"I use it for some piddly shit because that's what it's good for."
The bigotry from this community when it comes to PHP has left me sick to my stomach.
The bigotry from this community when it comes to PHP has left me sick to my stomach.
Some of the people who raise the biggest fuss about PHP are also people who never dealt with it (except through Wordpress).
I mostly program in Python these days, but I used PHP for years beforehand without much drama. I even enjoyed it at times. Yes, I do have a Comp Sci bachelors degree and I probably should care more - but I found it a lot more interesting not to have to deal with fiddling around with servers in order to perform my job.
The critiques of the language aren't baseless, but plenty of large startups manage to do just fine with PHP.
TLDR: Languages are meaningless penis measuring contests of the IT world. If you will ship faster and better with language X, go ahead and use it.
Absolutely, by all means, go for it. Godspeed.
> Languages are meaningless penis measuring contests of the IT world.
No they're not, and this is just insulting. I'm only an amateur PL nerd but there are people who have devoted their lives and careers to studying languages and thinking about the differences between them and how to design something practical, consistent, logically sound, beautiful, etc. To brush aside that work as meaningless is pretty narrow-minded. After all, some of that work helped even lowly PHP to stand taller on the shoulders of giants, and make it even possible to be a reasonable tool.
But please, tell me of one, just one, "severe flaw" you find in PHP, as it is today. And I will enter into a healthy debate with you.
I have nothing to say about PHP (because I've never used it) I was reacting to a specific comment in jbm's post, which generalized languages and debates around them. Sorry for derailing the thread from the topic of PHP, and I probably shouldn't have made a little dig with "severe flaw".
The intent was to make it easier for beginners to pick up the language without worrying about technical details like types, but it violates the "fail fast" principle. It might make it easier for beginners to write code that works some of the time, but at a cost of making it harder to write code that doesn't break in surprising ways later. It's not just that automatic coercion exists, but that the behavior is biased toward returning values that don't produce errors. Treating the string "three" as equal to the number 0 is very unlikely to be the desired behavior. Even if not emitting an error is desired, a contagious NaN value would make a lot more sense.
There are certainly ways for an experienced user to mitigate the problem, but beginners don't know them, using them effectively requires discipline and a great deal of production code doesn't use them. The latter problem is cultural, but the language being tolerant of sloppy code naturally attracts people who write sloppy code to the language.
That's clearly nonsense. The people who point out how terrible PHP is have huge, very detailed and very accurate lists of the problems with PHP. They don't get that from "never dealing with it".
>If you will ship faster and better with language X, go ahead and use it.
We do. Why do you think that means we shouldn't point out how bad PHP is? Did you know that for every stubborn dumbass that sticks his fingers in his ears and screams "LALALALA I CAN'T HEAR YOU!", there's an inexperienced developer who didn't know how bad PHP was or why, who was inspired to learn more because of that "PHP bashing" post, and who subsequently saved years of hardship by switching to a sane language? Just because you don't want to hear about how shitty PHP is, doesn't mean nobody else does.
The only legitimate complaints I read as someone who uses an up-to-date version tend to revolve around the wildly inconsistent naming conventions, and a couple of extensions with rather poor documentation. The recent releases (5.3, 5.4) really did a lot to make it just as feature rich as other scripting languages.
If you want to use something else, be my guest. But I for one am tired of the misinformation that PHP bashers spread. I happen to like a language that doesn't get in my way, has extremely thorough documentation, and almost any question is answered in the first search result. At the same time, I hate the lack of documentation on the actual source (I have a few things that are a huge pain to do in user land, so writing a native extension is a huge pain), and of course the wacky parameters and return values on the old functions.
Sounds an awful lot like you are just ignoring the things you don't want to hear. It isn't just that PHP is weakly typed, it is that it has absurd type conversions that no other weakly typed language does, that aren't even consistent, and explicit casts don't serve the expected purpose of forcing the correct type:
"1e1" == "10" => True
$a = "foo"; $b = 0; $c = "bar";
$a == $b => True
$b == $c => True
$a == $c => False
"22 cream puffs" == "22 bullfrogs" => False
"12 zombies" + "10 young ladies" == "22 cream puffs" => True
(string)"false" == (int)0 => True
$ perl -le 'print 07'
7
$ perl -le 'print 08'
Illegal octal digit '8' at -e line 1, at end of line
Execution of -e aborted due to compilation errors.
$ python -c 'print 07'
7
$ python -c 'print 08'
File "", line 1
print 08
^
SyntaxError: invalid token
$ php -r 'print 07;'
7
$ php -r 'print 08;'
0
$ perl -le '$foo = 1; print(($foo == 1) ? "uno" : ($foo == 2) ? "dos" : "tres");'
uno
$ php -r '$foo = 1; print(($foo == 1) ? "uno" : ($foo == 2) ? "dos" : "tres");'
dos
These are not problems that are fixed in recent versions of PHP. They are not misinformation. If you want to revel in your ignorance, feel free. But don't expect the rest of the world to tip toe around the facts to avoid inconveniencing you with reality.
Well that's the biggest piece of bullshit I've ever seen spewing out of someone's keyboard here on HN. I've been developing in PHP pretty much since it came out. At least, since it was stable/useful enough for people other than Rasmus to use. I've been using it for so long that I absolutely hate it. The inconsistencies, the "bolted-on" OOP, the amount of time I'm just sitting there scratching my head wondering where the fuck my data went to, and not even being able to test the thing since there's no good testing libraries built for PHP. It's all a confusing mess that I refuse to even be paid for at this point.
Often, the best tool in web software is the one you can get the most/cheapest labor for so you can actually get your product completed and on the market.
No one cares if your software is programed in the latest tech with the very best techniques - all they care about is if your business is viable. PHP fills this niche excellently.
As a developer I make my living off PHP. I'd rather play with nicer languages, but frankly that isn't where the money is where I am.