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PHP is actually a pretty nice language.

No it isn't.

It could have been, if the people who created it had known what the hell they were doing. And it has gotten a lot better in recent years (for example register_globals has actually been removed from the language now), but where they started from was so mind-numbingly stupid that I don't see how they could ever make it actually good, without also breaking it in ways that would make everyone stop using it.

Here's a general rant about how stunningly awful PHP is: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/06/the-php-singularity.html

And here's a specific and detailed side-by-side comparison between PHP and Perl: http://www.tnx.nl/php.html

But you're spot-on about the "meta problem": most people who write in PHP have no idea what they're doing, so most PHP code out there is badly written, so if you're learning the language, there's a very good chance that you're learning from someone who didn't know what they were doing.

http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/ http://tnx.nl/php.jpg http://www.quora.com/PHP/Why-is-PHP-hated-by-so-many-developers It's a bad horrible language, and why should I or anyone else be forced to use it.

I believe he's talking about this.

I don't know VB that well, but PHP has plenty of genuine headaches within it: http://www.tnx.nl/php.html

So yes, while you can write decent programs in PHP, most good programmers (i.e. the ones who understand the problems) don't want to. Even accounting for good programmers who don't have a choice, you end up with a disproportionate amount of the underskilled in the remainder.

Will the people who made PHP a good programming language please fork it and take it away from the clueless morons who have taken over?

As a Perl programmer, I have to laugh at your suggestion that somebody ever made PHP a good programming language. Read this and this.

It's good that there's a programming language out there that Perl Programmers can laugh at...

Will the people who made PHP a good programming language please fork it and take it away from the clueless morons who have taken over?

As a Perl programmer, I have to laugh at your suggestion that somebody ever made PHP a good programming language. Read this and this.

Oh, they've been at it for a while now ;)

It's not the lack of modules that people complain about. PHP is excessively convenient, if nothing else. :)

So because I said I've been using PHP for 8 years, that is conclusive evidence that I don't know any other languages? Great line of thinking, pal.

PHP in contrast to Perl

PHP in contrast to Perl

I'm making the assumption that you're talking about creating a database-driven website that's going to need a lot of the CRUD functionality that web dev frameworks facilitate; if this isn't true, the answer is probably "none of the above".

Given that: hand-coding PHP to do this kind of site is almost certainly going to be a painful mistake. You're either going to end up reimplementing your own web development framework, or repeating yourself a huge amount and generating error-ridden and unmaintainable code. Especially if you're going to go with a PHP-based solution, you want to use some kind of framework to minimize the amount of code you have to write. (PHP is, after all, training wheels without the bike :) ).

I'm leery of CakePHP; it's written in PHP 4, which pretty much guarantees bad coding practices. (Oh, you wanted /objects/? Ha!) I've had very positive results with symfony, as several others have mentioned. One thing in particular that it has that's been super-handy is, in addition to scaffolding à la Ruby on Rails, the ability to generate highly customizable "admin" interfaces on the fly, based on a configuration file. This makes interface creation more declarative than programmatic, which IME does wonders for maintainability.

• Arguments and return values are extremely inconsistent
• PHP has separate functions for case insensitive operations
• PHP has inconsistent function naming
• PHP has no lexical scope
• PHP has too many functions in the core
• PHP lacks abstraction and takes TIMTOWTDI to bad extremes

Yes, the function naming in php is crap. Show us a scripting language where it isn't.

Perl, for one.

To summarise:

• Arguments and return values are extremely inconsistent
• PHP has separate functions for case insensitive operations
• PHP has inconsistent function naming
• PHP has no lexical scope
• PHP has too many functions in the core
• PHP lacks abstraction and takes TIMTOWTDI to bad extremes

Which all adds up to one thing: PHP is a simple language that's actually rather hard to program in. Or maintain.

• no first-class functions (and no, create_function does not count)
• no usable object-model (check out response of developer below!)
• no namespaces
• problems with recursion
• general problems with consistency
• countless other horrible mis-designed "features" (not even starting on the security problems)

PHP is an oddity -- the syntax is okay, and since PHP5 it actually has some nice features like interfaces that move it toward an optional-static-typing model.

Shitty as PHP's syntax is, it's still better than perl's.

[...] if you know what you are doing.[...]

Quit with this "no such thing as a bad programming language, there are bad developers" bullshit. If a language encourages bad practices with an inconsistent, badly designed library and dubious features, then it is the fault of the language. Add in the poor tutorials (including most of those in printed books and on Zend's own website), and you've got a bad language made worse by ignorance. You ask where the articles are about good PHP apps and programmers. They don't exist, as most large scale web apps are written in Java - see this UKUUG paper for some reasons why. PHP lowers the barrier for getting a simple web app up and running, but it simply should not be used for anything large scale. The language is poorly designed, and poorly implemented (check out the number of vulnerabilities on bug tracking sites that are attributable to PHP itself rather than just the apps written with it).

You can't really say PHP is better than Perl.

See http://tnx.nl/php for a great comparison.

Fun in work is a "nice to have", but it's hardly required or such. And no matter what the job is, most of the time something ends up sucking - if it's not the job itself, then it's some a-hole coworker, or retarded boss, or workplace politics or something else.

Personally, I'd go for the .NET job. He already knows the technologies, there is far more employment in that field, the experience looks good on a resume, it's a really nice set of technologies to work with - a set of nice languages, excellent dev tools, a good framework and all (.NET 3.0 went final a couple days ago - lots of very cool and exciting stuff like WCF and WPF!) It's in a larger place (likely more "stable" than some startup or small shop - job security), and to top things off, it pays more (likely better benefits too)! Sounds like a no-brainer to me. I have no idea how he could possibly prefer junk like PHP (see http://tnx.nl/php) as it sucks horribly.

Even if the job isn't like going to a party every morning, that ~50% more can pay for a fun trip down south or something (fun), and also pay the mortgage/credit cards faster, put money aside, etc. Total no-brainer.

Since every version of php breaks compatibility somewhere, how hard would it be to rename all functions to maintain consistency in php6 or 7?

PHP has got to be the most inconsistent language out there. Check out this list

        * Arguments and return values are extremely inconsistent
        * PHP has separate functions for case insensitive operations
        * PHP has inconsistent function naming
        * PHP has no lexical scope
        * PHP has too many functions in the core
        * PHP lacks abstraction and takes TIMTOWTDI to bad extremes

PHP takes care to keep things consistent

You could have fooled me. PHP has one of the least consistent libraries of any programming language ever created.

Yes, maybe this explains why many people think that PHP sucks?

That said, I still like to use PHP for the 'quick hack' weekend projects as much as the next guy, but I really wouldn't recommend building serious applications with it. Although it certainly can be done, it's much more of a pain to build well-designed software using PHP than, well, basically any other programming language I could come up with (except Visual Basic or Brainfuck maybe ;)

Apart from a google search for "PHP sucks", here's a few I have bookmarked:

1. Experiences of Using PHP in Large Websites - PHP suffers from "oversimplification leading to excessive complexity".
2. What I don't like about PHP - a general shopping list of complaints.
3. "PHP IN CONTRAST TO PERL" - How PHP is a mess and Perl does more with less.
4. List of PHP's shortcomings from perl.advocacy
5. Re^2: Is Perl a good career move? on PerlMonks

I noticed that, despite your diatribe, you never actually said that the grandparent was wrong.

The original poster has a point. I can think of a number of language features that were just plain bad ideas.

1. Providing an inconsistant programming environment, based on INI settings. This exacerbates the next two problems.

2. Having register globals turned on by default. First "fixed" in php.ini-recommended for PHP 4. Later fixed in php.ini-dist for PHP 4.2. Scheduled for removal from the language in PHP 6.

3. Having magic quotes GPC turned on by default. First "fixed" in php.ini-recommended for PHP 4. Scheduled for removal from the language in PHP 6.

4. Lack of a good database abstraction layer shipped with PHP. Although dbx and Pear DB both ship with PHP, neither is that commonly used. dbx due to being disabled by default; Pear DB due to its slowness. This is fixed in PHP 5.1 with the addition of PDO. Unfortunately, this is a case of too little, too late, as anyone who writes things for multiple DBs already uses ADODB or hand-rolls their own abstraction layer (coughphpBBcough).

Rather than waiting for a perl programmer to come along and post this url, I will: PHP in contrast to Perl. I know very well that this is slanted against PHP, but that doesn't make a lot of the comments in it any less true. Particularly since PHP 1 was written in Perl 5.

This moron is defending PHP, which was spawned FROM Perl, borrowing the worst parts of the language, and ditching everything decent, like, LEXICALLY SCOPED VARIABLES, Unicode support, standard naming conventions for builtin functions, etc.

Someone who has "skipped Perl entirely" while using PHP, certainly needs to check their head.

For any doubters:
http://tnx.nl/php
http://czth.net/pH/PHPSucks

PHP - training wheels without the bike indeed.

anyone can tell me if this is to be taken seriously, or rather seen as worthless php-bashing?
http://tnx.nl/php

...God kills a kitten.

But seriously, I understand if someone wants to use PHP, their choice (of masochism). But why on earth would you want to use PHP and Perl together? Perl is clearly a better language, so why don't you use Perl by itself? You'd get rid of the useless interfacing and the idiocy that is PHP.

Admittedly PHP sucks, but isn't comparing it to BASIC a little harsh?

Sure, it's easy to write crap code in PHP if you don't know what you're doing. It's considerably harder to write crap code (that actually works) in C if you don't know what you're doing. So everyone should use C, so people who don't know what they're doing can't write code? I don't think so.

If you do know what you're doing, you can mostly use good design and practices in PHP - not as well as other languages like Perl (and I assume Ruby and Python), but a hell of a lot better than BASIC which, if I remember correctly, doesn't support local variables, short-circuit evaluation, passing arguments to subroutines and returning values, and plenty of other things I can't think of at the moment - let alone OOP. PHP at least tries. On top of that, languages like PHP have functionality built-in or readily available to deal with things like XML, databases and network I/O, so you don't have to write all of that code yourself.

I'm thinking anyone who compares PHP to BASIC either doesn't know BASIC, or doesn't know PHP.

is this one.

I'm not trying to troll, but if you do need a scripting language for more than a "Personal Home Page" then you're essentially better off using Perl, Python or Ruby.

(Just for the record, I'm telling this while having advanced knowledge in PHP, Perl and Python and intermediate in Ruby)

"But the link you posted has this following code: mail("ideirj@szerver.hu", "Hibabjelentes", $message, "From \"$_POST[nick] It clearly allows posted data in the header."

The reason I underlined the necessity of hungarian because the author of the post clearly underlines, that only the body of the email was non-hardcoded.

Thanks for providing me the link I've already included in one of my parent posts already, but as I've said the bug is in PHP which was even reported to the authors, because if the from, to and subject fields are hardcoded, PHP still allows sending multiple emails!

Let's see, with hardcoded to, from, subject values, how is it not a PHP bug if multiple emails can be sent with a specially crafted body? I'd _expect_ no less than binary level operation, so even if I assign a binary file to that body, the mail() function should still send it properly and ONCE.

The sad truth is that aside from security issues PHP is a very badly designed language.

With a manual as clear, conside and accessable as PHP's, who cares?

I haven't looked at the PHP docs for a while now, but one Perl programmer made up a table of PHP functions that even PHP programmers find useful! That page also has a *lot* of good comparisons to Perl. It's amazing how much baggage PHP has accumulated over the years.

http://tnx.nl/php
* Re^2: Is Perl a good career move? by Juerd, 2005
o Still no namespaces
o No closures, not even anonymous functions
o No good HTML parser
o No easy MIME builder
o No good WWW library
o No CPAN
o No arrays
o Less useful logical operators
* Yaywoo! by Dave Brown, 2004
o No way to avoid the (unsafe) shell with system()
o XY-problem
o Huge proliferation of different functions to do more-or-less the same thing with minor variations
o Second parameter and return value make no sense
o Bad spelling in function names
* Why PHP sucks by Edwin Martin, 2004
o Bad recursion support
o PHP is not thread safe
o PHP is crippled for commercial reasons
o No namespaces
o Non-standard date format characters
o Confusing licenses
o Inconsequent function naming convention
o Magic quotes hell
* Perl vs. PHP - octo's subjektiver Vergleich by Florian Forster, 2003 (German)
o Perl is faster than PHP
o Perl is more versatile than PHP
o Perl has better documentation than PHP
o PHP lacks support for modules
o PHP's here-docs are useless for Windows users
o PHP lacks a consistent database API
o PHP dangerously caches database query results
o For graphics, PHP is practically limited to GD
* I hate PHP by Keith Devens, 2003
o Idiotic call-time pass-by-reference deprecation
* Experiences of Using PHP in Large Websites by Aaron Crane, 2002
o PHP promotes interweaving presentation with business logic
o Not having namespaces causes problems
o Global configuration with php.ini
o Oversimplification leads to excessive complexity
* PHP Annoyances by Neil de Carteret, 2002
o No real references or pointers
o No idea of namespace
o No componentization
o Wants to be Perl, but doesn't want to be Perl
o No standard DB interface
o All PHP community sites are for non-programmers
o No chained method calls (Not true anymore --tnx.nl)
o No globals except by importation
o Both register_globals and $_REQUEST bite
o Arrays are hashes
o PEAR just ain't CPAN
o Arrays cannot be interpolated into strings
o No "use strict" like checking of variable names

one site to explain it all

Any particular reason why PHP is better than Perl with HTML::Mason? That's what I'm using with my site now, mainly because Perl wipes the floor with PHP, imho (where are the labelled blocks?? no, i don't want to uglify things with a function wrapper). Also, the people in PHP IRC channels seem to be, um, wankers, for some reason. :-)

Sounds like Javascript is being turned into a client-side version of PHP. Do we need another version of PHP?

PHP is server-side, so this is a completely stupid comparison. "Do we need another...?" On the client side, JavaScript is pretty much all we've got, so yeah, if we want more client-side functionality, JavaScript is the place to put it.

Besides, PHP is a terrible language. Sure, it's a lot nicer than C, and people with no background in either C or UNIX find it initially less confusing than Perl (which borrows a lot from both C and UNIX conventions), and the php.net documentation is very nicely presented. But here's why PHP sucks. Personally I find JavaScript's syntax for, say, handling regular expressions to be far less awkward and confusing than PHP's. JavaScript feels much more consistent to me.

PHP is seductive because it does let relatively inexperienced users generate dynamic content without too much of a learning curve. But from the description you give I think you are part of a very small minority of PHP developers at the other end of the spectrum.

My own PHP experience is more like this. Perhaps that's because I had come from Perl, and as this comparison makes clear the two certainly don't have the same ideas about how builtin functions should be designed.

As it evolves, PHP isn't solving the higher-level problems. It is merely reinventing functions, object models, and syntax. Zend's focus on things that real users don't care about may reflect that as well.

For example, PHP makes it trivially easy to insert dynamic content here and there into a page. If you want to separate business logic from presentation, which is almost manditory on a large site, you will want some sort of templating package. You will have to write your own. This is a common need, why shouldn't the core language address it? Because they are too busy reinventing object oriented programming?

Every now and then I get a (7 month?) itch to have a closer look at PHP, usually something turns me right off it, like the following:

PHP in contrast to Perl
Python vs PHP

Unless a special purpose language has really good reasons putting it head and shoulders above a general purpose language for a given task, I'll go the general purpose route. I have yet to see the reasons for using PHP stack up to more than 'it handles sessions etc for you' and 'its what every web host offers'. That may be reason enough for some for sure.

I've set up the odd PHP command-line app to do things other than munge web pages, and found that for anything longrunning, you have to edit or override a setting in php.ini that specifies the HTTP timeout, so it won't timeout your PHP system daemon/batch job processor. Aside from the rest, somehow that tells me everying other than 'web monkeywrench' was an afterthought.

modded as a troll? come on! PHP is for cretins writing forums. There's a message in each of the PHP guides, and that message is "Stay Away".

PHP
sucks
dog balls.

it's a cretinous language for inbreds.

So there you have it PHP sucks in comparison to perl, because some guy on the internet says so. Now aren't you glad you stuck with your arcane-obfuscated-gibberish parser?

It's the right season, right climate, right time for a holy war!

I'll start the easy way, by abusing someone elses article: http://tnx.nl/php.

now don't get me wrong, i'm not bashing php. i use php all the time and it is a pretty straightforward tool and quite easy to pick up. the inevitable problem with trying to reform a language is that you need to "break" it in order to fix it

In the movie "City Slickers" Jack Palance's character quips that the secret to life is just one thing, and once you know what that one thing is, everything else makes sense. I'm beginning to think that programming languages are the same way. The "one thing" about Visual Basic was introducing components. Perl's one best thing is powerful reporting capabilities. Python's contribution is namespace (just type 'import this' into the interpreter for an easter egg's explanation).

PHP's "one great thing" seems to be initial ease of use. It's dead simple to install, the php website's documentation is second-to-none, and it's relatively painless to cut-and-paste code inside HTML to make stuff work. My problem, however, is the same complaint I have with the Windows operating system: PHP is impossible to master, because it's becoming too broad with too many functions and too many special cases.

According to http://tnx.nl/php there are 3079 core functions in PHP4 (as of november 2003), compared to 206 in perl.

3079? That's just seems insane to me.

According to http://tnx.nl/php there are 3079 core functions in PHP4 (as of november 2003), compared to 206 in perl.

PHP is a terrible language. It is horribly inconsistant. It has no namespaces. It encourages mixing design and presentation.

This has a well-reasoned explanation as to why PHP sucks, and some links:

php in contrast to perl

To be fair to PHP though, it does have (had?) the advantage of a smaller memory footprint, and I gather that a lot of ISPs feel more comfortable about letting random users loose with it rather than giving them access to mod_perl.

ObOnTopic: I'm mildly annoyed at the author of the article proudly proclaiming that PHP is the "P" in LAMP. That "P" has a number of interpretations.

Though in general LAMP is a really lousy piece of terminology. People use it to mean "free/open source web technology" when it's far too specific about software names. Someone who uses FreeBSD and a Postgresql database evidentally doesn't qualify... but if Postgresql would change it's name to MostGreatSql, then all of a sudden it would be allowed in the club...

This has a well-reasoned explanation as to why PHP sucks, and some links:

http://tnx.nl/php

Looking at the responses to this article with a low threshold is really disheartening. PHP is a powerful language/library set. But PHP has some core design issues that still need addressing. And every intelligent post that points this out gets modded as a troll.

I guess I shouldn't be suprised at this anymore here on slashdot. But I would not ditch other languages in favor of (non-free) compiled PHP until they address *ALL* the problems listed in these articles:

Using PHP in large websites

PHP in contrast to Perl