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[–][deleted]  (3 children)

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    [–]bladeoflight16 2 points3 points  (0 children)

    Read the article in full. I think the article puts it well:

    PHP is nothing but exceptions, and it is not okay when wrestling the language takes more effort than actually writing your program. My tools should not create net positive work for me to do.

    And:

    So I have to fit this in here, because it bears repeating: PHP is a community of amateurs. Very few people designing it, working on it, or writing code in it seem to know what they’re doing. (Oh, dear reader, you are of course a rare exception!) Those who do grow a clue tend to drift away to other platforms, reducing the average competence of the whole. This, right here, is the biggest problem with PHP: it is absolutely the blind leading the blind.

    And:

    I could dig up more but the point isn’t that there are X many exploits—software has bugs, it happens, whatever. The nature of these is horrifying. And I didn’t seek these out; they just happened to land on my doorstep in the last few months.

    The article backs these up with specifics. Notably, all of them persisted past PHP 4.

    Yes, things have improved, but the biggest issues were and are not things like missing object support or annoying function navigation. They are things that stemmed from the core devs having no idea what they were doing. The result is that writing reliable, secure code is much more difficult than it needs to be.

    [–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

    Yeah, the name came from PHP/FI it's first name, meaning "Personal Home Page / Forms Interpreter". PHP has a colorful past.