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PHP Sucks

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201–210 of 297 posts

Re: PHP Sucks

#201
PHP "sucks" as a language, but it's productive, great for getting things done. It has some decent frameworks, like Laravel. You can bang out a ton of functionality quickly.

I've made a ton of money doing PHP contracting locally. For my day job, it's been Python, Java, and Go.

Re: PHP Sucks

#202
This is a great move on his part - every programmer should know as many languages as they feasibly can. Being a monolingual programmer is like being a carpenter who only uses hammers. Or maybe a better analogy would be an investor who only owns stock in one fund, or a physicist who only studies one type of particle.

Re: PHP Sucks

#203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Give us a break, as a language PHP is a terrible language, and yes I do develop and get paid because of PHP, and I do so for the same exact reason you listed. It pays the bills and does so handsomely too. 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…

Is it any worse than Javascript, if we're honest?

Both have their issues, but js is probably a little more advanced with prototyping.

Re: PHP Sucks

#204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But PHP & C++ get more complaining than the others, at least where I hang out. So good quote by Stroustrup.

And oddly seem to be the languages where tbe most code is written, go figure.

Yes, that was the point of the original quotation.

Re: PHP Sucks

#205
That's why I like Brainfuck as my goto language so I don't have to deal with the newbs jumping into my language . I once had a python programmer say I shouldn't use php because it doesn't have classes "so theres still some old thoughts on the language floating around" and I know java api devs who don't know the difference between POST or GET request so bad programmers come in all languages.

Re: PHP Sucks

#207
post #188
post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I'm very tired of hearing that PHP sucks. PHP is a good language And I'm quite tired of hearing this silly, totally meritless defense in every single thread that discusses PHP. Can't we just agree that it's not a very good language, but people are still doing cool stuff and lots of money with it? So many pointless fights could be averted like this.

I'll agree that what makes a good language is subjective, and that most all languages have their problems. There is a certain threshold where "good enough" is what matters. Personally, I'd rather everyone just stop the good/bad language debates entirely.

Programming has to be the only environment where the voices of academia don't seem to matter because "my language gets shit done". Deep inside, what do you think those researchers in the PL community, the people that know the ins and outs, that theorize about languages, the people who spent years and years learning about the theory behind it all, who created the OCamls, the Haskells, the Coqs, the Idrises and so forth, what do you reckon their opinion of PHP is?

So really I don't think "good language" is subjective. PHP is not fast, it's not well-designed, it's not particularly terse, it doesn't have particularly great tooling (Facebook has made that better with their HHVM initiative in all fairness), it isn't consistent and easy to reason about and the worst offender of all, it doesn't offer a dramatically different or original model of thinking about programs.

What is has going for it has nothing to do with the language itself: jobs, ecosystem and easy hosting. I totally agree that a good language is whatever works for you, but in the meantime, "whatever is good enough" is a mindset that doesn't help us strive for something better, which does matter if we're going to collectively spend decades in this line of work.

Re: PHP Sucks

#208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

| 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. :(

It's not hard to write structured elegant php, that is horseshit. Please look at code for symfony or laravel. Hell, my annoyance with writing good code in PHP is that it ends up looking like Java, which begs the question, why not just do it in java. https://github.com/symfony/symfony/tree/master/src/Symfony or you can look at simpler sample codes I wrote for a class in design patterns with php https://github.com/segm…

Symfony is the worst thing that could've happened to PHP. Dependency injection with varying degrees of XML/YAML madness everywhere. It's terribly slow and pretty much unusable w/o several caching layers in front. I can honestly say that I hate this framework with a passion, and the language too. PHP's core and a big part of the community is copying features and methodologies from Java, but they will never get close to its performance, nor its functionalities. I left the ecosystem when PHP 5.1 was around... I left for good.
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