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.
- <end of rant>
- (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.)
