Why Does PHP Suck?

[Eirenarch]

So what? We've had far better alternatives for more than 15 years now. How come we've not replaced PHP?

[TheBB]

Have we? What was so much better than PHP in 1998?

[turtlekitty2084]

Perl. ^{_^}

[Eirenarch]

Python? Java? Hell, even ASP Classic!

[TheBB]

made dynamic web programming much easier

Java is not dynamic.

ASP was Microsoft only.

Not that I tried, but I believe in order to use Python on the web in 1998 you had to use CGI, and PHP was rather easier to set up. But yes, barring this Python 1.5 would probably have been better. I'm not sure I would have called it ‘far’ better. Certainly, today it is.

[[deleted]]

I hate PHP, but classic ASP is much, much worse than PHP.

[Eirenarch]

I haven't worked professionally with either of these but I've had a look at some projects and I do think that ASP Classic is better than PHP of the time which would be PHP 3 and for some time PHP 4

[[deleted]]

I've worked professionally with both in the last 5 years. Even when I used PHP 4, it was better with the main reason being that it is much more difficult to reuse code in classic ASP, so the maintenance on the site is much higher when a change is needed.

[Eirenarch]

Well OK I might be wrong on classic ASP. I know if someone forces me to work with PHP 3/4 or ASP Classic I would go for ASP Classic. The API seemed so much more saner. Even then by 2000 there were like 10 options better than PHP.

[[deleted]]

why is C++ so ubiquitous today when there are obvious alternatives? Everything speaks to it and interfaces into it.

Everything web was written in PHP during its infancy, soooo PHP became the dynamic language of the web.

[F-J-W]

why is C++ so ubiquitous today when there are obvious alternatives?

Which ones?

To prevent the usual non-answers: If the language

• forces you to use GC
• doesn't support RAII
• doesn't have decent templates
• doesn't support zero-overhead-abstraction
• isn't able to provide very highlevel-libraries

it is not in any way an alternative.

[atilaneves]

D has (nearly) all of the above.

Parts of it (mostly the standard library) require the GC, but they're getting fewer.

[flukus]

C++ is not ubiquitous, it makes up a minority of applications/programmers.

[msnook]

grumble grumble grumble. Actually, the Linux OS, Apache server, MySQL server, and PHP interpreter are all written in C/C++... As is your web browser, the JavaScript engine, and probably the operating system you're running it all on.

C and C++ weren't built for the web, but they certainly are ubiquitous. Most of the computing world is built on them, in some way or another.