PHP Sucks

The nice thing about PHP is you can pick it up, write an app that does specifically what you need and someone else could maintain it relatively easily.

Most of the large code packages written in PHP are cumbersome, however. PEAR packages are written by some of the rudest, obnoxious, and anti-Zen people on Earth. Not to demonize them too much but I have had several encounters with PEAR people and they all went something like a Game of Thrones wedding.

I would love for WP to exist as only an admin interface to a clean, backend data store. Unfortunately, the problem is the database schema that WP ships with and the way WP handles data. It's almost impossible to get data out of WP press without using its lackluster DB "abstraction" layer and running the fetched data through its many obscure filtering mechanisms. To top it off, WP smashes everything into a handful of tables and makes doing normal, straightforward relational looks up (as any sane schema would allow for) a complete nightmare. Alas, when you go the WP route, your data is very much dependent on WP (and by default PHP).

Any organization that uses WP for an extended period of time and builds up a non-insignificant amount of data will run into this wall, guaranteed. If you truly value your data and your project is anything beyond a personal blog that you'll give up on in 6 months time, do yourself and your organization a favor and find an alternative solution. If you must use WP, use it as what it was originally intended for: a blog. It's not a framework to develop a complex application off of.

I have 20 yrs of programming experience in various languages than I care to count, as much as 20! So I do know my languages. From an academic perspective, PHP blows! But from a practical standpoint, it's a tool. It get's the job done, so long as you know it's quirks, you can avoid them. It's much better now with the OOP support and with PHP7 supporting scalar type and return types declaration. It's going to even make it possible to develop more robust software.

I'm indifferent to hearing about PHP sucking. So people say it as a put down. Perhaps they groovy or scala. I really don't care. It pays and that's all I care about. When I engage in my own personal projects, I never use PHP. PHP's documenation is not bad, but best-in-class? Please! With that said, I agree with your last sentence, in the sense that a good programmer can get more done with a bad language like PHP than a bad programmer can get done with whatever the hell one chooses to consider a good language.