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The PHP Singularity
An anonymous reader writes "Jeff Atwood at Coding Horror has a post about the awfulness of PHP — or, rather, a post about posts about the awfulness of PHP. He points out that PHP has been the whipping boy for the developer community for years, and while everybody seems happy to complain about it, nobody seems willing to do anything about it. He writes, 'From my perspective, the point of all these "PHP is broken" rants is not just to complain, but to help educate and potentially warn off new coders starting new codebases. Some fine, even historic work has been done in PHP despite the madness, unquestionably. But now we need to work together to fix what is broken. The best way to fix the PHP problem at this point is to make the alternatives so outstanding that the choice of the better hammer becomes obvious.'"
And now, a post about a post about posts about the awfulness of PHP.
Which would make these comments posts about a post about a post about posts about the awfulness of PHP.
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Recursion: First you curse, then you curse again.
What kind of bullshit logic is that? Something is broken, everyone hates it, so let's put all our efforts in making the alternatives better? How about contributing to PHP and fixing what you're bitching about instead of, well, bitching about it? You know, it's open-source and all.
if php is broken what is javascript?
PHP is a language for getting thing done. Just like any toolbox, you can build great or terrible things with it. It's like perl in that way (and I've done plenty of both). If you code well, there's very little to complain about with PHP. I've hired java guys onto my php projects before, and they were up and running in a week or so because we were coding with some structure instead of slapping together hacks.
And personally, I wouldn't want it any other way. I don't want language designers deciding they know what I want to do better than me. What I want, is the flexibility to build things as I see fit, and to do so quickly. Production is my goal. If you can help me build my projects elegantly/etc, then great, but getting it built quickly is always my priority.
Any good programmer will be able to make awesome PHP code. Bad PHP written applications are just the result of lack of passion, knowledge, and in some cases don't forget it, pressure from the customer. Combine bad programming skills, no experience with other OOP languages, pressure and "I don't care how it is done, I've done it and it works that's enough"... and you get the result. I'm tired to read and hear that PHP is shit. -- ParaBug
Years ago I was involved with PHP, and the core developers have no real interest in making anything better, or, more specifically, accepting any criticism. I'm not the only developer to be pissed off when decisions are made "off line" and passed down. There was no sense of community. In conversations with other would be contributors, the general consensus was the PHP was headed up by a bunch of pissy children.
Don't get me wrong, I think PHP is a powerful environment and a lot of things have been done with it, but it suffers from a lack of rigour. If they could decide *what* the hell the language wanted to be, that would be helpful. If they could clean up the extensions API that would be helpful too. PHP's extensions are so powerful but there is no abstraction, your extension is essentially a PHP internal module.
All in all, PHP has had power and potential for years, but the reason why ruby even had a shot was that the PHP project can't get its act together to address, or even acknowledge, its short comings.
The one big redeeming feature of PHP is you set up a single DB server (or even multimaster) plus multiple webservers, and bam! You're sharing objects/sessions among the webservers. Doesn't matter what webserver the next request hits, the session's there.
By contrast, that simple thing is something that other environments struggle with. I remember ads for "Share Java POJOs" as if that was a huge deal, and the CEO of some firm that did that said people told him that was a godsend. I'd imagine it's the same for Python and Ruby.
1. Java. Huge memory footprint. Admins hate it because it doesn't conform to certain Unix conventions.
Try this: Download any one of a number of open-source Java CMSs or ERM systems. Then watch the Java exceptions flow down your console screen. Good luck figuring them out. Static analysis rules, except when it doesn't.
Java's great if you're writing an desktop app for geologists trying to find oil or a backend bank system. For your average, ho-hum, billion-dollar website: not so much.
2. Ruby: You go to war with the webserver they give you, not the one you want.
3. Python: Great language and library. A shame it was hobbled by the whitespace issue, which meant that some programmers didn't check it out who should have. Anyway, it's hard for Beta to get traction against VHS.
Anotherwords, PHP is good enough. "Worse is better."
Since the three environments above are monolithic, if there's a problem, it's a problem for every client logged in. PHP, by contrast, follows a Unix minimalist philosophy: if a PHP FCGI instance (or even an Apache mod_php instance) crashes, it's just that one instance. No problem, user hits F5, reloads, PHP's stateless, you get the session back, keep calm and carry on.
When Marc Zuckerberg or a number of other entrepreneurs started hacking out Facebook, they started out with PHP, just because it's light and fast, and easy to get something up on the wall. Nobody cares about the elegance of Python or Ruby, it's all about time to market.
Finally, nothing about "you can't debug PHP", in today's discussion, please. You can very well step through PHP code. Use Netbeans and something like xdebug. Or Eclipse.
PHP: Paraphrasing Churchill, it's bad, but the alternatives are worse.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
Going to Perl where I can get a simple concise syntax that is always the same among different programmers and does not have any idiosyncracies and enforced consitancy everywhere.
http://saveie6.com/
I would be less quick to blame PHP than blame the fact that many PHP programmers come from "Web" developers. People who started with MS Paint and some HTML, then some CSS and then jammed in some PHP. After a while they got pretty good at small PHP 50 line programs. But when faced with huge projects people like this just aren't prepared. A great programmer could use PHP just as well as any other language.
But the second half is that PHP should be bad at times. Often a simple unstructured script is the best. It needs to do a simple thing quickly and well. There is no need for templating, language abstraction, unit testing, separation of data, logic, and view. So if you are a bank deploying a mission critical system then it should be rigorous and perfect. But if your blog about car tires needs a widget that reads from your odometer then hack away.
I would say that all arguments that condemn PHP should whither under the light that Facebook was developed primarily in PHP with MySQL. Even now they have their Hip Hop that converts PHP to C++. Arguing against PHP is like saying that Carbon Fiber is a better material than steel for car frames. Absolutely true but most cars are still successfully made from steel for a wide variety of reasons. Next time I need to win an F1 challenge and it had better be Carbon Fiber. But for the next ride to the grocery store and I just don't care.
So to circle around one could argue that the best cars are made from this or that but the reality is that what made the truly terrible cars terrible was that the designer would have made a terrible car out of anything. So teach a "better" language to the people making messes with PHP and you will just have a different kind of mess.
I've programmed in every major language and several minor ones from the 1970's to the present day, never mind design methodologies. They all have their relative strengths and weaknesses, but at the end of the day, the only thing that really recommends one over the other is a) what's available, and b) what you're most familiar with. No widely used language is "broken" any more than any natural spoken language is broken. No one ever says, hey, this novel would be much easier to write if we were taking advantage of the greater expressive power of Indonesian instead of kludgy old Lithuanian.
Aside from juvenile cliquishness and fashion obsession, every language flamefest starts with people obsessing on some awkward feature of the dominant language du jour, and then concluding that all of their problems would be solved if we all switched to some other language without that awkward feature. Of course, tomorrow's language (or methodology, editor, coding standard, platform) has its own awkward qualities that will only become apparent once it collides with the real world on a large scale, setting the stage for the day after tomorrow's language. Rarely does anyone pull their head out of their compiler/interpreter long enough to recognize that it's the real world that's awkward, and no amount of switching between fundamentally equivalent machine-parseable languages is going to change that.
Instead, we keep implementing the same stuff over and over in one language after another until the pace of real progress slows so much that we can actually get excited that the document viewer we're trying to port everything over to is receiving a "major" new features in HTML5 that will allow it to get a little closer to matching the desktop GUI functionality of twenty years ago, only not as well and with the added requirement of several orders of magnitude more hardware power required to keep it going.
But by all means, let's get rid of PHP if that makes it easier to imagine that we're doing something besides reinventing the same old wheel and doing it badly.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
The C-like syntax and wrappers for all sorts of handy stuff like POSIX threading, sockets, SSL, etc is why I like PHP. My biggest issue with PHP is that these functions are poorly documented (especially the SSL wrappers). I am not a language purist, I want something easy to use, gives me access to all the nifty stuff Unix can provide, and doesn't make me learn an entirely new syntax. If I was a professional programmer I might feel differently, but for MY needs at my job and for personal projects PHP is a good tool.
I really shouldn't have used someone else's email address for this account.
The assumption in TFA seems to be that PHP does something that couldn't be done otherwise now, or does it more easily, or something. But I don't think that's true. There are alternative languages and alternative ecosystems now. IMO, most PHP coders don't use PHP because they have looked at the alternatives and decided PHP is the best choice, or the least bad choice, or any other choice. People use PHP because either
1: It was forced upon them for some reason or
2: It was the first thing they found and it was good enough
If that's the case, it's irrelevant how fantastic the alternatives are.
Also, while PHP code can be truly terrible, people who are determined to write terrible code will do so whatever the tool. You can use almost anything as a hammer if you try hard enough. The myth that The One Right Language somehow makes bad programmers good is still alive, especially within the Python community, but it's stll a myth.
When good programmers have no choice but to use PHP, they'll find a way to build something that is workmanlike even if it isn't beautiful. When bad programmers program, the result is going to be bad regardless of the language.
Virtually serving coffee
Python has *always* been obviously better than PHP (or perl, etc.) But if you have no skills, you look for the easiest path: the goal is to get the project going.
If your expertise is Perl, climbing the Python learning curve, gentle as it may be, isn't attractive, and becomes less so as your available time to engage in such things narrows. And so your project $sucks @terribly $$ and looks like APL But it works fine because you know how all that perl weirdness operates:
$_ = shift;
tr/+/
s/%(..)/pack('c', hex($1))/eg;
return($_);
For a new user with no skills (which really seems to be the primary group that ends up using it), the availability of PHP examples and the ease of putting a canned site up seem to be the primary enticements. Slap a canned site up, and bam, there you are. *Now* you can learn how it works (which accounts of a lot of strange things on the web, but I digress.)
So better isn't really the issue. Easier is the bottom line, it seems to me. Where are the canned sites in Python? For that matter where are the canned sites in Perl or Ruby or whatever?
If "better" were all it took, no one would be running Windows, for instance, but that's not the case.
Mind you... *I'm* not running windows, and I long ago abandoned Perl for Python (and I'm so glad I did), but I'm someone who actually has the time to explore and make choices without someone else hovering over my shoulder or otherwise being compromised. I don't think that's very common.
Ever since programming languages existed, they have been classified in 2 categories:
- Those every one bitches about,
- and those nobody uses...
This.
PHP feels natural for me, as a C guy. The library functions lack consistency, but then neither do 3rd party C libraries. You just learn how to work them and get on with your billable day. I can look at just about any PHP code and figure it out pretty quickly. A lot of it is written by mental midgets, but it is familiar enough that I can jump in and fix whatever needs to be done.
Meanwhile, all those other, functional languages venture so far off the beaten path as to make them look like gibberish. They often strike me as the product of overexcited college grads. It's like a little kid who just learned a new swear word and starts using it ten times in every sentence. Closures this, aspects that, ooh look ma I'm using list operators... academic functionality makes for cute sample code, but those of us with actual jobs have more pressing things to do than learn a new language and syntax. At the very least, PHP offers a good online manual with some very handy user-contributed snippets. Sure, some of them are ass and could benefit from some karma/moderation system, but I've often found a little 10-line function in those comments that saved me an hour of poking around, or that I could patch up and post my improved version. That right there beats all those "Look how easy RoR is" screencasts that ignore all the actual things programmers need to know to write secure, production-ready code.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Ever since programming languages existed, they have been classified in 2 categories: - Those every one bitches about, - and those nobody uses...
Sounds clever, but it's plainly false.
C, Java, C# are among the most used languages today. Very few serious programmers will say that they are stupid or awful. And, many criticisms aside, most programmers respect them - even love them. I program in all these languages, I like them all, and I hate PHP with passion. It's not an issue of popularity; PHP, its community, its history, all of it, is a tale of terror.
Very few serious programmers will say that they are stupid or awful.
Huh? Have you just fallen off the turnip truck?
C: Unsafe at any speed. Un-bound-checked array, null pointers, etc, etc. Many people HATE C because it's unsafe, though they grudgingly admit that it's sometimes a necessary evil for system programming.
C++: Overly complex, insane learning curve, no garbage collection. There are no shortage of people who hate C++.
And Java is possibly your most absurd point. Overly verbose to the extreme, slow, insane memory requirements, slow, crazy libraries, and slow (please don't bother to claim that isn't slow).
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
C is so awful that nowbody would dare use it for any serious stuff, like kernels or drivers!!!