Skill issue
I briefly touched PHP in undergrad and never worked with it again. Why do people hate it so much?
It used to have some really strangely behaving functions and syntax. Stuff like inconsistency between throwing and returning error codes, weirdly named standard functions, adding strings with numbers, really really strange but very well known bugs you had to constantly work around and a lots of ambiguous syntax causing strange bugs rather than just crashing to help you out. It also had this horrible feature where if you write $$variable where the contains a string, it’d access the contents of the variable with that string as name, which allows for huge security risks but also lots of “quirky” coding.
It was also one of the most supported languages for web back-ends, so lots of people had the displeasure of working with it.
But AFAIK the newer versions have made it somewhat of a normal language. r/lolphp used to document a lot of those oddities, so you could sort it by top all time if you want to see some weird shit.
But AFAIK the newer versions have made it somewhat of a normal language
Yup! The language maintainers have been slowly and surely standardizing the behavior you mentioned, first deprecating it, then issuing a runtime warning, and finally making those old behaviors throw exceptions in new versions. The latest set of warnings are new in 8.3 and will be fully corrected in 9.0.
Any tech that’s sufficiently popular and accessible is also lowering the bar for how good you have to be to use it. Very similar to React nowadays imo. It’s just a dead simple mental model, so it was everywhere.
Also, PHP has come a long way and is now cleaner and faster than it ever was. There’s a lot of weird bloat surrounding the standard library, but the basic syntax is surprisingly simple once you get your head around how arrays work.
When it comes to language debates, I would highly recommend Rich Hickey’s 2011 talk, “Simple Made Easy”. Most issues of “bad” languages and code readability come to issues of familiarity, not of complexity. Complexity exists in all languages, sometimes to different extents, but most language discussions don’t isolate complexity. They conflate the two issues.
That said, I’m down to duke it out over some PHP minutia lol
come to issues of familiarity, not of complexity … They conflate the two issues
Okay, but have you seen Objective-C++?
You get two distinct syntaxes in one language that you can’t use interchangeably.
I can’t think of any two compiled languages where allowing them to link against each other in a shared codebase would not balloon their complexity. So fair. I hope no one’s trying to do that without first being fluent in the two languages.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
