The only language people don't shit on are the ones nobody uses.

Nah, it's historically been a special kind of shit. It started life as a Perl templating engine, then grew out to its own language where it repeated all of Perl's mistakes while adding more of its own. Its community was single-handedly responsible for keeping SQL injection attacks in the OWASP Top 10 list for years. Notice that it's now bundled with "injection attacks" as a generic label for a wider range of similar issues--SQL injection alone would no longer warrant being there. Its conflation of arrays and hash maps meant it took years to wrestle with algorithmic complexity attacks. Perl kept the two separate, and was able to get a patch out for algorithmic complexity almost immediately (though it turned out to have a few bugs of its own, and a true fix came in a few years later; still faster than PHP solved it).

The web from 1998 through 2010 or so was absolutely riddled with bad PHP programs. "But that's not the language's fault", you say? Doesn't matter. Community is an important and underappreciated feature of a language, and PHP had a special kind of shit community. It almost seemed designed to suck away the dross from all other communities.

Consider the plugin system for phpBB:

• Its architecture doesn't have any kind of hook system for plugins; they're added by patching the code in place
• This naturally leads to different plugins interfering with each other
• Having done that, you might choose one of the patch formats already out there, but phpBB decide to create their own
• There are, at first, no tools available to automatically patch in plugins, so administrators (often not developers themselves) need to hand edit the source files and modify the database (the plugin format specifies both together)
• Tools start to emerge over the years to handle it automatically, but they're buggy and unusable for a long time

Is it PHP's fault that one major application was implemented so poorly? YES! Its community is a feature, and its community is what brought us to this.

You want to claim that the language has done better since PHP7? Alright, that's fine. I still don't care. There are so many better options available, and I don't have time to keep up with all of them. I'm happy relegating PHP to being a long-tail language where it trails off slowly over the years like COBOL.

I used PHP for the past year. And honestly I still think it is not a good language. Just of the top of my head.

1. By far the biggest culprit. Arrays. This monstrosity is basically everything. Yes, it is fast but it only teaches bad habits. It is a weird combination of Arrays/Lists/(Dictionary/Hashmap) and you can't know which one it currently is because there are 0 compile time safety checks. Also when used as a parameter it is passing a full copy instead. But the copy of course is only shallow. I have seen so many problems with that. And even worse when someone thinks the way to fix it, is to just json encode/decode the whole thing in order to get a deep copy before passing it.

2. Generics. I still don't get why this is such a huge issue. Like I would rather have a half-baked optional compile time implementation then none at all. The worst part is that IDE tools support generics so you end up inplementing them on the comment level. I shouldn't be forced to use generics through comments.

3. $ for variables. I know that this is just based on how the language grew. But god do I hate having to type it. It is not an easy to reach letter and just breaks my typing flow the whole time. You get used to it but still.

4 . The default functions. Yes. You will mostly use framework provided functions or your own stuff. But you still end up in contact with them and the naming schemes are still all over the place, so it is fast to just google it then hope you accidentally stumble upon it through the IDE. And some things are still straight up missing. Like the best way to deep copy an array is json_encode into json_decode. When I saw this the first time I was sure that must be wrong. But no. That is legit the way to do it.

Also I am stuck with PHP7 so some of my other complains seemed to be fixed in later versions. Also please don't recommend DS for my first issue. I tried to push for it but it got vetoed because "it is too complicated for new devs".

There are a lot of people who think that if a language or framework doesn't completely disallow bad practices (and of course the authors have to agree with their very specific subjective ideas of what bad practices are) then it sucks. I've always found that weird. Like why are you mad at a tool for being "too flexible"? Why not be okay with learning what not to do?

I used to think that php was a bad language until recently (used php5 when i was just learning to program, cooked some delicious spaghetti). But after 5 years I had to use PHP at work. The language has improved a lot, but I think a lot of the bad parts are still there.

Like, why does stdclass exist? Why not just use associative arrays? Why are there warning, error, fatal errors, exceptions? Some functions throw exceptions, other raise errors, others return false, other fail silently and you have to call another function to check if there was an error (last_json_error). Why do find functions return false instead of -1? Like every other language? Why can't I use strings with numeric values as maps keys? (I can't have ["001" => value], it gets casted to ["1" => value].

There are no generics, you have to use mixed everywhere. The stdlib is an inconsistent mess, some_snake_case, someCamelCase, verb_noun, noun_verb, functions are not namespaced, everything is global. A lot of duplicates: die vs exit, print vs echo, etc. You are forced to use PSR & autoload to be able to use namespaces in a tolerable way, not including_once everywhere. No UTF-8 support, only ascii. You have to manually use mb_ functions. Variable scoping is weird. Variable variables? Why?

And all that is just comparing it to the average language. If compared to a modern language like Rust, Zig, Swift, php is light years behind.

It's not hot garbage, but I wouldn't call it "good". There's laravel, but not much more. PHP still makes you shoot yourself in the foot by default, unless you spend a lot of time learning its edge cases. Just like javascript.

It has also improved a lot in the last years. PHP5 and especially versions older than that weren't very good and deserved a lot of the criticism. PHP7 and onward are much better languages and don't deserve the hate.

I think the worst thing about PHP is all the ancient tutorials that litter the web like landmines. SQL injections everywhere.

And there's way too many low-budget wannabe web developers who know just enough to blow their own feet off. Or more likely whoever paid for its feet, because that web dev will be nowhere to be seen a week after handing it over.

Honestly, php is actually pretty fucking sweet for functional programming and metaprogramming... other languages wish they had __invoke and __get.

I also think it has the "right" balance of library functions built in, you can do pretty much anything common and trivial with built-ins but the function list is short enough that you can comprehend most of it.

My issue with PHP isn't the language, it's the developers. PHP developer culture is much like C# and Java culture.

I could bring a million reasons I don't want to program in PHP and every time we talk about it, the PHP developer tells me I should be using it for everything. If I suggest that it may not be the best tool for a particular task at hand, the PHP developer tells me it's the only language they know so they will use PHP.

The issue is that this type of culture closes doors mentally. In any craft, we should try to use the best tool available for the task at hand. In carpentry you'd use a hammer with nails and a screwdriver with screws. In programming, there are times using PHP makes sense and times it doesn't.

In container based services, I tend to lean toward a compiled binary because it reduces the size of the container at run time and most modern languages don't require tons of heavy duty frameworks to scale well there.

In a monolith, a fully interpreted language with an MVC framework could make sense.

I've never actually used PHP.

Does it still have random Hebrew in error messages like 'unexpected T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM'?

It's also funny how they mention languages and frameworks, but php is just php. No symphony or whatever people use now, php. And somehow people whlent from using frameworks in python to not using them? It makes little sense.

One could argue that people who say PHP is fine only suffer Stockholm syndrome !