Why Developers Hate PHP

But in this case he is terribly ill and not actually dancing but having a condition called Chorea that is often mistaken for dance like movements

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chorea

That article is from 2012. If a "fad" lasts 7 years, is it still a fad?

In C you can write i[t] instead of t[i], but don't do it.

I guess it's true for many languages. These funny features don't prevent you from writing good code, especially if you enforce some coding styles that will catch any unintended use of these features.

Blame PHP for what you can't do with it, or for things you don't like but are forced to do. For instance I like PHP but I cannot type things the way I'd like. It's getting better though.

I don't like the inconsistencies in the function names of the standard library but the functions are often straightforward and very simple to use. And, above all, the doc is good. These aspects mean I don't waste time figuring out how to do simple things because of a complex interface involving many classes, despite the inconsistencies.

I also don't like the dollar notation for variables but that's a matter of taste, nor the syntax for namespaces, nor the implicit declaration of variables (like in Python by the way).

I do think better languages do it better, for example in Elixir I can extract multiple elements out of an object at the same time.

  object = %{nested: ["my value"], other: "some element"}

  %{nested: [first | _], other: other} = object

PHP sucks because of the legacy it pulls with it that keeps it from being simple and elegant. It also fails pretty hard when you use it outside of it's niche, and a multi-purpose language > single purpose language.

Surprisingly, the technical inconsistencies isn't what I hated most about it. It's rather the fact that questionable practice was rampant and largely left unchecked in its many communities. The only way to realize this is to join another community where peer review is severe enough and bullshit detection high enough that mediocrity is rarely given the opportunity to infect your practice for long and fester. A proper community is supposed to nurture you into becoming a better programmer, so that you can take those lessons and carry them with you wherever you decide to go next. By contrast, my experience with PHP over the 6 years or so that I used it was that you learn 3 things today and you'll have to unlearn 2 tomorrow. Eventually I got fed up of the cyclical learning pattern and I moved on.

Some years after my move away from it, I decided to take a look back at some of the code that I had written with PHP. I was freshly appraising the sum of my past experience. I remember thinking that the language seemed to have a crisis of identity. It was dynamically and weakly typed, but with serious Java envy and so some of the less desirable aspects of Java were basically just cargoculted in, but in a shitty incomplete way. Private, protected, public class members, what a joke. If you're a PHP programmer, did you ever ask yourself why would Python or Ruby programmers somehow be able to get by without this shit and not you? Do you know that because of the way its interpreter works there are some technical benefits for Java to have these besides the fallacious architectural "advantages" of hiding access from the programmer? Does the same thing apply to PHP? Interfaces and inheritance, without the possibility to overload methods, which can cause a lot of grief when a zealous and inexperienced library designer hasn't properly thought things through (which happened more than I'd like to remember in PHP projects). That was just at the language level, but many of the big frameworks followed suit with the Java obsession, by implementing a slew of circuitous patterns aimed at convincing programmers that they were now coding "Enterprise Style". Front Controller, Action Controller, Dispatcher, and a whole other lot straight out of pattern catalogs. When you think about it, most of those efforts were fallacious in PHP. If the problems that you were trying to solve were beyond the constraints of what PHP is typically good for, namely cms-type admin web apps, then you were probably better off with another language. On the other hand, if they applied, why bother with all the enterprisey bullcrap? But, but, but Facebook... Ah, shut up! Even Facebook had to invent a whole other language to fix that mistake. The other projects that didn't buy into this sort of architectural zeal went the other extreme, with their own experimentations and idiosyncrasies. Bastardizations of concepts that someone had seen somewhere else, but only half-understood, was common. Lots of Rails envy and no shortage of fame-driven wannabes that had failed to make a name for themselves in other communities, but somehow always found a way to shine in PHP. Ensued just more bullshit.

Anyways, that was a long time ago. I hope things have changed. I'm not sure I'd be back if they did, in hindsight what PHP has for it is one of the easiest "hello world" tutorials, but you end up paying for years the half-hour you saved to see these two words on a web page. And for what it's worth there are worse languages, but there are better ones too.