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Comment by stevencorona | Hacker News Reader

Wrong! Nope!

PHP OO is screwed up and hacked together. Look at crappy support for late static binding, being unable to bind $this in closures, and all of the hack-glue that is get_class(), get_class($this), get_called_class(), self:: vs static::, the list goes on.

The thing is that, with PHP, the "new, modern" features are only surface deep... once you do anything slightly advanced, you can always tell that they were hacked on to a language that was never meant for anything more than 'include counter.php', and maybe that's okay, but stop saying it's a real programming language because it's NOT.

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but stop saying it's a real programming language because it's NOT.

Any definition of "real programming language" that can inexplicably exclude the Facebook stack is just meaningless. Saying that another stack could do it better is pointless since PHP is what does it. And just to preempt any "HipHop is the stack, not PHP", just remember that front-end Facebook engineers don't write C++, they build Facebook in PHP, inconsistent parameter orders and all.

Does everyone think the facebook stack is just built from PHP, there is a boatload of C etc too. Don't forget they have HipHop which makes thier PHP a little non-standard. Also they have a MASSIVE legacy codebase I presume so just swapping out to something might not be justifiable despite how much they wish they could.

Ok, I'll fall for this one. Tell me what a real programming language is (in a bulleted list prefferabily).

My guess is that what GP considers a "real" programming language is a language that tries to solve at least one problem some of the other programming languages have, instead of incorporating pitfalls that most other languages avoid in order to make programming accessible to everyone.

What do you think PHP did when it came out exactly?

Could you be a little bit more specific?

What is crappy about the late static binging support for example?

Btw, you can bind and rebind $this as of PHP 5.4.

Still solving problems...

Just cause I can solve problems in BASH doesn't meant that it's a real, modern language.

http://bashlib.sourceforge.net/

Actually it does make it real. It may not be popular or modern or the best tool for solving a particular task, but it isn't any less real than the real languages: C, C++, Java, Objective-C, C#, Python, Ruby, JavaScript. Even http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainfuck is a real language - it sure is restrictive and impossibly hard to use for nearly all projects. Let's not use the word 'real' in this discussion. It seems unnecessary and quite frankly, fanboy-ish

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