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PHP Sucks

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Re: PHP Sucks

#261
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…

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…

PHP is more or less a dynamic typed C++ especially tailored for web development, that's how I see it. PHP originally borrowed a lot from C (syntax and function names) and later borrowed a lot from C++, Java and even JavaScript.

I like PHP and JavaScript a lot. They are not perfect but these organically grown languages tend to be better from my experience.

Re: PHP Sucks

#262
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…

PHP, as a language, particularly since somewhere in the 5.x series, is basically "flawed, but still more than adequate." The real problem is that so many people who use it are utterly incompetent. When someone says they work in/with PHP you immediately wonder if they're in the "let's duplicate a 900-line function across dozens of files just to give various pages a different icon" camp, the "I call myself a PHP Develo…

[deleted]

Re: PHP Sucks

#263
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…

RoR is chronically known for having issues with a maintenance of projects in a long term, so using this comparison is a very weak defense of PHP.

Re: PHP Sucks

#264
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…

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…

> Perhaps they groovy or scala

You're using Apache Groovy as a counter-example to PHP blowing? Groovy's the PHP equivalent in the JVM world, the sloppy partner to the more exacting Scala, Clojure, and Kotlin.

Since its first release in late 2003, Groovy's been extended and repurposed so many times it's not really one unified language anymore. The MOP stuff was added for Grails in 2006, the half-baked types when generics were added in v 1.5, the pluggable annotations in v 1.6, the command syntax in v 1.7 to appeal make Gradle builds look nicer, the static typing in 2.0, traits in 2.2, the unsuccessful switch to Android deliverables after that, with backwards incompatibilities between minor versions. And then there's the stuff that silently got dropped, like interceptors and empty try statements.

Groovy's OK for quick'n'dirties scripting Java classes and defining builds, but for actually building systems use a language built from the ground up for that purpose, e.g. Java, Scala, or Kotlin.

Re: PHP Sucks

#265
post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fort…

Hi Veejay, I do not know for how long or just how intensely you have been in contact with the "academia" so far, but let me tell you this: however much a certain solution is promoted in academic circles has close to nothing to do with how useful it actually is to general (programming) society. The average academic bases his assumptions of what makes a language "good" or "bad" on 6-12 months of internship at a medium sized company (preferably in a mgmt/assistant position), some tutorials he went through and 5 years of theorizing with a professor who did his last serious programming work back in the 1980s. Granted, this approach sometimes yields exciting innovations that might someday be adopted by real world applications. But this does and will not make Haskell and OCaml appropriate for the other 95% of problems developers have to solve.

Re: PHP Sucks

#266
post #261

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…

PHP is more or less a dynamic typed C++ especially tailored for web development, that's how I see it. PHP originally borrowed a lot from C (syntax and function names) and later borrowed a lot from C++, Java and even JavaScript. I like PHP and JavaScript a lot. They are not perfect but these organically grown languages tend to be better from my experience.

WOW... i mean PHP is nothing like C++. It is closer to some sort of dynamically typed C with classes. C++ is not just C with classes it is much much deeper language. That being said, C with classes for web is not bad thing to be.

And yeah I HATE inclusion in PHP... it's a mess

Re: PHP Sucks

#267
PHP is a see-saw at a kids' playground; on one end there's a small, sensibly dressed kid and on the other, an overweight kid having a great time, with his/her side stuck firmly to the ground.

The child suspended in the air is wailing about how the whole playground is being totally ruined by the other kid.

The other children watch, bemused, from the other playground equipment, happy that they've grown out of the seesaw; all the parents watch from outside the playground, not caring who plays with what.

I'm overweight and enjoy seesaws. Yay!

Re: PHP Sucks

#268

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?

No, they are both the same, where else can you evaluate '5' + 2?

Re: PHP Sucks

#270
Such a tiring debate.

This is what a function call looks like in PHP:

  myfunc($arg1,$arg2);
What a mess, right?

Functions can represent any subset of computation within a program, or in some cases a function can represent all of the computations of an entire program. If you're hung up on small nuances of a language, you're probably just not doing it right. That's not a bad thing. A lot of people find themselves in this position, but the bottom line is you're probably just not writing your programs with the correct lower level abstractions.

That's it. It's not magic, but it's not always easy either. You shouldn't feel bad about it. Just keep trying and one day you'll realize that very little of what makes a great programmer has anything to do with the language you're using.

NOTE: This isn't in response to the author. They appear to have a strong reputation within the PHP community. This is really just a general response to all of the PHP hate in this thread.

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