What is Symfony2?

One person having limited experience with professional PHP development doesn't make it the overall state of PHP development.

The majority of PHP development I've see use these community frameworks like Zend and Symfony. They also use a lot of other well established tools. Things like CodeCoverage and PHPUnit, xdebug, and countless other solid, well written tools.

I'm sorry, but when people refer to PHP development and relate to WordPress or Drupal, I can't help but shake my head. If that's your idea of professional level PHP, I'd hate to see what you think professional level code in your language looks like.

The overall state of PHP development is doing well. We have a lot of professionals writing solid code. Yes, we have a lot of people that flock to WordPress and Drupal, or pick up CI and think they are following best practices in PHP. Many move off to a framework in another language, thankful to get away from PHP and the horrible code it forced them to write.

CakePHP is the only open source project I was involved with where the core developers mailing list was private, new major versions were developed in private repos, and inline documentation was banned (because "inline code comments often go out of date").

It's a critical realisation that often the health of a community is more important than the product itself.

The problem is less the language, which is slippery and broken in interesting and different ways from version to version but generally not in ways that are real killers. The real problem is that those people that you say aren't professional developers (and they're not!) and are considered important use cases. This is a language where the core developers actually care about people who splat HTML in their PHP and vice versa. They're the people who don't even know about mysql_real_escape_string (LOL), let alone PDO or doctrine-dbal. And if those guys are just hanging on, great, more power to them, but the core PHP team actually cares about the use case for these people, while for the most part, they really don't seem to care about the use case for people who want to Do It Right. The distaste from guys like Rasmus toward the various framework projects is well-known and I kinda think it has an impact on the language itself.

This is I've seen as commonplace PHP development:

-Misuse of Mediawiki as a corporate intranet, using and extending scary plugins like template parser functions.

-Autogenerated CakePHP monstrosities that barely function and doesn't if you have to make significant changes.

-Home-rolled extensions to Drupal for that one little thing that SomeCo's website really just had to have. Ditto Wordpress, ditto Joomla.

Don't get me wrong: it is entirely possible to write good PHP. I'd say, with a decent bit of conviction, that the possibility of doing so goes down sublinearly with the amount of code/feature-points/other-measure-of-size and goes down superlinearly with the number of other people touching your code. But it's totally possible to do so. I wouldn't have used it for most of a decade if it wasn't. But I am entirely and completely convinced it is the sad minority, with the crazy majority largely catered to by the PHP development team, and it's a major reason why I've gone on to saner pastures.

I was a bit harsher than I should have been, but I also see quite a bit, and it's encouraging. Sure, if you look around github and SF, you see a lot of libs/class that aren't built for Zend or Symfony, but then they shouldn't be built around a specific framework. Heck, even Zend/Symf attempts to make each component indecent and replaceable.

And while you have big names like Drupal and Wordpress, people constantly prop those up as if somehow they are prime examples of professional level PHP code. It would be like me saying Ruby can't run on busy websites and use Twitter as an example. It's just old news.

And regardless of when you started PHP, it's fairly clear you haven't been as involved with the community over the past few years (or if you have, nothing in your comment gives that impression). Otherwise, you'd know about all the projects that are being launched/have been launched on top of frameworks. Open source projects, community projects using Zend, Symonfy, CI, etc.

The professional PHP community isn't made up of some rag tag group of people who don't know better. It's made up of incredibly smart people who write excellent code. I'm sorry, but nothing in Python or Ruby or any other language makes you a better programmer. They are excellent languages, but I've yet to meet a language that can fix stupid (though, some support it better than others).

I'm sorry if I offended you. But, I enjoy PHP. It's an amazingly flexible language. Yes, it has warts, but it gets frustrating every time the topic comes up on HN, people rag on it like somehow it's the worst thing since sliced bread. It gets tiresome. Worse than that, it gets insulting.

And for what? What's the point? What's the fucking point? I could easily point to Diaspora's initial launch and say "Yeah, awesome! That's what all that money buys you for an awesome open source Ruby project." But I don't. Because it's stupid. Its childish. Its pointless.

So yeah. I get it. PHP is the red headed step child that everyone likes to beat on. And that I like it makes me an immature stupid twit that doesn't know the first thing about programming. My respect for fellow professionals be damned, as they don't have a clue either. And by choosing PHP as my choice for a web language is based on clear brain damage at the hands of too many cold winters up north.

So yeah, this is me venting. And I don't mean to do it all over you. But it gets tiresome that every time there is a post about PHP, it has to consist of people bad mouthing anyone who chooses to use PHP, let alone the topic at hand.

Sorry for going apeshit all over this, and sorry for ragging on you. Your commentary is generally well appreciated. It's just getting tiresome, and I guess a part of me responds to all the comments in one.