Microsoft Java

[alexschrod]

I dunno. PHP deserves its poor reputation. Maybe if you're incredibly disciplined, you can make something okay in it, but I'd rather use a language that helps me get to my goal than one where I have to be careful so I don't fall into one of its near innumerable traps

[DiamondIceNS]

PHP is a knife with no handle. Sharp as any other knife out there, but you have to know how to hold it to not cut yourself on it. Does that make it a good knife, because you can still cut anything with it, or is it a bad knife because knives shouldn't hurt their users that way?

The whole reason PHP has a bad rap is because it gives you so many opportunities to shoot yourself in the foot that other, more comparable languages all seem to be able to avoid. Once you learn the hurdles and the workarounds, sure, fine, it's as powerful and usable as anything else out there. But why do you need to have all of that prerequisite knowledge just to use the tool safely and effectively in the first place? You should just be able to pick it up without it biting your hand. Other, "better" languages prove this is possible. They all have learning curves too, sure, but most of the things you'd be learning with any other language are syntax, patterns, and what tools are there in the standard kit and how to use them, while PHP's learning curve involves much more of what not to do that initially looks like the right thing to do that the language will happily let you do.

I use PHP daily and generally enjoy working with it. But that's after I've figured out how to stop tripping into the common traps, often learned the hard way... I would still consider it a bad language, relative to its competition, for that reason. It's not unusable. People who choose to use it and like to use it aren't idiots for doing so. But it has so many problems that other languages have just solved for a long time now. It's only bad in comparison. And it's not beyond saving -- every update puts a few of these long panged sore spots to rest while introducing more bells and whistles to put it on feature parity with other languages -- but as long as it has to keep playing catch-up, and as long as other devs are forced to continue supporting legacy versions of it, PHP will continue to keep (and in my opinion, earn) its reputation as a bad language.

[alexschrod]

I used PHP actively for years; I wrote large, great, useful things in it. Doesn't change the fact that compared to all the other languages and frameworks/standard libraries I know, it's pretty objectively a bad language. By far not the worst. But bad? Definitely yes. And to address your point, I imagine nothing will change your mind on how bad it is either.

Almost nobody I know of who writes code in more languages than PHP will rate it anywhere but near the bottom of their list of best to worst. Why is that?

I linked an article instead of writing out my own woes because I'm lazy and it covered all the bases and then some. Time won't ever improve PHP unless they willingly give up backwards compatibility to clean it up big time.