Ask HN: Why do people hate PHP so much?

Mostly because the legacy of PHP as a toy project carried forward forever. Here's a great tidbit about why all the original functions have ridiculous, inconsistent naming schemes:

> "Well, there were other factors in play there. htmlspecialchars was a very early function. Back when PHP had less than 100 functions and the function hashing mechanism was strlen(). In order to get a nice hash distribution of function names across the various function name lengths names were picked specifically to make them fit into a specific length bucket. This was circa late 1994 when PHP was a tool just for my own personal use and I wasn't too worried about not being able to remember the few function names."

That's right: Every one of the original function names has a different character length because length was used as a lookup. There are a lot of clowny things like this that have never been stamped out of the language.

Add to that its history of being a beginner language that most of its early adopters sprinkled into HTML and where many people who mayyybe have no business being professional programmers started making a career out of it. This severely undermined PHP's credibility as a language for professionals even though good software can be created in PHP in the right hands.

That all said, I spent about year coding in Hack, and while the parts that still feel like PHP are annoying, it is awesome in so many other ways. Hopefully it either starts to unseat PHP or PHP turns into Hack at some point.

Because people are stupid. And stuck in the 90's. That's the main reason. Other reasons include self-hatred for spending so much time on RoR's/Node's penis. That's definitely the second leading reason. Making less money then "stupid PHP programmers" cause they seriously thought they could develop real applications after learning JavaScript. That's pretty high on the list.

Look the bottom line is PHP has some weird issues (naming inconsistencies, parameter ordering, security issues with deprecated functionality, etc. etc.) but you can find issues on the same level with ANY language. Professional PHP dev's can consistently build large enterprise applications that are readable, scalable, maintainable and performant. Anyone who tells you otherwise is simply not familiar with the transformation that PHP and the community has gone through since version 5.3.

That's true.

There are a ton of features in modern PHP which address a lot of the common criticisms brought against it. Doing a proper comparison with other languages (framework to framework, not framework to language) I think PHP measures up reasonably well.

But there is so much terrible, legacy code out there. The evolution, if it's happening is happening very slowly.

It's interesting to read all these comments and more interesting for me to constantly be hearing "But hey, Facebook's built on PHP".

I think that the fact it has taken this long to even deprecate, let alone remove, utter garbage like these functions is a prime example of why PHP is often reviled.

It almost makes you wonder if the point isn't to keep catering to bad programmers' whims just to keep from losing the 50% of PHP's community that would never be able to write software at all if they weren't working in a language that enabled them to ignore every best practice from the past 20 years.

I kid, I kid. Mostly.