PHP: A fractal of bad design

PHP as a language is, at present, defined by the behaviour of the canonical PHP.net implementation. Change the implementation, and de facto you've changed the language; Perl 5 is similar in this respect. A claim that an alternate implementation or tool chain supports _that_ very same language is a curious statement. It is an alternate implementation, and surely it must differ behaviourally, even if only by having unique bugs.

IIRC Facebook engineers must use HipHop for all their development, with PHP.net's php being now incompatible (hence the push to speed up the interpreter.) Wouldn't that make the language-supported-by-HipHop a PHP flavoured superset at the very least?

If I had to guess I'd say it's fear of the unknown combined with a reluctance to embrace new ideas on some subconscious level.

You should give Ruby or Python a shot as an alternative. C# comes with all the .Net baggage, it's a whole different game, and Java is far too enterprise for someone living in PHP-land.

There are things that are stupidly easy to do in Ruby and Python that are virtually impossible to do in PHP, and these are things you do all the time. PHP's feeble list transformation routines, which are a fundamental operation in even Perl, are a huge problem.

If you think PHP is fun, you would love a well designed language.

I love a good, high quality rant; this is a very good one. Kudos.

I was starting to entertain the idea of doing a project in PHP, thinking it can’t be that bad. Thanks for convincing me otherwise. The inconsistencies you listed would drive me up a wall.

It does remind me of the Unix Haters Handbook (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_UNIX-HATERS_Handbook); I used to have my very own copy; I would read it and laugh and think how lucky I don’t have to use Unix on regular basis.

Of course, that was back in the day; now I spend a lot of time at the command line on my MacBook Pro.

I had a one-to-one talk with Rasmus Lerdorf a few weeks ago. This is one of the few things he said:

"I wrote PHP as a hammer to do my stuff. Around 1993, the only way to write web apps was by hacking C and Perl. This was extremely painful, and you would have to do the same thing over and over again. So I started writing a tool which would make my work easier."

"I never thought while writing PHP that someday millions of people will be looking over my shoulder into my code. If I would have known that, I would have surely done a few things differently. But nobody knows that. Some appreciate the language, some don't. I don't blame them."

"PHP is a hammer. Use it for the right purpose at right place. Learn Python, Ruby, Haskell, Scala, etc. every language and use them where they fit. No language is perfect. There are trade-offs involved in each of them."

"When anything is too popular, criticism naturally follows. When people compare a language which is used in, say, 35% of the web apps to a language which is used in, say, 5%, their comparison is highly skewed because then they directly compare the number of things that have gone wrong in one with respect to another. They don't scale them to the same level and then see the faults. I don't blame anyone for that."

"You can scale horizontally with PHP as much as you want. There are many companies doing that, and they have been very successful."

"I can teach a semi-intelligent monkey to code in PHP in three hours."

There were many other cool and brilliant things he pointed out. What I learnt: Accept what it is. If you don't like it for your purpose, use another language which fits in.

P.S. In the new release of PHP, there are even driven servers (libevent), Support Vector Machine (SVM), Traits, Instance Method Call, built-in web server for testing, improved error messages, broad performance improvements, and many others. This language is not going to go away soon.

Huh?