PHP is the language many people love to hate; I guess some of them like the idea of being able to point the black sheep of web development, so that they can tell "maybe we have some flaws, but at least we're not one of these PHP shops".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splitting_%28psychology%29

> PHP is the language many people love to hate

Do you think there's a reason for that? Maybe a direct one? That it's a bad language for example? Why would it need to be anything more complicated than that.

So I don't think your guess is accurate. It's simply a bad language on its own. No need to compare it to anything. And I don't think anyone can deny that, no one will honestly say that "php is a good language". You can say it has some good features, or that it's good for certain tasks, or perhaps that it's better.. but that's all.

I think PHP is a great language, not just a good one, and its competitors like Python and Ruby offer little to nothing over PHP (and vice-versa). They're all in the same boat. Same programming style (OOP), same constructs, same runtime models (interpreted, JIT). I'm so fucking tired of people who have not programmed in PHP claiming anything, let alone that it's a bad language. I can make that claim about any language currently in existence with plenty of "evidence" to back it up, but my purpose here isn't to annoy. The only thing I can deduce from posts like this is that people lash out against PHP because they get off on being closed-minded and trolling others.

To me, it's a so-so language, with some bad parts, some ok. On the plus side, it's easy to pick up, and it gets the job done for many projects. Perhaps it's a bit like the Ikea of programming languages, if you will--no the best of furniture for sure, but when you need a table and some chairs with little efforts, it's nice to have, and they're not horrendous unless you couldn't build them correctly.

I like the IKEA parallel as IKEA is cheap. So was php (to host), hence the popularity I guess. And as a result of that, there are lots of developers.. and many equals cheap. And the vicious circle continues. Doesn't make it a good language :)

(To be honest, I like IKEA, and I don't think it suck)

> To be honest, I like IKEA, and I don't think it suck

Ikea sucks. Quite a bit of the furniture is just painted cardboard, the quality is absolutely horrible. It looks ok but 'under the hood' it is terrible. It is throwaway furniture, the very opposite of sustainable.

Weird, I've been using my IKEA bed, wardrobe and drawers for many years now and they're fine. Maybe I'm just happy to make do with convenience - like many PHP developers.

The intersection of the sets 'Ikea furniture owners', 'People that think Ikea furniture is low quality' and 'PHP programmers' isn't empty.

It's interesting how a discussion can end, seriously, what a quote :)

Cardboard furniture is great for moving. And for some pieces of furniture is perfectly OK (if you can stand the massive look).

They do "regular" furniture as well, not sure about its quality though.

> Cardboard furniture is great for moving.

It isn't because moving implies taking stuff apart and putting it back together again. As you'll find after your move screws won't catch any more, some of your furniture will have been compressed (holes in table surfaces? WTF?, yes this actually happened to me less than 3 months ago). Surface finish is 1/10th of a mm so it'll scratch super easy.

That's their 'regular' furniture, I'm not sure if they have anything better either. Ikea put a whole raft of companies out of business with cheap and good stuff, once they achieved market dominance they dropped the quality they are selling to something horrific.

My "cardboard" furniture has solid blocks where screws go. Not wood, but some sort of plywood or something.

I have an ikea bed and rack that is made from wood. Lots of their furniture is regular wood. The cheap ones usually untreated.

It's called MDF. You can think of it as high density cardboard, it's mostly wood fibers and resin.

Bad analogy; competent people put lots of time and effort into designing IKEA furniture.

The library is C's fault. PHP is basically a scripting language around the standard C library. It's what makes it the fastest non-JIT scripting language, but also what makes it so inconsistent.

It's not really a matter of fault. If being a wrapper around C is a problem, it's a problem PHP designers made, for better or worse. That's not C's fault.

So are Lua and Python and Ruby, but they're not "inconsistent".

That's a matter of perspective. Inconsistency is not objective and Lua has PLENTY of warts (46 max upvalues?)

Your tone is a little off for HN, but some of your points are good.

Most of your complaints also apply to JavaScript

Such as? Maybe the part about users, but I don't see anything else (some I don't know to be fair).