Hacker News Reader

HNHacker News

Top New Best Ask Show Jobs

Comment by lhorie | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

lhorie·

Agreed. Fwiw, many of the complaints apply to other "better" languages also:

- PHP has inconsistent naming of built-in and library functions. - C has types like int, size_t, jmp_buf and FILE

- PHP performance is abysmal without caching - MRI Ruby is pretty slow too

- Functions are case insensitive - Lisp anyone?

etc etc

The whole meme of PHP warts seems more like an exercise in confirmation bias than objective analysis.

View on HN

Yeah, but if we continue that logic and fill up that "etc etc" it would seem that the other languages have their own bad features and PHP combines them all.

That "all" is what I'm referring to when I mentioned confirmation bias. PHP programs don't segfault when you have a typo. You don't have macro expansion problems. It's not particularly verbose. Most languages have a ton of issues. Imho, the stuff in the PHP list is pretty minor compared to some of the warts in some other languages.

Yeah, the minor details of PHP don't really matter. It's the whole language and ecosystem when viewed as one that is really repulsive. It's also difficult to write good code, because there are no abstraction mechanisms.

Well, there's one -- Java-style OO. But incidentally, Java is almost impossible to use for the same reason.

I'm curious why you think the ecosystem contributes to the bad rep. If anything, I think that's one thing PHP has going for it. In general, yes, seasoned programmers who are new(ish) to PHP tend to have a bit of a NIH-based bias against the frameworks, but you gotta admit that other languages simply don't have the one-click-install-everything-you-will-never-need sort of thing that Fantastico or whatever gives you.

>> Well, there's one -- Java-style OO. But incidentally, Java is almost impossible to use for the same reason.

Tiobe begs to differ :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com