Comments on: PHP – a bad programming language – Dark side of PHP

By: Hunter Dolan

Hunter Dolan — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 15:32:30 +0000

Anyone else find it ironic that he is bashing PHP and yet his site is powered by WordPress? A PHP blogging system…

By: Mike

Mike — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 19:13:00 +0000

PHP can be a bitch, but I love it and it gets the job done.

By: Camel Case

Camel Case — Sat, 05 Feb 2011 10:07:20 +0000

You sound like you know very little about software development. Perhaps you are self-taught, perhaps were trained in India. Whatever, it is because of folks like you who expound their ignorance that I can have a good laugh.

By: Clif

Clif — Sun, 30 Jan 2011 04:32:19 +0000

I’m not a fan of PHP, Thanks for your comments

Like JavaScript… I like weak typing, and dynamic objects, have no use of namespaces.

By: php programmer

php programmer — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 15:18:30 +0000

Hey ARI

What was you value for: $a['crap'];

Doesn’t make any sense to me!

By: maath

maath — Sun, 08 Aug 2010 09:33:20 +0000

Look at all the PHP fanbois.

PHP is great for people who don’t want to learn programming. In 24 hours you can be a PHP Guru and unfortunately lots of people consider themselves “developers” because they have knowledge in PHP. The language is supported by hobbyist programmers and has a weak community. I hate the language, and refuse to use it, as it serves no purpose for a real programmer.

By: james

james — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 14:01:21 +0000

Dont you ever use a spell check?

By: manibalan

manibalan — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 10:02:19 +0000

hey first of all you know that the PHP is dynamic language and specially used for web programming,of course its a open source.The only language very eay to learn and easy to work.i think you just not a beginner in PHP.check out the 5.3 version its include namespaces, late static binding, closures, optional garbage collection for cyclic references..etc…
check out http://www.php.net/usage.php

By: Ari

Ari — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 14:31:14 +0000

What do you get when you do this in php ?

$a = ’54′;
$val = $a['crap'];
var_dump($val);

you get string ’5′

By: alex downson

alex downson — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 12:56:23 +0000

well, i think you are not a good PHP programmer.

By: Cenovis

Cenovis — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 04:12:41 +0000

I’m someone who is coming from a mostly Java and C++ background and is in the process of learning PHP5. I understand what you mean by PHP being a bad language; too much freedom kills.

Most people (even the internet hotshots posting here) need to be protected from themselves most of, if not all of the time. Java knows this, and ensures that the user does not accidentally shoot him or herself in the foot. PHP wants too badly to bite the hand that feeds it.

Not to say that I don’t like the language, it’s very refreshing to have so much freedom. But for a serious application, or large scale website, I would definitely not use PHP. There’s a lot of naysayers here, but the overwhelming consensus elsewhere on the net seems to agree with you.

By: PHP, Bahasa Pemrograman yang Tidak Baik? | TKJstembayo, Never Ending Community

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 03:22:21 +0000

[...] semula juga tidak percaya akan hal itu. Tetapi, ketika saya membaca artikel dari sebuah blog milik Roshan, saya mulai berpikir. “Mungkin juga, [...]

By: Audi Nugraha

Audi Nugraha — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 07:58:39 +0000

7) Irrational one. Ever tried yourself? I think you’re just fell in love with Java.

By: Arwind Prasad

Arwind Prasad — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 13:52:56 +0000

I am using PHP since last 4 years and i have never feel any lack of resources in it. This looks very simple for beginners but as you go in depth of php you will find alot about PHP.

By: Ernie

Ernie — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 13:10:48 +0000

I definitely agree with the author. PHP really do have some issues to say the least. I have to say I’m quite surprised that people don’t see PHP as slow. Some say it’s not because it’s cachable. Well, I’d say that’s proof of it being slow and need caching to be fast enough (as the author argue). Using caching and accelerator it’s possible to achieve in some cases about 5 times better performance. In my opinion that’s hard evidence that there are some tricks that can be applied which will give a boost in speed. Now I’m really wondering why this isn’t a part of PHP. If PHP is suppose to be fast, shouldn’t that be included by default?

One thing that’s not mentioned here is I18N (internationalization) and Unicode. PHP is useless if you want any of that. For starters both mbstring and iconv accept Unicode code-point that really, really, really shouldn’t be accepted. For instance U+D800 to U+DFFF is perfectly valid even though no Unicode encoding is using it, because in reality it’s byte sequences that are used in UTF-16 to support astral planes (stuff above U+FFFF). Last time I checked, allowing such is regarded as a potential security problem (don’t ask me why). Even so, I’m quite curios to know which byte sequences this is going to be translated to in UTF-16. Yeah, and did I mention Unicode is a 16-17 year old standard or something? IMO this should be supported a very, very long time ago. Say at least PHP4 and definitly PHP5.

Anyway, without proper support for Unicode, I18N is just about impossible to achieve. It’s not the only problem though. Proper support for I18N require locale sorting abilities, searching, to upper/lower case etc. none of it being remotely available in PHP. Mbstring doesn’t even have case-less matching! … and no, it’s not a matter of using strcmp and mb_strtolower. Case-less matching requires something called “case folding”, and that’s definitely NOT the same as lower case.

The lack of Unicode and I18N in addition to in-consequent naming convention are the main reasons why I wouldn’t develop any major web-applications in PHP. It just isn’t suited for it. Maybe PHP6 will change that, but PHP6 is not going to be available for quite while.