FWIW, PHP 4.x was completely awful for large and/or OOP codebases due to the totally insane copy-by-default semantics, the need to use &= perfectly at every call site that returned an instance of a class, and a handful of reference-counting bugs that caused interpreter crashes and still weren't fixed when 5.x matured.
It's definitely gotten better; I feel like a lot of people who swore off PHP forever are remembering version four.
> I feel like a lot of people who swore off PHP forever are remembering version four.
I think that's a valid point however I'm not sure if that is better or worse when they are attacking something.
Oh, almost certainly worse, unless Rasmus Lerdorf is going on another mailing list tirade and flaming them directly.
Re:The self-hating web developer
by stickfigure on Sunday July 19, 2015 @01:19PM
(#9911911)
There are objective differences between programming languages and it's reasonable to have strong opinions about the relative merits and demerits of each. Yes, it's toxic when people who have no real-world experience with a language or platform rant about it, because this tends to be useless bile. But that does't mean PHP is just as good as anything else.
If you only know a single programming language, you should have some inner doubts, no matter what that language is. This is healthy.
Of course languages are different. Some are better for some things than others. Choosing a language without knowledge of its tradeoffs is not a vary good idea.
The issue the parent is comments is judging someone based on their use of a language without knowing if that person has any knowledge of the tradeoffs is doing them a disservice. Spewing that judgement on the internet is actively harmful.
1. Are incredibly stupid (register globals has been deprecated for years) 2. Are incredibly closed minded because you make comments like "These things does make a difference. But only on the surface, not deep down where it is really rotten" 3. Can't actually program in PHP and have not written large production apps in it 4. Probably can't actually program any language because you don't realize every single language has a million gotchas
My assumptions may be wrong, but it really doesn't matter. That's the problem with assumptions ... the damage is already done.