25 Years of PHP

Laravel et al read like java. Nobody wants that crap anymore. Everyones moving codebases back to more procedural styles with a good dose of functional leanings towards immutable values.

You're over simplifying my point to make yours.

I have seen bad PHP code. I have seen bad Go code. I have seen bad code in many languages.

The proportion of bad PHP code however, is higher in PHP, for the reasons I've stated around edge cases and the difficulty in reasoning.

> You are trying to compare PHP with Go, probably Go is better then PHP, but if Go is better that does not mean PHP is bad, just that Go is better (probably not for all use cases).

Go being good doesn't make PHP bad, and PHP being bad doesn't make Go good. I'm not saying one thing is true because the other thing. I'm saying that PHP is a bad language.

> So you have experience with PHP, probably are you thinking at html code mixed with PHP code? yeah that thing is bad but only news use that for large projects.

Nope, you're making untrue assumptions about my experience. The largest project I worked on was over 300,000 lines of PHP and used templating. It controlled everything from a companies finances, to printing plate layout, to believe it or not, sorting robots on a conveyer belt.

> If you do not mean that then I am not sure what PHP issues prevent you to write good code.

I've talked about this. Edge cases and the inability to reason about the code. In PHP there are a ton of weird little behaviours or edge cases that you just have to know about that could cause bugs. It's hard to know all of these, and even if you do the sheer number of intricacies of the language means that it would be easy to miss some.

PHP isn't alone in this. Go has little gotchas, Ruby has a fair few, Javascript has plenty, but PHP has loads.

The amount of PHP you need to know to avoid the sharp edges depends on the complexity of your application and what you're trying to do.

I don't make assumptions about what people are trying to build.

> I will judge people for it, in the same way I would question someone's judgement if they insisted against all evidence that there was nothing wrong with their shoe-hammer.

I also don't make assumptions about how a person evaluated and/or prioritized the tradeoffs involved with their choices, because their choice in itself doesn't tell a complete story.

Sometimes what might appear to be a bad choice was well reasoned at the time it was made. When Twitter was made, "Rails doesn't scale" was a common insult against it. But Twitter might not have been built they been forced to make it in Java.

PHP as a development paradigm is second to none. The reason to choose PHP isn't because it is such a great language, the reason to PHP is because it gives you the most power for the least effort compared to any platform targeting the web (fight me).

PHP is dead simple. I can make a new directory with a single index.php file and view it in my browser in less than 10 seconds. I can then change/add more files, hit F5, and immediately see those changes reflected on my screen. It is the tightest feedback loop possible. I didn't have to remember/rely on any CLI helpers or package managers or debug tools. I didn't have to redeploy or recompile or restart anything... none of the bullshit. Just one file in one directory with zero indirection. And we aren't even done yet!

PHP also gives you a built-in web framework out of the box. It automatically parses server/request information and hands it to me for processing into a response. What's that? I don't need a special templating engine to format my output nicely either? PHP is a templating engine! Did I mention routing is also built-in (and transparent) as well?

The above is why PHP has become so popular/beloved by so many (and hated by many more). Everyone complaining about the language features ("array doesn't work the way I want it to!") is simply putting their ignorance on full display. There is nothing wrong with wanting something else out of your development environment/paradigm (heck, I've moved on too!), but don't blame PHP because it doesn't conform to your idea of how an application should be written.

The above is also why I am so disappointed by the direction the PHP community seems to be taking the language. I am all for improving PHP as a language, but to be honest, I have a feeling the maintainers are going to prove all of those people that claim "PHP is just a worse Java" right... PHP will never be as powerful of a language as Java or C#, and for the reasons I explain above, it doesn't matter! Nobody is choosing PHP because of the language (if they were, they would have chosen Java/C# in the first place).

If you want to improve PHP, improve upon the things that make it great. Lean in to templating. Lean in to a more functional approach. Lean in to includes. Screw it, add some more magic! Make the platform more ergonomic. It was always the draw anyway. Who cares about the language...