Thanks for taking the time to read my little rant from so long ago.

You make some very good points. I make no argument against the notion that PHP promotes bad coding due to a more-than-typical lack of Homogeneity. In fact, sometimes I think if I didn’t have code completion in my IDE, I’d never get anything done. My argument wasn’t so much for promoting PHP on equal standing with better languages such as python, ruby, perl (yes, perl) , etc. My contention was that it’s perfectly adequate for Web applications because you often do not need to write some giant project for the Web. It’s generally available everywhere and makes a lot of sense because you have a better chance that your designer/programmer can crank out a little code from time-to-time. That, and you shouldn’t have to feel ashamed that you use it! However, I understand that you are trying to better explain why PHP contempt exists in general. Again, good points.

In recent years, I’ve gotten my hands on python for several projects. I really like how I can almost write it without code completion (among other things I won’t mention right now.) In fact, I really considered doing a larger project that I am currently working on in django. However, I have yet to do a Web project in django and decided I better wait to ride that learning curve with some less significant project. Before this post, I had coded several projects using C#. Oddly, I’ve never laid hands on Java for any real project. Could this be that barrier to entry that keeps us newbies tied to PHP? That, or I’m just lazy.

Yes, an inferior language can make you less productive (and cause headaches for future developers.) I’ve seen my share of bad PHP code that made me want to hurt certain persons (mostly oscommerce developers.) When I first started at my company about 10 years ago, I cut my teeth on legacy ASP. Unfortunately, I’m still maintaining several projects/snippets after all these years. Now that is a truly limiting language!

I also enjoy writing javascript!

Cheers.

FWIW, I think the point about the possibility of writing clean, consistent php code demonstrates the issue. There’s no argument over whether Python or Java developers can write clean code, because most Python and Java projects are relatively consistent. Java in particular is unique homogeneous, so much so that almost all Java projects actually adhere to the same coding standards, from camelCase to package organization.

With PHP, some projects are clean, others are not. Many of us old-timers are still suffering PTSD from “magic” features from early iterations of PHP, such as bugs resulting from “smart quoting” in the 90s (when a run-time system configuration flag affected how variables are represented). Another simple fact is that most of us who suffered through PHP had to suffer through code that someone else wrote, that broke. The clean projects that avoid PHP’s shortcomings we don’t see, because they don’t break.

There are practical reasons why mysql.connect is vastly superior to mysql_connect — namely that you can specify a backend engine in one place, and use it agnostically throughout the code. The fact that an API exists in PHP to do that isn’t really the point. It’s the bad taste left in your mouth when you see how it got started.

There are some very high quality projects written in PHP. Maybe its informal growth pattern discourages over-engineering. Drupal, after all, is far better than Zope, even though Zope (in all its complexity) is supposedly very powerful, even though no one can figure out why.

Ultimately what does matter is the end result, the fun you have writing code, and what makes you happy. My fellow Python (and Java) geeks think I’m crazy because I enjoy Javascript. It isn’t that I think Javascript is well-designed (it isn’t), it’s that I like what I can do with it. I think the same applies to PHP. People do amazing things with PHP, and that’s what matters.

Thanks!