The Lesser Known Contributors Who Are Trying To Make PHP Good Again

But, sticking with it, it's comes down to there being a huge market in parts and service. Something like all taxis in the US still being Ford Ts, with very little forecast of change.

One of the worst flaws of php is that it makes it easy to mix up code and the view, which is ok if you're writing a single page, and terribly dangerous if you're writing anything more complex.

I've experienced this myself writing templates for things like phpbb (thankfully not something I do frequently) - every time the forum updates, the templates have to be patched again - they even have a weird patching system to try to work around the issue with code in views.

A better template language would actually limit the amount you can do in your view files to the bare minimum - something like mustache comes to mind. If you want to keep the views maintainable, easy to swap out, and easy to add alternatives to like json or XML as well as HTML, the aim should be to reduce the lines in your codebase by putting the filters, caching and logic around your views in helpers rather than inside your views.

I can agree that PHP is documented. That it is well documented however is something I'm very much willing to argue against.

PHP has string-operations documented to be "binary-safe" without ever saying what that is supposed to mean, if it's good (it's not), if it's bad (yes, yes, yes it is) and why you should have an opinion on that at all. Nothing about that. "Binary-safe" is not defined anywhere. It just "notes" that all these operations which should operate on text is "binary-safe". And "safe" makes it sound like a good feature, right?

Documentation like this is probably written by people who have no idea what a character encoding is and thinks that being able to strpos() on raw byte-data is a "cool feature", without understanding that text and it's encoded representation are two very different things.

Basically, the documentation is written by people lacking any deep understanding of the subject they are covering, and they pass their confusion on to whoever may be unfortunate enough to stumble upon it.

So... Is bad documentation better than no documentation? I don't know. Maybe? Still: PHP documentation, good or bad, represents the blind leading the blind.

If you want "extremely well documented", head over to MSDN and check the .net docs. It's systematic, it's consistent and it's thorough. It's written by people who understand the difference between Unicode, UTF8, text and bytes. Or whatever else the subject you are reading about covers.

But people peddling in PHP wouldn't know that, because they wouldn't want to go too far outside their comfort-zones, and hey, they definitely wouldn't want to look at anything done by Microsoft.