July 2012
1 post
4 tags
You're an Idiot If You Use PHP.
Mohammed: i like coding in PHP :D
me: Then you're an idiot. I'll tolerate anything but two languages: PHP and BASIC.
Mohammed: hehe
BASIC goes for me too
me: PHP is brain-damagingly bad.
Mohammed: but it is used so widely.......
me: That doesn't automatically make it good.
Mohammed: but PHP must hv[sic] something which made it the most widely used server side language. I know that Python is a powerful language but you can't just say that PHP is bad
me: I can and I am. Here's why it's that popular: because you can just drop HTML into PHP source code and you can just drop PHP code into a directory and it "just works." That makes it easy for newbies. Doesn't mean that it's the safest or the best thing to do. In fact putting source code into a web facing directory is an absolute no-no. The standard library in PHP has no namespaces and is a big messy ball of functions. There's no consistency when it comes to naming: there's functions like strlen and also functions like str_foo. The parameters of these functions, even when they are exactly the same, don't follow the same order. The typecasting system is laughably bad. For example, in PHP:
"3 hundred spartans" == 3
would evaluate to true. The syntax for many common language features like variables and hashes is poorly thought out and clunky. $and_all_variables_look_like_this and hashes (dicts in Python) use => as a separator. Need more evidence? Newbies using PHP is bad as it is.
Mohammed: nah :-|
me: But knowing all this and still using PHP is nothing but stupidity.
Mohammed: i got my answer (an intelligent answer)
me: ?
What?
Mohammed: now
i saw the 'real' face of PHP
as always......u tell me things which prove to be very awesome
me: lol. Anyway here's more:
Mohammed: thanks :D
me: The biggest problem with PHP
imho
is Rasmus Lerdorf (the guy who created it)
According to him, "PHP is a language for non-programmers"
Mohammed: that's right
me: and "PHP is not engineered ... it was just hacked together" (rough quote)
Check it up.
When I write something, I want it to be fast, readable and bug free.
PHP doesn't let me do that (easily.) In fact a lot of PHP itself is very buggy. For example, I remember a case where a standard library function was supposed to return false, but was returning a "falsy" (anything that resolves to false, in this case 0) value and someone reported that it was causing some of his apps to break, but the issue was closed without a fix. Things like that.
Is it possible to develop good software in PHP? Yes. But it's extremely difficult. Your programming language should make it as easy as possible for you to develop stuff.
(there are a lot more things that are broken in PHP, but I don't know enough of it to tell you about all of them, and frankly speaking, I don't want to know more than I already do; it's bad enough as it is.)
