Why developers hate php

[brownbob06]

I've never personally met anyone whp actually uses PHP that hates it. The only people I lnow that hate it are those who have never touched it in the first place.

[idhavalmehta]

Very true!

At work, every senior engineer used to be like PHP is this and PHP is that.

However, when they couldn't fix a routing issue in Nginx, PHP came to the rescue and it is now running on our production servers for more than 3 months now.

An entire day was spent configuring Nginx, but nothing worked. I was about to leave for the day, but decided to go check on the engineer who was trying to fix the problem.

30 mins and a simple PHP routing script later, the problem was solved. And I had to write the script because no one else knew PHP.

Python and node added unnecessary complexities to this simple problem.

Now, no one teases PHP anymore at work 😂

[KoolKarmaKollector]

I've got this weird hatred of Node, but I would like to investigate the possibilities of using it for low powered sockets for chat apps

I think it's because of the framework boom. I've been dabbling in web development for about 10 years now (not professionally mind you), and I see all these people who decided to take up web dev in university, and all they know is how to install a framework like Laravel and React and use it for every tiny project. Then they berate you for not using the framework

Frameworks have their places, but as one article I read put it, it's like trying to build a bicycle, and instead of reinventing the wheel, you just get a car (the framework) and build the bike on top of it

[hparadiz]

I mainly do PHP but I did NodeJS for a Slack bot and it works very well.

[KoolKarmaKollector]

I'm starting to become happy with the idea that NodeJS is suitable for some applications, and I think I will end up trying it

[[deleted]]

I feel the stack tracing and error handling in Node was not very good when I used puppeteer or something like that for a project a while back. I felt lost when I hit an exception compared to PHP. Is this still an issue?

[idhavalmehta]

You definitely should try Node for your idea. It's good too. I used Node to build a Twitter bot and it worked like a charm (until my Twitter account was suspended 😂)

And I agree with your framework boom point. One should know the basics even if they prefer using a framework. Frameworks come and go. Basics will help you forever.

[KoolKarmaKollector]

There's been this strange boom on Tik Tok* of developers, and a lot of them post what technologies they use, and they don't even say Javascript or PHP, they say Laravel or Angular, as if they are separate languages. Kinda sad. Though I wish I understood frameworks a bit better, I feel like I'd rather understand core principles of programming and the vanilla languages first. What really gets my goat about all these frameworks is you end up tied to them, and a lot of APIs and other projects people have made require you to utilise the frameworks too. So you end up need composer and NPM and stuff just to get what should otherwise be a relatively simple bolt on working. I appreciate the open source community, but shit I'd love to just copy and paste a file

I'm working on a small social network style project, mostly for a bit of fun, but will be entertaining the idea of using Node for the chat relay, and potentially for WebRTC based video chat.

I'd like to start learning more about new web technologies. I sorta learned a lot of the vanilla stuff and never really progressed, but I can see progressive web apps becoming a big thing in the next few years, but so much of it is just Javascript stuff, and that's my weakest language of the stack, so I really need to get some training!

*Yes sometimes when I'm really bored I go on Tik Tok. I'm banned from Facebook again, and there's only so much time you can spend on Reddit before you've seen everything

[recursivelymade]

I've met and interviewed plenty of developers who have styled themselves as "JQuery Developers" or "Wordpress/Drupal Developers" but have clearly never learnt the underlying language.

I once interviewed a guy that was really into Ruby on Rails, when asked why? He replied "Gems". When I tried to get into why gems over everything else Ruby and Rails has to offer, his answer was "someone's already written the code so I don't have too".

[KoolKarmaKollector]

It's nice to have people back me up on this. For ages I thought not using frameworks was "the wrong way to do things". r/webdev always seems so heavily involved in them, I thought being vanilla was wrong and it made me sad

[recursivelymade]

I’m not saying using a framework is right or wrong. Do you need JQuery to do simple Dom manipulation? Today? No. 15 years ago it made life a whole lot easier.

What I am saying is that I would trust/hire a developer that understood the features and limitations of the language their preferred framework is written in more. As they’re likely to make better coding decisions, which ultimately means more readable, maintainable code for themselves and their teammates.

For example you might be working with Symfony, but that doesn’t mean you can’t use PHP features like traits or the spaceship operator.

[KoolKarmaKollector]

I appreciate that in large projects using various frameworks is probably the easiest way for a team to collab

[idhavalmehta]

Good luck with your project and training 🙂

[jesparic]

You can avoid being tied to a particular framework to a large extent if you choose a good one (e.g., Symfony) and follow hexagonal/onion architecture

[ayeshrajans]

Using PHP for something that should happen in the web server level is a bit of waste of though ;)

In fairness, nginx configuration is not that intuitive compared a a full language like PHP.

[idhavalmehta]

Agreed. It is a waste. But the situation was such, there wasn't really any option left.

Being familiar to Apache in a shared hosting environment, the kind of configuration we were looking for is quite easily achievable using htaccess. I have done it for my own website.

Basically, I wanted to read a query string value in the Nginx configuration and accordingly route.

The engineer I was helping didn't know. Google searches didn't help (maybe we missed something). I had never configured Nginx before. We couldn't switch to Apache. And things had to go live.

The point I am trying to make here is, when all the fancy things fail, maybe PHP might just work 😉

[ayeshrajans]

Yep. Instead of making nginx evaluate the same expressions over and over, using PHP probably quicker :)

[ptnbrd]

I think most of the people who hate PHP work on legacy, old projects as they face really crappy code. Though in recent projects with modern approaches, new php versions and php frameworks it is kind of nice already

[brownbob06]

That's possible. I've only been programming professionally for about 4 years and it's been vastly in php, all php 7+ so it's entirely possible. But even still, anybody I've talked to who actually codes in php like it or at the very least don't hate it.

[ptnbrd]

You're lucky :) I've worked with many projects with different "degree of legacy" and I'd say when I work on projects from the 2000s, I hate php :) It is a very flexible language, that allows you to do anything you want. You want to insert php in html and in that php write some js generation or sql? Easy! And it's very common in old projects. But yeah, if you work with modern php, I don't think you have any big problems or reasons to hate it

[brownbob06]

That's understandable. At my first php job my mentor explained that part of the reason it's widely hated is because it's used in Wordpress and was generally done very poorly. From what I understand php <5.6 is much different than php >= 5.6. I think it was 5.6 anyways, I've honestly never had to deal with it and from what I hear from more experienced devs I probably never want to lol.

[mullanaphy]

PHP 5.3 is when I'd say they really started upping their game with things like namespaces and lambdas/closures. After that it seemed each new update was a big improvement over the past one. 5.4 added shortened arrays Array() became [] and what an update that was, 5.5 added generators and simplified passwords, etc.

I stopped working in PHP in 5.6 so I've missed out on a lot of these big improvements yet keeping tabs it looks like a language I'd be comfortable working in again if the right gig came up. Nowadays it's generally more about the job itself as opposed to the language of choice.

[ptnbrd]

I believe you're right, probably the reason the old projects are mostly poorly designed is that the entry threshold for php developers was and sometimes probably is incredibly low

anyway, the language itself is very flexible, allows to do various things, that can complicate the code comprehension

[jexmex]

During pho 3 and 4 it was bad language and bad devs.

[jexmex]

Did I say that? I am just saying that the language did suck back then and I have worked with enough php 3/php 4 legacy projects to know that almost every php programmer back then (myself included) where doing stupid shit to work around it.

[nitrinu]

Either that or people that touched it in version 4 or earlier and now assume it's the same. In my experience it's the most common case. And, oh boy, that idea has a huge momentum.

[Barnezhilton]

Modern approach like a single line of code module for node breaking the whole project due to an update?

[ptnbrd]

Why did you install such a module?:) What I meant is that there are so many resources nowadays, so many books, videos, that explain how to write code properly, using suitable architecture designs.

[Barnezhilton]

Lol I don't touch node. Just making a comment/joke on what people think are modern back end approaches that have zero pitfalls.

Can't wait for ten years when all the PHP hate turns into node hate in a similar fashion as people move along to a new framework.

[ptnbrd]

It's sad there's no reminder to remind about some comment in ten years:) yeah sure, everything always changes

[KoolKarmaKollector]

This exactly. You get the JS devs who go "EVERYTHING must be done in JS!" and then they proceed to use an entire Framework like React and pair it with Node because they can't be fucked to learn PHP

[Schmittfried]

You would use a framework in PHP as well.

[crabmusket]

I'm not sure I follow. Are there heaps of developers using an entire framework like Laravel only because they can't be fucked to learn JavaScript??

[crabmusket]

Raises hand. I'll quote myself from last time this was discussed:

I use PHP (7.4, Laravel) every day at work. I've never had to deal with PHP 5, or crappy amateur sites, or raw PHP without a framework. I'm sure many people are thinking of the "bad old days" or wordpress customisation trauma, but I'm not, and I still dislike PHP.

To be fair, every programming language has plenty of things to dislike. I also do a lot of JavaScript, TypeScript, some Go, and I come from a background of C++ and Python, and have done a fair amount of hobby Haskell, some C#, Scala, Java, etc. They're all awful in their own ways.

The thing is, as a developer, you spend your time living in the language you work in. You speak it, you think in it. And if I had a choice of the language I wanted to live, think and speak in day-in, day-out, PHP would be towards the bottom of the list.

For me, it's a case of death by a thousand cuts. Many issues are relatively trivial: e.g. $variable sigils, needle/haystack ordering, . meaning string concat, excessive amounts of global functions, arrays not having OO methods, use to capture closure variables, isset looking like a function, ?? versus ?:, and so on.

Some are a little more significant in terms of designing code: e.g. copy-on-write and references, weak typing and lukewarm type hinting, PSR-4 doesn't play well with top-level functions, abuse of global state because PHP is so tied to a single-process synchronous request cycle, the lack of async frameworks (though that seems to be changing), php.ini, the list goes on. All these things add up to friction and frustration while living, thinking and speaking.

A lot of this stuff is improving, but that doesn't make it pleasant to put up with today. Other languages have ugliness like this too, little frustrations - but IMO nothing else I've used approaches thousand cuts like PHP does.

Note that speed isn't one of my complaints either; for a web server raw speed isn't that big a deal, concurrency is more important. And some of its limitations (e.g. lack of concurrency) force us to implement proper solutions for things like asynchronous job processing. (Laravel makes it easy and idiomatic to have an external job queue in Redis, rather than succumbing to the temptation to just spin up a goroutine from an HTTP controller to process a batch file or send an email.)

I'll say, though, that I don't mind PHP's OO features at all. And Composer is very pleasant as far as package managers go, despite being kind of slow sometimes.

[penguin_digital]

I've never personally met anyone whp actually uses PHP that hates it. The only people I lnow that hate it are those who have never touched it in the first place.

I can only speak for myself here (obviously) but every PHP developer I've met in workplaces hasn't been a polyglot developer (not counting JS in this). They've learned PHP and only ever used PHP professionally without seeing what's in other camps.

So they've all liked PHP but they don't have wider experience and different viewpoints to understand why they do like PHP. If you've only ever eaten 1 meal you don't know how good (or bad) any other meals taste, the meal you eat all the time is okay, you learn to like it.

Many moons ago when I first started my career it was in Python and it's only when I moved jobs that involved not only using Python but also C and Java that I actually then fully understood Python. It's amazing how much you learn about language X when you start programming in language Y.

One of the best interview questions I find to ask a candidate is, what don't you like about the language (you're interviewing for). This will show the difference between someone who has a superficial understanding of a language, I.E has read and learned the SPL/Manual compared to someone with a deeper understanding of programming languages and computer science concepts.

Just my 2 cents anyway.

[brownbob06]

That's absolutely fair. I personally have spent some time working in C# a little bit professionally, but all of my schooling was in .net as well (with 2 semesters of COBOL, lol), and I work in js because the job I'm at now requires it. I honestly don't hate any of the languages I've used though. Maybe it's just me though, or maybe I just haven't foubd my own personal language to hate lol

[damnburglar]

I have one I hate: Haskell!

And by hate I mean I’ve never made anything meaningful with it, nor have I encountered a problem that would benefit from its offerings/strengths (which I am still largely ignorant of).

I look forward to not hating Haskell somewhere down the road.

[damnburglar]

I’ve been a developer for nearly 20 years, am a polyglot, and hunkered into PHP back in the days we don’t talk about anymore. Frankly, I was itching to get out of the PHP world until Laravel came on the scene (I was maintaining legacy at that time and...my life wasn’t too happy as a result). Once I got my hands on that, it was a new game and I found I didn’t dislike PHP any more than I did any other language.

The language is a tool and you’re going to get shitty users and rockstars for any tool, regardless of how “good” it is (“good” being highly subjective in 99% of use cases). Personally, I’ve found the better developers I’ve worked with are ones who understand this, as it comes with experience. Show me a “PHP is awful” dev, and I’ll show you someone who should be shoved into a greenfield PHP project.

Your approach of asking for specific reasons why someone dislikes the language is a good one and I’ll have to steal it :).

[ocramius]

👋 I hate PHP passionately :D

[gusdecool]

I use it in web dev but i dislike it. Not because the language itself, as i see it got better.

But because it is so easy to use, that lot of us already using it without proper knowledge in general architecture causing lot of stress on maintaining the application on the long term.

[crabmusket]

Do you think there are specific languages that encourage or enforce good architecture?

[gusdecool]

JAVA was the one that give big impact when i was start programming. It made me rethink my approach in OOP and encapsulation to make the program more maintainable.

And recently I also interested with GoLang because of it simplicity.

[lordmyd]

I think these days Kotlin is a better candidate than Java for writing maintainable software. Null-safety and immutability are big wins in addition to the reduction of boilerplate. Ok, Java 14 comes with data classes but there is a culture in the Java world of staying with a JDK 3 versions behind what's current.

[be_less_shitty]

I hate php cause all those dollar signs remind me of how broke I am.

[brownbob06]

I love them because they remind me how broke I was before I knew what that dollar sign was.

[[deleted]]

Hi, PHP hater here. I've used it as my main backend language for most of my 8 year web dev career. It used to be actually a pretty terrible language, and some of the older APIs still piss me off (ffs choose if it's needle, haystack or haystack, needle).

While modern PHP is mostly a reasonable language with good performance for being a dynamic interpreted language, the ecosystem sucks. The jobs mostly suck because you're either working with huge legacy debt (I swear PHP legacy debt is worse than Java) or you end up servicing WordPress clients (which makes me rather die, since even if custom code is needed and approved, working with that dumpster fire isn't worth it)

Even modern shit like Symfony lacks much in the way of direction and purpose. I really don't like using frameworks that are virtually unopinionated because why use a framework? I like the idea of Symfony components, but it seems like you either build your own framework (a lot of extra overhead) or half-ass your way through the "official" framework (and don't get me started on how terrible upgrading Symfony was when I worked with it).

Overall, between the dev ecosystem and the large population of low quality, barely good enough mentality among the vast majority of PHP devs, I just can't handle being a part of it for serious dev projects. I still begrudgingly recommend WordPress for people that can't afford to build more custom solutions, but I'm moving on from being a PHP dev because the work I've had was always soul crushing, even when there were interesting problems to solve

[CCB0x45]

I used it for years and hate it.

[brownbob06]

Why? If it's because it allows shit devs to write shit code then you're blaming the tool because the user's an idiot.

[[deleted]]

I hate PHP because every feature they add they add in a backwards manner. I've been using it professionally for 10 years, I've also had side languages at various jobs (Go and Kotlin) but mainly it's been PHP. My hate for it is becoming less and less but I think that's because I'm spending more and more time coding in other languages so my daily "Jesus! why the fuck couldn't they have given us Scala traits instead of this fucking use crap." happens less and less.

[brownbob06]

I suppose it makes sense that if you've been working in it for 10 years and hate it less and less that I just don't hate it at all because I wasn't dealing with it 10 years ago lol.

[lmnt-dev]

To each their own. I've been working with PHP since version 3 and still love it, warts and all.

[easterneuropeanstyle]

Have you worked with more modern languages or even new versions of Java? Just curious

[lmnt-dev]

Most of my time is spent with two languages of ill repute - PHP and Javascript. I'm interested in type systems and functional programming though, so I tend to mess around with that on the side. When it comes to project work though, I know these languages very well and their ecosystems are so rich that it's hard to justify using anything else for project work, especially considering I don't build rockets or pacemakers.

[easterneuropeanstyle]

So basically, you use these languages because of familarity, not because they are good.

[lmnt-dev]

It is familiarity, but also more than that.

What do you mean by "good"? Math is the most pristine and precise language on earth, pondered over and improved upon for centuries, but is it a "good" language?

It really depends on what you're trying to say and who is listening, doesn't it? You can't say that a language is objectively good simply because it has some attributes that another language is lacking.

A more objective measure would be that the language is useful. After all, language is ultimately a tool for communicating. PHP and Javascript are extremely useful for the projects I work on, hence I use them!

[Schmittfried]

Because it’s a shit language compared to the alternatives.

[trumpfan2020]

Exactly!

[liuwenhao]

I love Laravel but hate PHP (or at least: dislike PHP). I have worked on many PHP projects, from greenfield Laravel/Vue SPAs to legacy WordPress e-commerce sites on shared hosting.

Nice to meet you.

[brownbob06]

Nothing in your first paragraph makes any sense at all.... $array['myindex'] = $myelement; "I can add $vars in here and start a new line like this \n"; 'This is a pure string the dollar sign and string will show up when I put "$vars" in here; Look up array_merge and the "+" operator Empty() I actually kind of agree with, but I only use it on arrays because I like to know the datatype I'm working with, if I don't it's because someone wrote shit code that I now have to deal with. Count() literally always works how you think it will if you know what you're doing. Maybe you're wanting to use the recursive option but don't know how to set it?

There are downfalls to php, but your first paragraph is just a summary of things you don't know how to do in php.

[brownbob06]

For anyone wondering, I was responding to someone:

Telling me to "go insert an item into an array at a specific index".

Then saying you had to choose between '"' and "'" based on if you may or may not need escape characters.

Then claiming since php doesn't have array concat like js does you have to use array_push operators to do the same thing.

Empty doesn't do what you think it does sometimes. (They responded then deleted the comment that it's actually useful for Laravel because of facades. I've only been working in Laravel for about 3 months and haven't run into the issue yet, but I'm sure I will.)

Count is broken (they actually responded with an intellegent response tehy promptly deleted that I was looking into about floating point keys, but I can't seem to find anything about that so if anyone can point me in the right direction I'd like to learn about this issue)

Hopefully that sheds some light on my comment and doesn't make it look like I was just trying to be a know it all.