On: 25 Years of PHP

[castis]

No one is claiming that PHP is and/or was without fault. The sentiment is that we built things that worked despite them.

[ragnese → castis]

That's not being fair. There are many comments on HN of people saying exactly that PHP just isn't bad. The grandparent reply even says:

>My only real gripe with PHP is the annotation syntax.

[elric → ragnese]

I never said it was the only problem with the language. I said it was the only one that really bugged me. You're more than welcome to attack my opinion of PHP (which seems like a silly thing to do, but you're welcome nevertheless), but please don't put words in my mouth.

[nkozyra → ragnese]

The parent comment claimed that PHP's former sins were being absolved. The quote you are referencing is about the current state of PHP.

[ragnese → nkozyra]

The parent comment to mine, though, said:

> No one is claiming that PHP is and/or was without fault.

I'm emphasizing the "is" part. "No one is claiming that PHP is without fault."

My comment is asserting that there are definitely people who say that PHP is not bad. I did not speak to whether anyone claims PHP was never bad.

[nkozyra → ragnese]

Well let's be clear ... "bad" is a little more subjective than "faults," which can at least be qualified.

By some measure, every language has warts. PHP in 2008 had a ton of them. PHP in 2020 has fewer of them. Which is a lot like JS.

[ragnese → nkozyra]

But if PHP in 2020 still has a TON of warts and other languages (even ones with large ecosystems) have WAY FEWER warts, does it matter if PHP has improved since 2008?

[nkozyra → ragnese]

Again, I stopped messing with PHP at 5.7 and have watched 7+ grow. My daily language is Go, which I like a lot. Had or have runs with python, asp!, Perl, c#, node, delphi and used rust and Java for personal projects.

I can find warts in all of them. At one point I'd have put PHP right above JavaScript and ASP down at the bottom. Now? I don't see it. Legacy issues are still there, like inconsistent standard library function names, but otherwise I don't see it - as a whole - as any more 'warty' than most of those.

[castis → ragnese]

I should have known better. My apologies, the person simias is replying to is not saying that PHP is without fault.