This. PHP is PHP just like Javascript is Javascript. Their growth process was a bunch of people needing things and just implementing them one by one without a grand design. It kinda works, but it'll never be Good in a theoretical sense.
Disturbingly for us language geeks, it doesn't seem to matter at all that they're not very good.
PHP has value types - the one "every data structure at once" type gets deep copied when you pass it to another function. That's enough to make it a good programming language, whereas Python is unnecessarily 90s class-based OOP with reference types.
I don't quite understand what you mean here. Do you have an example?
If you have a dictionary and pass it around to someone else's code and it gets changed, those changes affect your code too instead of copying it, which is annoying and less safe.
Re:Whats New in PHP 8.2
by Beltalowda on Monday April 25, 2022 @02:26PM
(#31158777)
The real problem with PHP was always the standard library and its many caveats, outright bugs, and inadequacies, rather than the PHP language itself (there's a few language issues as well, but I found those less painful than the standard library).
A few of these things have been fixed, but by and large the situation has remained unchanged for a long time. It's not an easy problem due to compatibility reasons; adding new language features and such is comparatively easy.
I’ve been hearing this for ~20 years, and yet somehow I still find it more painful to use than other languages that didn’t even exist 10 years ago…
(Except for “being easy to deploy on any random bargain-basement shared web host”, which is a hugely important factor where PHP is genuinely best-in-class and no other language even seems to care about competing, and is the reason that I still regularly need to use it)