I've been a PHP programmer for over 15 years and I cannot think of a single time this has been an actual problem. It sounds like you were embarrassed by a bug in your code and have just decided to blame it on the tools.

I ended up building out a whole new array class to work around it. The notes at the top of my class file pretty well describe the problem: https://github.com/robsheldon/asinius-core/blob/master/src/A...

There are native-php workarounds and if you're very very careful you can probably maybe encounter this and code around it without triggering any of the strange behaviors, but it's a minefield.

I'm not new to PHP, either. I think by chance people just usually don't encounter the circumstances for this particular bad behavior, but when it happens, it's really bad. Array keys shouldn't be getting implicitly typecasted.

I've been bitten by it and also stuff like 800=="8E2".

I've never been able to make an adequate defense of PHP, yet also have never seen another language match its success rate of getting useful software into the hands of users. I have wondered whether something about PHP, or something that it lacks, makes PHP projects easier to estimate.

Ease of deployment? Batteries included standard library? Pragmatic community? Surprisingly adequate performance? It never seems like enough to overcome the obvious deficits. I can neither ignore my own experience nor convince anyone that it's actually great.

It's going to sound extremely condescending, but here it is, anyway: I believe that the majority of people who defend PHP (and JavaScript) are people who have ever only written code in Java (especially <=1.6), JavaScript, and PHP. Maybe C for fun or in college. In light of those immensely popular languages, I could see why someone might not think that any of the deficiencies are deal-breakers.

The only-ever-PHP coders I have known tend to be fairly polarized between fear of the unknown and the "grass is greener" attitude.

The ease of estimation thing was an aside, but I'm getting more convinced. With PHP there is only one way to do any feature: look up the library function, type it, refresh the page, and slowly accrete your functionality. With other languages there's some hope of a free lunch and it engages our tendency to optimism.

Asking as someone who's mostly only written PHP (and some javascript, more recently): can you expand on this? What kind of "hope of a free lunch" is there with other languages?

The first is the promise of DSLs and meta programming, where you can tune the syntax of the language to more naturally express your problem domain. When this works it's beautiful, but sometimes it is a distraction and makes the code difficult to debug.

The second, which is conceptually very different but I find it can play out similarly, are rich type systems where you can hopefully build up your application as a series of well defined type relations and transformations. Again, when this works you get really robust, reliable, and easy to modify software but there are often cross cutting concerns or business practices that break the model.

Edit: when I talk about a free lunch or a silver bullet, I am often thinking about the writing of Fred Brooks.

That's about as far as you can go with Java, I guess, but honestly, now that I type that out, I guess that does get you pretty far...

The most salient problem is the fact that the languages do not distinguish between references and values (aka “mutability by default”) which means that the compiler will not maintain those invariants for you unless you annotate things specifically, and the authors of the libraries you use do the same.

My overall preference is for F#, which is ironically a better object oriented language than C#, by virtue of using ML-like syntax instead of C-like. Nonetheless, C# is a passable functional programming language these days, and the language designers keep adding more functional-inspired features with every release.

Peter Norvig at some point came to the realization that the deficiencies of Python relative to Lisp were not deal-breakers, and I don't think that stemmed from his limited experience.

Since then I've done (real, professional, for-profit) projects in PHP, Go, Java, Kotlin, Swift, Rust, JavaScript, Elixir, and Clojure.

So when I work on PHP and Java I can feel what they're missing. It's simply the luxury of having experienced working in (what I consider to be) better languages. Clojure and Elixir were not my cup of tea, but I still find them to be better quality languages than JavaScript.

I have met many developers in my life. Some with quite a lot of experience. The VAST majority of them have only ever worked in a handful of very similar languages. Mostly the ones I listed originally (I forgot C# in the list, but that's more-or-less Java++). If I'd only ever used PHP and Java I would literally not know what a good type system looks like. It's ignorance, but not stupidity.

And I'm talking about people I have much respect for. People who I acknowledge are smarter than me. That doesn't mean I don't know anything they don't, though. And if they've only used PHP and Java, then I know some things they might not. That's all.

EDIT: Also, I'm not sure what Peter Norvig has to do with it. I bet he doesn't like PHP, either.

Your comment wasn't about people who like PHP. Your comment was about people who defend JS or PHP to the minimal extent of saying their deficiencies are not deal-breakers.

There are people with broad experience who are willing to accept deficiencies of a particular language if the context is right.

(I don't actually know what the right context would be for PHP; I'm more stating a general principle.)

I was more, in my head, describing people who say "Well, all languages have issues." or "You can write good/bad code in any language." or whatever other bottom-of-the-barrel defenses I often hear and read.

However, I also use C/C++(Mostly low level embedded), C#, and Golang regularly.

If I was given the choice of what language(excluding C/C++) to launch a new web site I would still choose PHP with `strict_types=1` enabled.

The proliferation of Collection classes may be one side-effect of how poweful-yet-awkward they are.

1. https://3v4l.org/99pMn

It's no wonder people still lean on the broken foreach. I always use unset() after foreach. It makes me die inside a little.

I'm not that talented. I write bugs all the time. Most of the time, tests save me.

You can size me up as just childishly trying to divert blame when I made a mistake, but you're missing out by doing so.

Not sure about the productivity claim. I once wrote from scratch (frameworks excluded) backend and frontend (version 1) of a multi-tenant, cloud-based video-sharing platform with PHP as the backend (aws cloud) in a matter of weeks.

I once wrote, from scratch (frameworks excluded), an entire backend (and front-end) of version 1 of a hybrid mobile app (backend in PHP) for a medium-size logistics company in a matter of less than 2 months.

I have other examples, but life is too short trying to convince "haters" that they might not be 100% correct.

I was the only developer on both of those projects. Your mileage may vary :)

Also, the PHP ecosystem is friendly to beginners. Compare these authentication docs for a PHP project vs a .NET project:

Laravel (PHP): https://laravel.com/docs/7.x/authentication ASP.NET Core (.NET): https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/security/authen...

This is available with many other languages as well, i.e. https://github.com/cosmtrek/air

It may require an external tool, but the deployment experience is a lot simpler for Go than PHP.

I personally spend a lot of time hopping among technologies and I always lean heavily on documentation. PHP has pretty good documentation, and this helps a lot in my opinion. I would guess that a lot of developers don't read the docs and just assume that something in a less-familiar language will work exactly like they expect it to, and then call this a "gotcha" when it doesn't.

Because of spaces vs tabs additional overhead. Packages vs built-in libruaries. RAD frameworks like laravel vs Django.

Most of it won't survive a handful of years at best and most companies won't ever benefit from the attitude of some developers that ever developer on ever task should be writing FAANG level code.

What 3nds yo happening it matter what you do is the next agency / person comes along and claims its not fit for purpose any more and redoes it 'better' and the cycle continues of low value

Seems like a fairly minor language quirk (of which almost every language has) rather than a huge feature that makes one want to avoid the language at all cost.

Of course, feel free to make your own choice when picking a language, but I don't think this is a compelling reason why one would always want to avoid using PHP for their web backend.

[0]: https://www.php.net/manual/en/language.types.array.php

Do you truly believe that I articulated that there was exactly one reason that I think PHP hinders developer productivity?

And of course, we brought out the old "every language has quirks" apology. Yes, you can bang a nail in with a rock. But, don't. Use a hammer.

Do better, please.

https://repl.it/@JadoJodo/SelfreliantEdibleUsers

edit: Not trying to discount your feelings overall, but just curious about that specific example.

https://repl.it/repls/CompetentBlondInstructions

Here I changed your string index to an int and it still says success!

If I hadn't considered string-number-keys in my code, I would also have forgotten about them in my unit tests. Maybe you're different.