I took the time to read this enormously long and detailed list of gripes about PHP and I must admit to feeling somewhat relieved. It wasn’t me all along – it just shouldn’t be this difficult.

The underlying problem with the language is it hasn’t managed to technically evolve into the enterprise development language that it’s now used for. It’s never shaken off its script-kiddie hackathon roots, adding layer upon layer of somewhat random inspiration from other languages with no real strategy. The result is a bottomless boxatricks Swiss army knife with thousands of curious tools – but the glaring omission of a few bread-and-butter spanners.

In retrospect I wonder now why, when installing XDebug into another Eclipse version and another server variant for the umpteenth time, I was so forgiving of the language not providing something as basic as a stack trace. I’ve been programming for over 30 years (gulp) – I should know my basic developer rights by now! How is it a language can get away with being such a bad boyfriend for so long?

One interesting point, re-iterated in the comments, is that websites built with PHP aren’t necessarily bad – but the programmers have to first “overcome the platform”  to achieve great things. It certainly made me feel better, reading the list of quirks, about the countless times I’ve spent scratching my head over PHP code which should work but doesn’t – e.g. ?: is left associative – why don’t they tell you this at school!

Read the full rant by Eevee here at me.veekun.com

via .net magazine

Right… I’m off to learn Brainfuck instead, as suggested.

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