Dispelling the hate against PHP | Hacker News Reader

Dispelling the hate against PHP

blog.someguy123.com

12 pointssomeguy123312 comments

It took me some time using PHP to realize it wasn't as bad as its bad rep had lead me to believe.

It's old, it has been through a lot of changes, most of them great improvements (although leaving some ambiguities behind, I admit) and it's so wildly popular on the web that the amount of disastrous coding and outdated information spread is a mess to deal with and discourages a lot of people who take software development seriously.

Personal Home Pages has its original purpose stated on its name and it used to be something you wouldn't want to be endorsing on a multi billion USD web service with millions of users.

Yet, PHP has become much more than a language for adding some cool web forms, a guest book and some other dynamic content on amateur home pages uploaded to shared hosting services.

We still have a hard time taking seriously any programmer who starts saying (s)he codes on PHP. Many of them can run in circles around me and any other developer any time with their skills, and I don't think their language of choice should have any impact on the judgment we do on their abilities or the quality of the software they build.

I still prefer many other languages over PHP but now I see them as just preferences (sometimes more or less appropriate, depending on the context), not better or worse choices.

Let the kids fight over which language is the coolest, I just want to get the work done.

Putting aside all the horrible choices the language designers made (hellishly inconsistent naming, no proper exception usage by the standard library functions, functions are not first-class citizens, etc etc etc), the one thing that truly makes PHP revolting are the majority of people who write PHP code. And by the way, if PHP is the only language you know, chances are -- you're one of those developers. The community is so uniquely bad, I ofter wonder if PHP's language design actually has something to do with it.

Python/Ruby community is much different.

Elitism and an unwillingness to consider the benefits of other languages or the rationale of those who use them is a problem present in many communities. Only knowing PHP is much different than refusing to know anything but PHP.

You don't hate PHP because it doesn't have sexy peripheral utilities like other contemporary language hipsters do. You hate it because it's a badly designed language/runtime/standard library. And it's not getting any better although it had had ample time to do that.

This has been my go-to link when trying to explain what's wrong with PHP: http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-de...

Yes, and everyone who posts that in a thread about PHP seems to think that they're the first one ever to do so.

And we would all like to thank you for your continued " I have opinion x and don't change it when confronted with new information" contribution of showing issues with the programmer and instead of the language.

There's something to hate in all programming languages but hate can almost be seen as a popularity metric.

You are absolutely right:

https://wiki.theory.org/YourLanguageSucks

It's insecure by the language design, not from the framework itself.

When I pen test PHP custom-built sites, I almost always find a dozen high-severity security defects.

Many of the popular PHP-MySql tutorials on the web have sql injection bugs, not a good way to learn a new language.

Although, any decent framework should take care of most of those issues. It wouldn't for instance, be using the mysql functions at all, or something like md5 for hashing passwords, or not escaping user data by default (three common issues I can think of off the top of my head..)

Not saying PHP is secure by any means, but it can be implemented securely - it just isn't very often.

That said, if there is an argument to be made for PHP, i'm afraid to say, I don't think the linked article does a good job of making it. While I think its suggestion that PHP has evolved beyond some of the common criticisms against it might have merit, it doesn't address that the bulk of PHP code in the wild most definitely has not.

It's definitely unfortunate that PHP code in various websites across the web is designed horridly, it's also sad that we're unable to fix most things in PHP e.g. the needle-haystack problem, without destroying compatibility. HHVM has done a decent job at cleaning it up with Hacklang, but some of these legacy issues we're going to be dealing with for a long time.

PHP is evolving, many sites on the web are too. But legacy codebases are here to stay, I mean look at how many sites are still on classic ASP.

PHP was one of my first programming languages so I will defend it, the ecosystem is much cleaner than it was a few years ago, and it's still the easiest to deploy language IMO.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com