You are completely correct - you are being unfairly prejudiced by judging PHP on explanations of people that do not understand it instead of learning it. If you learned it, you would know references work exactly like they supposed to, and do exactly what they are meant to do - just because they are not, as parent assumes, pointers, he misunderstands them and thinks they are weird. Moreover, he thinks since PHP in not like C and does not have C-like pointers PHP is weird. Please read http://us2.php.net/references if you want real information instead of collection of misunderstanding.

I think the whole point here is why does PHP even have references like that. Right now the only mainstream language I know that does that is C++ and well, its C++ and mutable references are actually not frequently used in practice. Most other languages stay with pass by value most of the time and PHP references kind of look like a leaky abstraction from the underlying C implementation...

C++ references and PHP references are completely different beasts. PHP references like Unix hardlinks, for example. As for why they exist - they make doing some things easier and some use cases easier to program, without introducing concepts like pointers which are completely foreign to language like PHP. Could we do without them? Yes, probably. That's only one way to solve it, there can be others.

And in C++, a variable is either declared as a reference and acts like one, or it's declared as a value and acts like one. It can't change behavior halfway through a function.

(Well, ignoring operator overloading anyway… you could conceivably import PHP's concept of variables and references into C++.)

I use references for passing around large arrays of data for instance, rather than having copies made all over the place (class instances are passed by reference no matter what you do).

What I meant is that people usually pass things via a pointer (that needs to be explicitly dereferrenced) or via const references (where there is no mutation to worry about). Mutable references are rarer and usually they are function arguments and are relatively "obvious"

I thought this for a long time as well. I always enjoyed ragging on PHP but wondered if it was just because I wasn't familiar with it.

A few months ago, I got the opportunity to do a little PHP programming. I was wrong. I didn't have a bad impression of PHP simply out of ignorance. In fact, my opinion of the language is now much lower than before. I honestly can't conceive how anyone could legitimately defend it for anything other than its ubiquity.