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PHP Sucks

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Re: PHP Sucks

#114
Many great things suck.

PHP will still be the most accessible backend language for a long time and only JavaScript stands a chance at outcompeting it for a long time. (And yes I know JavaScript is normally seen as a frontend language)

Re: PHP Sucks

#115
> We’re not taken as seriously, and we’re being paid less. The 2016 StackOverflow Survey puts PHP developers as the least paid. Hilariously that position is shared with “LAMP” and “Wordpress”, both of which are also PHP.

The author didn't explicitly state it as a causal relationship, but doesn't this have more to do with supply and demand than respect?

It's true that if you're a guru in a more esoteric language you're going to earn more respect than a guru in PHP (although if you're really a guru in PHP you're probably also pretty good in more respected languages).

But it's also true that your skills would be in much higher demand for any available jobs in that esoteric language than PHP skills are for its available jobs.

[EDIT: I suppose an argument that cuts the other way is that PHP projects -- regardless of what the employers know or care about the language -- tend to be lower status and lower paying than those built on more esoteric or more "serious" languages.]

Re: PHP Sucks

#116
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe PhP is to hard for you?

The point isn't that it's easy or hard. It doesn't require the user to understand things like scope or the rudiments of typing to get started, which means it's insanely permissive.

Which is like saying that chainsaws suck because they don't stop you from cutting off your own leg.

Re: PHP Sucks

#117
post #85

I started freelancing in my area doing Ruby on Rails, and found it far harder to maintain a project. I also found it harder to acquire clients in my area for new RoR development. More work was available locally with PHP. Clients were more willing to pay. I've done a ton of things in WordPress that shouldn't have been, "to save money". And I've done greenfield development with CodeIgniter, Laravel (v3 and v5), and a c…

| More often it's the programmer who sucks, not the language. Whilst it is possible to write structured, elegant php, its very hard, and thats the languages fault. The barrier to entry to write bad PHP is very low, thats what makes people think it 'sucks', because 90% of PHP codebases do. :(

I disagree. Namespaces help hugely, as do Traits, etc. It used to be difficult back in the pre 5.4 days, but we have come a long way since then.

Older projects will suffer till they're brought up to spec, true.

Re: PHP Sucks

#118
If I listened to developers as a group I would think all tools/languages suck and I would have never bothered entering this industry.

Anyway...

>> For many people, PHP is the first programming language they try without formal education.

>> We’re not taken as seriously, and we’re being paid less.

Is this one of those correlation not causation things I keep hearing about?

Re: PHP Sucks

#119
post #85

I started freelancing in my area doing Ruby on Rails, and found it far harder to maintain a project. I also found it harder to acquire clients in my area for new RoR development. More work was available locally with PHP. Clients were more willing to pay. I've done a ton of things in WordPress that shouldn't have been, "to save money". And I've done greenfield development with CodeIgniter, Laravel (v3 and v5), and a c…

I suspect that a decent amount of people saw PHP 10 years ago, decided that PHP4 sucked (it did), and do not pay close attention to further PHP development ever since. Newer PHP is a much nicer language than it used to be. Newer frameworks can be reasonable and elegant.

OTOH RoR has its own bunch of problems, and exploits a number of anti-patterns "in the name of simplicity", and Ruby as an ecosystem has its own set of pain points (e.g. deployment).

Re: PHP Sucks

#120

PHP is awesome for Stage 2 level projects in this model: http://devblog.procore.com/dev/evolution-of-software-applica... Once you need a framework and the complexity that goes with it, PHP starts to suck. It lacks the behavior and tools to nicely manage complexity beyond a pile of files. But when what you need is a pile of files, PHP is awesome.

With PHP you can grow your own infrastructure from being a couple of calls to your RDBMS/MySQL up to installing modern libs and implementing a framework. On the other hand: With RoR, Python, NodeJS, et al (which by itself can do anything, since they need frameworks and libraries for anything web-related) you have to start with these HUGE dependencies and package managers that only add more technical debt to your project plus your projects can't start from dead-simple bd-calls it has to be all or nothing and under the same structure because "it's the right thing to do bro, you will thank me later"... guess what: i still don't use everything.

The day a languages appears that is web-ready and dead-simple with no technical debt that's the day we can say: PHP Suck.

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