't really understand the criticism, and is himself 100% captured by the exact mindset which the original article criticized PHP for having.
This guy is the one who will be standing at the door complaining that you just broke his house. He is what is wrong with PHP.
And naturally, however much sense he thinks his argument makes, it will still be wrong. It's in the very nature of this situation.
But we need to actually move away from using bad tools (and this has happened with PERL) and start using the newer, better tools more often. Every software developer should learn some Erlang (or Elixir), some Clojure, some Go, etc.
If you don't try these tools out and kick the tires for a while, then you end up stuck in the past like all those COBOL programmers.
But is it solving more problems than it creates?
Clojure isn't new. Not to take a dig at Rich Hickey, but everything he is doing with immutable objects was done more than a decade ago by the likes of Henry Baker (http://home.pipeline.com/~hbaker1/home.html). Of course, everything that has ever been tried at all has been tried in some variant of Lisp/Scheme at one point in time.
Stop while you're behind. Nobody believes that Henry Baker's papers are equal to what Rich Hickey has done with immutable objects. Geez, get a grip on reality man.
Where will Perl 6 sit when/if it becomes something you could realistically use? Would you classify it as one of the bad tools or a newer, better one?
Efforts are being made to clean it up, but for a language to ever end up in a place with that sort of library functions is a pretty big red flag.
At the time it was reasonable .. but PHP evolved and learned lessons, it didn't just stop there as you seem to be saying.
Why is exposing a C library's functions and their names PHP's fault?
[1] http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/mysql-escape-string.h... [2] http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/mysql-real-escape-str...
And that's why it's impossible to build frameworkless PHP code that is elegant, something that even the designed-in-10-days javascript lets you do.
Still, i like php for its getting things done mentality. What it lacks in elegance it makes up for in productivity.
I stand by my comment. I can see why people like PHP but nobody in their right mind should deny that it is a mess and that it was constructed haphazardly.