all 4 comments

[–]fschmidt 1 insightful - 2 fun1 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 2 fun -  (1 child)

Yes, PHP is horrible. That is why it became so popular.

[–]package 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

PHP is the excel of backend languages

[–][deleted] 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

"Sorry that I didn't invent a prettier internet or Facebook or WordPress for you guys." - PHP

[–]SoCo 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

There is plenty to complain about, I mean a whole lot, but this stance is a bit overboard.

PHP was never meant to be a programming language, just a text templating system. It has done very well to expand much much past its origins, with many annoying vestigials from it's earlier simpler conceptions, like many others with a similar history (ie JavaScript, Python, Lua).

Several of the gripes don't seem very reasonable, like complaining the warning/error handling has too many hierarchical levels of configuration with ini files, the @ symbol, and various error reporting options. The same goes for levels of security options for fopen. There's nothing particularly wrong with being loosely typed, many languages are, and the author seems to enumerate quite a few characteristics of this. In the same way, the author complains a lot about error handling that is a symptom of being an interpreted language (ie not compiled).

Hopefully many of the other complaints are improved by now, as this article was from 2012, provoking a bit of confusion.

In the end, the value of a language isn't any of those strives for perfection; if you are able to quickly create a reliable project, then it is a good language. One must remember, this relies heavily on "you."