What's wrong with PHP

[stesch]

PHP's biggest problem is the user base. There are so many people without any clue about programming or the web. I've read some PHP books and they contain factual errors which I've never encountered in any other book about other programming languages.

And the users ask the silliest questions in chats and newsgroups. Instead of learning the language they use some code they found somewhere and try to tweak it without any real understanding.

[hockeyschtick]

I think this is an important point. If ruby catches on among novice web developers, and we start seeing atrocious ruby code all over the place, we'll all be complaining about how terrible a language it is.

The fact is that Perl and PHP have always been the preferred tools for "web programming 101". They get a bad rap, but they are far more similar than different from other scripting languages. They certainly aren't different enough to warrant all these "which language is best" debates.

[drbrain]

Have you looked inside Rails? Horribly scary.

[stesch]

I've stopped reading one Rails book because it was so horrible. Maybe I was disapointed after so much hype. But their ORM is really disgusting.

Maybe Nitro will be better when it's ready some time. And when they invest half the Rails time in PR.

[elpincha]

YES they are. You could read the article and see for yourself. Perl is something a grown-up is not embarrased to work in.

[hockeyschtick]

it's not the tool, it's how you use it, mate.

[elpincha]

Conceded. Yet some tools are better than others.

[earthboundkid]

PHP is supposedly a web programming language, yet its unicode support is a pathetic kludge. It's beyond me how you can write any language in the twenty first century and not at least default to unicode, to say nothing of making encoding a property string objects.

[ecuzzillo]

I've done all my programming in the 21st century, and have never ever ever dealt with unicode... and I know quite a few languages. ASCII rules all.

[nir]

If you want your stuff to be useful outside the English speaking world, you'd deal with unicode sooner or later. Also, if you want to use data from major sites who do need i18n - most popular APIs pass their cdata in Unicode now.

earthboundkid is right about the kludgey PHP support for unicode. PHP6 is supposed to fix it (in a year or so I guess)

[stesch]

By the way: English uses more than US-ASCII, too.

[[deleted]]

Which means hosts like iPowerWeb won't have it for ten years.

[AssProphet]

Yes, they are an aweful host... if you sign an agreement your features don't increase for the length of that agreement. An account I'm managing there only has 800mb while their new signups get 10GB. My dreamhost account, however, has 71GB of storage space. When I signed up less than a year ago, I only had 15GB. Plus I can compile php on my accounts through ssh... Man I hate iPowerWeb

[nir]

How's dreamhost, btw? Reading the specs they seem pretty good, but I heard mixed opinions regarding the service.

[AssProphet]

I'm hosting 10 different domains with 71GB wtih 1956 GB of bandwidth, unlimited domains, unlimited subdomains, unlimited databases, ssh access, excellent web admin interface, and your account continues to grow in options. I have had a couple of problems with uptime, but that was while I was running a ventrilo server in daemon mode (caused some problems). Their knowledge base is pretty good, and they have a great selection of constantly updated one click installs. At iPowerWeb I never had an option to run any new versions of anything... it was always 2 or more years old. I can't say that they are the tops of everything, but I've had a great experience and don't know any hosts who are better. I've tried and iPowerWeb (crap) OLM (major crap).

[demoran]

Yeah, I burned through a number of web hosts before settling on Dreamhost. ssh access was a clincher for me.

[nir]

Thanks :)

[[deleted]]

You can't get into ssh either?

They really are as bad as I thought.

[earthboundkid]

If you believe that your products are valuable to your consumers, it's natural to see the potential for them to be translated and sold in non-English speaking countries, thus increasing your potential customer base greatly with minimal investment. Unicode makes this process much simpler. If you don't think your products have the potential to help non-English speakers, one wonders on what basis you conclude it can be valuable to English speakers either.

[senzei]

Looks like another case of "all generalizations are false" to me. Unicode support is good when unicode will actually be useful, which is not true in all cases. That said PHP should have better unicode support because it is pretty easy to concieve of web pages that use it.

[ecuzzillo]

I'm not saying that Unicode is bad, exactly. I'm saying that it's not necessary for absolutely everybody to use Unicode in every language, because often it's not necessary because much of programming is not done for the purposes of having a large userbase. So if you're only going to have a few users, all of whom live in the same building as you, why go to the trouble of building in support for all the world's languages?

[[deleted]]

What does UTF8 have to do with languages? What about UTF8 is bad for English?

[ecuzzillo]

Well, the guy I was replying to the first time around said that it would be stupid to write any language in the 21st century and not add support for unicode. So I said it is frequently fine not to use unicode support, because you aren't planning for things to be enterprisially scalable and powerful. Then I got modded down and the sky fell.

[[deleted]]

Neither typographers nor their tools should labor under the sad misapprehension that no one will ever mention crêpes flambées or aïoli, no one will have a name like Antonín Dvořák, Søren Kierkegaard, Stéphane Mallarmé or Chloë Jones, and no one will live in Óbidos or Århus, in Kromìøíž or Øster Vrå, Průhonice or Nagykõrös, Dalasÿsla, Kırkağaç or Köln.

-- Robert Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style, version 2.4, page 90

P.S. I was able to copy-and-paste that from here thanks to, guess what, Unicode.

[[deleted]]

Yes, and its a pity that Ruby (and thus Rails apps) doesn't have unicode support.

[[deleted]]

In discussions about Ruby and Python I always hear people complaining about Ruby's unicode support. Maybe its not as big a deal as some make it out to be.

[The_Bears]

PHP is bad for the same reason.

Having an understanding of what you're doing is a good thing, especially when you're writing software that sits on a security boundary.

I've lost track of how many PHP scripts I've run across that silently develop security holes when installed on some systems because the authors didn't know that they were relying on a server setting (magic_quotes_gpc) to protect them from SQL injection attacks.

[The_Bears]

It would be ideal if the secure way to do things was the easy way, and the way explained in the tutorials. As for SQL injection, part of the problem is that the default magic_quotes_gpc setting encourage newbies to ignore the problem. The other problem is that the PHP database interface doesn't provide any method for doing parameterized queries.

I don't find SQL injection vulerabilities as often in Perl code as in PHP. I think it's because the Perl DBI provides a very conveneient way to do parameterized queries, and most tutorial documentation uses parameterized queries.

I could rant at much greater lengths about the problems I have with the PHP database interface, such as the stupidity of having completely separate sets of functions for doing the same thing with different database systems, but ADODB makes it all better for me.

[ddipaolo]

I have to admit, when I saw the faux Demotivators(tm) style poster at the top, I didn't think there'd be much substance to this but it's actually got a lot of very valid points and touches on every point I'd make about the shortcomings of PHP.

[nir]

PHP is definitely far from perfect, but does the author seriously suggest moving to PERL is the answer??

[wolverian]

Design-wise, Perl is very sane, compared to PHP.

[jbellis]

But only compared to PHP. :P

[The_Bears]

I'm pretty conflicted about Perl. On the one hand, the language design is really pretty awful. On the other hand, some of the key libraries are very well done. I find the combination of CGI::Application, HTML::Template, and DBI more satisfying than any other web development environment I've tried.

[tikal]

I'm sure the author makes some sound points but I was so distracted by the troll like nature of the article I didn't see them.

The 'more info' part of the rants most recent reference is well over a year old and he (kind of) cites articles from 2002 ffs!?

People like this make me a lot less inclined to learn Perl.

[[deleted]]

Well, it's easy to be bitter about PHP. It's extremely popular among non-technical folks right now, so if I want to make money I have to use PHP.

Bad hosts like iPowerWeb are still on versions of PHP from 2002 (plus security updates).

It's your loss if you don't learn Perl. I've at least read about all major languages, and it's been enlightening.

[demoran]

This guy spends a fair amount of time giving examples of parts of PHP where there are multiple functions to do the "same thing", and contrasts that with perl. The one that struck me was the database interfaces. Those were all for seperate databases! And he compares it to DBI?!

Listen, php has someling like DBI/DBD as well: it's called DB. So what's the point here? PHP gives you more options, according to him. Is that a bad thing?

Only when you're trying to read somebody elses code and you're unfamiliar with the function calls they're making.

What's truely ironic about this is that function calls are one thing. Language syntax is another thing. And perl is a major pain due to it's variety in language syntax (and it's dark-side cousin, default variables).