PHP is fundamentally broken, and unfixable. Its a toy language, and there is no reason to pick it in 2026
PHP's Oddities
61–70 of 186 posts
Re: PHP's Oddities
#62About undefined vs. NULL:
> Not a warning—a FATAL error occurs if you try to access an uninitialized property. This comes up a lot in cases where you try to deserialize data into a PHP object. If a field's data isn't present you might not initialize the property at all.
I don't think that is an issue, except in interpretet type-unsafe languages it is harder to anticipate when writing code whether that value is NULL or undefined/uninitialized. E.g. it is basically the same in C#, but here the compiler warns you that the value is not initialized and forbids some actions (like reading the value of it).
Re: PHP's Oddities
#63Arrays in PHP are mostly confusing if you are used to them in other languages. Instead of $array[0] - the first element is accessed via array_first(). Having them as key-value means, that you can easily just remove some items in the middle, during iteration etc. No automatic shifting happening. The thing which bites me is when some internal functions actually reindex the array. array_filter does not, but for example…
There's one problem with arrays that I haven't seen mentioned here or by the OP: when inserting a key-value, the type of the key may change.
For instance ["4" => "four"] === [4 => "Four"]
This can lead to some unexpected behaviors. For example, I've already been bitten by `array_merge()` whose result is different if its parameters are arrays with numeric indexes.
array_merge(["4 " => "four"], ["5 " => "five"])
// ["4 " => "four", "5 " => "five"]
array_merge(["4" => "four"], ["5" => "five"])
// [0 => "four", 1 => "five"]Re: PHP's Oddities
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Modern PHP is great. Many powerful language features, excellent performance, great community and package ecosystem I heard this a long time ago about perl. CPAN is great. Well ... perl entered the fossilized era. I think people do not really observe things correctly. I am noticing the same with ruby right now - everyone sees that ruby is in decline, very strongly so, in the last 3 years. Yet you have blog posts suc…
> People seem to shy away from criticism. What actual criticism of PHP is anyone shying away from? PHP got bashed for such a long time, while simply nothing steps up to do what it does better . Something that, for example, is available on every webhost you can just throw files at, where all (meaningful) config and state can be in those files.
I've always thought that the core idea of PHP, the intermixing of code and HTML is an incredibly elegant solution to a very difficult problem. But at the same time, the language itself does suck (although I won't discount the improvements it has made). I would really love for there to be an entirely reimagined PHP from the ground up, and to hell with backwards compatibility or availability.
Re: PHP's Oddities
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Modern PHP is great. Many powerful language features, excellent performance, great community and package ecosystem I heard this a long time ago about perl. CPAN is great. Well ... perl entered the fossilized era. I think people do not really observe things correctly. I am noticing the same with ruby right now - everyone sees that ruby is in decline, very strongly so, in the last 3 years. Yet you have blog posts suc…
You can say the same thing about lisp (and C in some regards). Sometimes a language is done and anything you add to it is breaking things for no sizable improvement. And if your primary target is Unix, it’s often so easy to write a shim for C/C++ libraries that you don’t bother implementing your own version of stuff.
Which lisp? :P
Re: PHP's Oddities
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
> People seem to shy away from criticism. What actual criticism of PHP is anyone shying away from? PHP got bashed for such a long time, while simply nothing steps up to do what it does better . Something that, for example, is available on every webhost you can just throw files at, where all (meaningful) config and state can be in those files.
I've always thought that the core idea of PHP, the intermixing of code and HTML is an incredibly elegant solution to a very difficult problem. But at the same time, the language itself does suck (although I won't discount the improvements it has made). I would really love for there to be an entirely reimagined PHP from the ground up, and to hell with backwards compatibility or availability.
There was. It was called Hack[0]. Among other things it had XHP built in so you could write HTML natively (as opposed to concatenating strings) and define your own templates easily[0]. It even handled escaping. It really improved on a ton of PHP's flaws.
Unfortunately newer versions of PHP killed it and it's dead now, and even more unfortunately while PHP absorbed a lot of features from Hack, native XML was not one of them. There was even going to be a Hack version of the Composer package manager but that never got finished AFAIK. Distros stopped supporting it. I think I still have my half-finished attempt at a Hacker News fork in Hack sitting around on a hard drive somewhere. I can't even find an environment to run it in anymore.
Re: PHP's Oddities
#67Re: PHP's Oddities
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Modern PHP is great. Many powerful language features, excellent performance, great community and package ecosystem I heard this a long time ago about perl. CPAN is great. Well ... perl entered the fossilized era. I think people do not really observe things correctly. I am noticing the same with ruby right now - everyone sees that ruby is in decline, very strongly so, in the last 3 years. Yet you have blog posts suc…
People absolutely have VERY strong opinions and voice them constantly. True of every language but especially php. Almost feel like it’s more acceptable to rant about php than to praise it
I know I used to have the impression of PHP as a messy language because I last worked with PHP4. It's come a long way since then, though I don't use it.
Re: PHP's Oddities
#69[deleted]
Re: PHP's Oddities
#70After over two decades of working in PHP, I'm now working in Java. PHP is basically Java-lite. I am absolutely loving the compile-time safety of Java, but I dearly miss PHP's maps and arrays. In Java, the amount of verbosity for defining a map/list and operating on it is overwhelming. Modern PHP is great. Many powerful language features, excellent performance, great community and package ecosystem, and decent enough…
All PHP needs is python's flexible and convenient manipulation of lists/dicts/objects. Plus dropping the end semi colon and it would riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiip the fabric of spacetime.