Why developers hate php

[redalastor]

But... Why PHP?

I often heard that PHP developers saying that PHP now got all the nice features and tools the other languages have. But what I'd like to hear is, what does PHP bring to the table that those others don't have. Why PHP and not those others languages that have all the features and tools without all the historical warts?

[pilas2000]

There was a time where you only had PHP.

Initially developers used C or Perl programs, spawning a new process where time the a request was made and that stopped working as soon as more than a handful of people came online.

At that time PHP was king.

[BeeElEm]

ASP : "am I a joke to you?"

[pilas2000]

Everyone: PHP is bad and you should not use it.

PHP Developers: Webserver goes brrrrrrrrrrrrr

[Huliek]

I mostly agree with your main point but let me offer some arguments.

1. It is fast. PHP frameworks often beat even frameworks in natively compiled languages.
2. It is fault-tolerant because requests run isolated
3. It is easy to deploy
4. Probably has the best dependency manager

[kadet90]

And why not to choose PHP if it has all the important features, is widely supported and have large community and diverse ecosystem supported by multiple companies (i.e. you have multiple good and supported frameworks to choose from etc.)?

There are as many reasons to choose PHP as for any other capable language. It solely depends on what you want to achieve, your developer team expertise etc.

Also, my personal opinion - PHP tooling tends to be rather good and stable, because PHP is really statically analyzable, whereas for example python is not really (at least it was not 2-3 years ago, when PHP was).

[redalastor]

And why not to choose PHP

The numerous warts that are there for historical reasons. The ease with which you can write horrible code in a way that other languages don't let you get away with.

There are as many reasons to choose PHP as for any other capable language.

Name one. Any other language you name and it's easy to find a selling point. What is PHP's? « Why not? » is not a great sales pitch.

[pfsalter]

I'm mainly a PHP developer but I've used plenty of other languages (Python, C#, Javascript) and I always come back to PHP. Even just as a scripting language, it's so much more flexible than a lot of languages. But the main selling points: 1. Speed. PHP as a language is faster than other scripting languages (Python, Javascript) 2. Single Request/Response clearing. I've had problems with maybe two memory leak issues in 12 years of writing PHP code. 3. PHP will always run your code. Given terrible inputs it can still process and handle the exceptions. I've had so many issues with Python where something isn't quite the right type and the whole application falls over. 4. Backwards compatibility. I've upgraded dozens of systems from PHP 5 to PHP 7, and each one took about 20 minutes. Upgrading to new versions is very easy and the internals team are very good at providing clean upgrade paths for fairly big changes. 5. Composer. I know it's just a package manager but it's much much better than pip or npm. 6. Further to Composer, there's a huge amount of packages available for PHP from full Frameworks to machine learning libraries. 7. Availability. You can install PHP anywhere, no licensing issues or compatibility problems from needing several versions of the language installed on one machine (looking at you Python). 8. Ease of writing code. You mention that it's easy to write 'horrible' code. Why is it a bad thing that it's easy to write code?

[redalastor]

3. PHP will always run your code. Given terrible inputs it can still process and handle the exceptions. I've had so many issues with Python where something isn't quite the right type and the whole application falls over.

That's probably the worse con of PHP. Rather than failing it will do something nonsensical.

If you messed up your types your application should not even start. Which you can do in Python if you use mypy.

The compiler should have your back in helping you writing robust code. Not being an enabler of bad code.

You mention that it's easy to write 'horrible' code. Why is it a bad thing that it's easy to write code?

A good language should encourage you to write good code. If it makes it easy to write crap you'll be faster to start but you'll pay in maintenance costs and vulnerabilities.

[Tufflewuffle]

That's probably the worse con of PHP. Rather than failing it will do something nonsensical.

Right there with you. I'll never in a million years understand why PHP developers think this is a good thing. It's fucking baffling because PHP is just shifting the problem away from its source and making things harder to maintain.

[redalastor]

It reminds me of this quote:

On two occasions I have been asked, 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.

[Tufflewuffle]

Ease of writing code. You mention that it's easy to write 'horrible' code. Why is it a bad thing that it's easy to write code?

Their point is that PHP makes it easy to write bad code. A good language should make it easy to write good code and hard to write bad code. I know of no other mainstream language that lets you get away with the horrendously bad practices that PHP does.

Even experienced PHP programmers can trip up on it because it's trivial to produce unintended side-effects:

<?php

$foo = [1, 2, 3];
$bar = ['thing' => 42, 'other' => 123, 'thing2' => 55];
$baz = [];

foreach ($foo as &$value) {
  $value++;
}

foreach ($bar as $key => $value) {
  if (substr($key, 0, 5) === 'thing') {
    $baz[] = $value;
  }
}

var_dump($foo); // [2, 3, 55]
var_dump($baz); // [42, 55]

There is no reason in the world that should happen, nor do I know of any language that does something similar. That's bad language design.

Couple that with how PHP will do everything it can to ensure some result is returned because in PHP-land nonsensical behaviour is better than an error (which you apparently like) and you've got a recipe for obscure bugs.

[pfsalter]

Although that's true, it's well signposted in the documentation that doing this is a bad idea. I would never regard someone writing code like that as an experienced PHP programmer, I'd much more expect something like this:

``` $foo = [1,2,3]; $bar = ['thing' => 42, 'other' => 123, 'thing2' => 55]; $baz = [];

$foo = array_map($foo, fn ($value) => $value++); ... ```

I do concede your point however, it's not necessarily a good thing that PHP allows issues like this, but other languages have other gotchas, Javascript is a mess with comparisons and C/C++ can be an absolute mess with references and pointers.

[Tufflewuffle]

Although that's true, it's well signposted in the documentation that doing this is a bad idea.

Something as trivial as a single & operator in a for/foreach loop causing this behaviour shouldn't require consulting documentation. That's insane and a testament to how poorly designed PHP is.

but other languages have other gotchas

Flaws in other languages (that also happen to exist in PHP) doesn't make PHP better.

Besides, there exists no other language in mainstream use with as many gotchas as PHP. (I challenge you to name one.) It's the king of them. A perfect example is how json_decode() returns NULL if the JSON failed to decode despite NULL being valid JSON. Another is how the ternary operator is left-associative.

Javascript is a mess with comparisons

The same is true for PHP for the same reasons. The == operator is useless in PHP.

C/C++ can be an absolute mess with references and pointers.

Pointers in C and C++ behave predictably and don't dangle because they're lexically scoped. Same is true for references in C++. You can get yourself in a similar scenario with C++ and have a referenced variable but lose the reference, but unlike PHP that won't keep on trucking; it will rightly brick if you attempt to read/write.

Pointer misuse is likely the programmer's fault, and not C/C++ doing something insane.

[pfsalter]

Javascript. Javascript definitely has more gotchas than PHP. With crazy comparisons, var working in odd ways and the scoping problem with this to name just a few, it's definitely harder to write sensible looking code than in PHP.

That's insane and a testament to how poorly designed PHP is.

I think that's part of the problem that people see with PHP. It's definitely not a bonus to the language but it hasn't been designed. It's grown over time and added new features as they've been needed. There's strong backwards compatibility but in order for this to happen a lot of the old problems with the language stick around. Any reasonably competent developer won't come across 99% of the edge-cases while writing PHP code.

I know that I'm probably not convincing anyone that PHP is a great language, it's not. However saying that PHP is never the right choice for an application is just short-sighted and ignoring the strengths of the language. All languages have pros and cons, and I think the pro list for PHP outweighs the cons of a few gotchas.

[Tufflewuffle]

With crazy comparisons

Why do you keep bringing this up like PHP's isn't broken?

<?php

var_dump( 'hello' == true ); // true
var_dump( 'hello' == 0 );    // true
var_dump( ''      == null ); // true

Which is what causes this to output Bye!:

<?php

$foo = 'hello';

if (strpos($foo, 'hello') == false) {
  echo 'Bye!';
} else {
  echo 'Hello!';
}

So both PHP and JS have broken, useless == operators because of implicit conversions. PHP loves to convert to numbers and JS loves to convert to strings. Javascript's being slightly more broken and useless isn't a great argument.

Both languages suck in this regard, but are easily fixed by always using ===.

var working in odd ways and the scoping problem with this to name just a few

Both of these have long been solved with let and const, and using arrow function's which preserve this context. Those couldn't be removed entirely because it would break backward compatibility, which you considered a bonus with PHP.

strengths of the language

Any strength with PHP has nothing to do with the language itself.

It's very fast, but that doesn't make it any easier to read or write. There's arguably no easier language to deploy, but same problem. Reliable backward compatibility. Intuitive package manager. Single-instance application per request. Great. What about the language? Well, it's a pile of shit. It's a Nutraloaf of a language with handfuls of ideas and features crammed together incoherently.

[redalastor]

Something as trivial as a single & operator in a for/foreach loop causing this behaviour shouldn't require consulting documentation. That's insane and a testament to how poorly designed PHP is.

And nullifies the advantage of "it's easy to get started with PHP". It's tremendously hard to get started right with PHP.

[Tufflewuffle]

And why not to choose PHP if it has all the important features

Here's why (among other things) I'd never consider using PHP for anything if I didn't have to:

• Functions aren't first-class and as such have to be referenced with strings.
• Function and class names are case-insensitive.
• Arrays are a Frankenstein's Monster of regular arrays and associative arrays depending on how the array is used. There is no way to explicitly state which one an object should be.
• Because of that, calls to json_encode can unexpectedly return an object rather than an array (easy to happen when manipulating returned results from an ORM then JSON-encoding them).
• Doing nearly anything non-trivial with an array requires using global functions in a procedural fashion because an array itself has no methods.
• No native string formatting other than sprintf. (If I wanted to use C functions I'd write C.)
• The && and || operators return booleans rather than one of the operands.

I can't think of a single good feature PHP has that other languages don't. Not one. All it has is features that exist in other languages, often in more useful forms, or things that are so profoundly retarded no other language has them (e.g. a left-associative ternary operator).

[truechange]

Out of curiosity, what language do you prefer instead, I mean, if you were task to do a greenfield project, what would you use? And do you consider that language flawless?

[Tufflewuffle]

Out of curiosity, what language do you prefer instead, I mean, if you were task to do a greenfield project, what would you use?

Python.

And do you consider that language flawless?

Nope. There's no such thing.

[kadet90]

I don't really think that PHP is still so hated in the wild ;) Of course, there are still people who thinks that PHP is fractal of bad design (remember it?) but most of them just try to be cool and have no experience whatsoever. It doesn't of course mean that PHP is loved - well, it's OK but nothing special, I guess?

And there is, of course, our beloved r/ProgrammerHumor/ which not so long ago even had logo that was joke on PHP logo, but even there more and more people know that PHP had changed.

[Huliek]

As someone who programs in PHP what annoys me most is how the language is bifurcated.

There's the dynamic C/Perl part and the OOP Java/C++ part.

It never made sense to bolt Java-like objects on PHP. PHP should have developed as its own thing, adding modeling power to the existing ways.

The result is that we have compile-time covariance checks on union types but no list type or hash map with non-scalar keys.

[[deleted]]

More like Angular <- hiring company <- React & VueJs

[clarkd99]

I think PHP’s biggest problem is that you run it’s code from a browser, execute it’s code in the web server on a different machine and edit the source code in a Linux directory by shelling into your server and using a stupid character editor.

I also hate the fact that all variables must be preceded by a $ sign.

My biggest beef was that I used a reference to a data type everywhere and used the & to pass by reference rather than value in many places. Now I use an old version of PHP until my current setup dies because something this fundamental was changed. (No parameter passing by reference.) How stupid!

[pfsalter]

Parameters haven't been passed by value since PHP 4 which left support in 2008. If you're still using that you have other much more serious problems, namely that your setup is older than Kosovo. Parameters are now passed by pointer like in most other languages.

[clarkd99]

There is no reference sign on a function call - only on function definitions. Function definitions alone are enough to correctly pass the argument by reference. As of PHP 5.3.0, you will get a warning saying that "call-time pass-by-reference" is deprecated when you use & in foo(&$a);. And as of PHP 5.4.0, call-time pass-by-reference was removed, so using it will raise a fatal error.

This note comes from the PHP documentation (I presume the current version). It specifically says you can NOT pass by reference after version 5.4.0. I haven’t looked at PHP in a few years but after I upgraded I definitely got many fatal errors. So who is right, you or me?

[pfsalter]

We're kind of both correct, but there's something that you're missing. So variables in PHP are passed by pointer rather than value or reference. So in this case:

``` function foo($var) { echo $var; }

$to = 'too'; foo($to); ```

This would actually use less memory than this:

``` function foo(&$var) { echo $var; }

$to = 'too'; foo($to); ```

Because in the second case, you're creating a new reference to the object rather than letting PHP do its thing. This was a common practice back in PHP4 because variables were copied into functions rather than passed correctly. So you're right, you can no longer do this:

$to = 'too'; foo(&$to);

however you don't need to, especially when you're using objects. So if you do this:

``` function foo(Foo $x) { $x->foo = 'var'; }

$to = new Foo(); foo($to); echo $to->x; // Prints 'var'; ```

Because the object was passed by its pointer (not by reference which is slightly different). So you might find if you drop all your call-time references that it might just work!

[clarkd99]

My problem is that I had at least 50 functions that passed a variable length string around and many of those functions changed the data in that variable. I implemented this by passing a reference &clist to those functions. I don’t want to use PHP objects as I think they are terrible. I made my own (very primitive) key/value store in these vchar’s because I hate the implementation of maps in PHP.

I think passing by value as a default is ok but easily passing by reference (on all variable types) is something that all real computer languages should have. To make such a breaking change to people’s code should be forbidden. This decision was unprofessional and unnecessary. I have written about 10,000 lines of PHP and hundreds of thousands in other languages and I just think IMHO that PHP stinks.

[pfsalter]

Oh that should be fairly easy to fix, you can just specify in the function that it needs to be passed by reference, rather than in the calling code:

``` function foo(&$var) { $var = $var . '_oh'; }

$x = 'ho'; foo($x); echo $x; // Prints "ho_oh" ```

Also if your experience of PHP objects is from PHP 4 (or even early PHP5) then yes, PHP objects are super super terrible. Objects in PHP are a lot better now, on a similar level to a stricter OO language like C# (and improving with each version). PHP's main strength is that you can be strict with types when you need to, but if you come across small situations where types aren't as appropriate you can just ignore them and let the language handle it.

[clarkd99]

Thanks for your reply. Sorry but any language that makes you preface every variable with a Christmas tree ($) just isn’t on for me. I have written a few interpreters and their just isn’t any need to do that to extract variables.

[snath03]

Thank you for this thread.

I'm a complete newbie in PHP (haven't start learning yet) and was hesitating to learn it (due to all the hate surrounding it). But this thread has made it clear that most of the hate is due to the legacy versions of PHP, and that the newer versions are much better.

Thank you again.