Ask HN: Is PHP still a mess?

#1

Post by tbirrell » Fri, Nov 11, 2016, 4:00 PM UTC

PHP is that one language that people love to hate. And from what I've read of the days before I got into programming, they have good reason to. However, a lot of these popular articles I've found are in the 2008-2012 time frame. Did PHP 5.5 alleviate a lot of concerns? Or did people just get tired of writing WoT about the issue?

In addition, now that PHP 7 is out, would you still consider it to be a hot mess? Is it getting worse? Better? Or staying the same?

Re: Ask HN: Is PHP still a mess?

#2

Post by andrewmcwatters » Fri, Nov 11, 2016, 4:28 PM UTC

These days, not so much. Also, the PHP ecosystem has really matured, and great best practices and standards have arisen. That all being said, people have moved on regardless.

Re: Ask HN: Is PHP still a mess?

#3

Post by chinese_donald » Fri, Nov 11, 2016, 4:29 PM UTC

I have been using PHP for over a decade in my personal and professional life. I also use Python for some projects and I'm also learning Go. Every language has its strengths and weaknesses.

PHP 7.X is the latest release. It has some nice features like type hinting, major speedups to the core language, and a whole host of other things.

It still has many things that could be improved (no language is perfect), but I still use it for the back-end of most web sites/apps. It's been battle tested by many major sites and still gets the job done.

Many people hate PHP because it's cool to do so. New fad languages and frameworks aren't always the best thing for a new project. Especially when they haven't been thoroughly tested in a production environment.

Re: Ask HN: Is PHP still a mess?

#4

Post by gusdeboer » Fri, Nov 11, 2016, 5:14 PM UTC

First, PHP isn't perfect. I've worked with PHP since I started developing and i love it. When you're developing for web it's the way to go. And with PHP 7 the language has matured a lot.