I started writing PHP about nine years ago, I'd say about five years of that was within a professional context. I can elaborate more if you like but whilst I understand PHP can be used in an effective way in the hands of someone that understands all the nuance, and I know that PHP enables people to start hammering stuff out with ease, it also enables people that don't know the nuances of the language to write utterly shit code that people like me have to deal with for ages on out. It's as if the low barrier to entry, shit, actually means that the door is wide open to cowboys who just abuse shit to go wrong.
Of course you can write decent PHP, but I've since switched to Python (which I really enjoy, but I'm not biased toward it, I can equally imagine people writing decent Ruby or whatever), but I'd never look back. It's an enabler of people who care little, not for the love of code, or the technical beauty of things, but an enabler of people who don't give a blind fuck about whoever is the next person to inherit their code. No, this is not necessarily a language flaw (because there are many of those, I don't have to elaborate), but what's lauded as the brilliance of PHP, especially lately, is an attitude that fucks people down the line. Look at osCommerce FFS.
I mean, perhaps now osCommerce is a decent product, but it wasn't in 2003, it was a godawful mess, and this is relevant now because there a bunch of hapless fucks that are tasked with maintaining a clusterfuck of hacks based on a version of software X that was made many years back because very little of the people who are developing in PHP give a blind fuck about the next dev to come along.
What's the point of talking about the latest generation of PHP nearly-catching-up-to-decent-interpreted-languages when the entire culture is based around godawful hackery, misuse, half-arsed ports of 4.3 codebases and developer laziness and insecure anti-patterns and other shit buzzwords I can't be fucked to mention but most likely apply to the majority of PHP code out there?
Of course you can write decent PHP, but I've since switched to Python (which I really enjoy, but I'm not biased toward it, I can equally imagine people writing decent Ruby or whatever), but I'd never look back. It's an enabler of people who care little, not for the love of code, or the technical beauty of things, but an enabler of people who don't give a blind fuck about whoever is the next person to inherit their code. No, this is not necessarily a language flaw (because there are many of those, I don't have to elaborate), but what's lauded as the brilliance of PHP, especially lately, is an attitude that fucks people down the line. Look at osCommerce FFS.
I mean, perhaps now osCommerce is a decent product, but it wasn't in 2003, it was a godawful mess, and this is relevant now because there a bunch of hapless fucks that are tasked with maintaining a clusterfuck of hacks based on a version of software X that was made many years back because very little of the people who are developing in PHP give a blind fuck about the next dev to come along.
What's the point of talking about the latest generation of PHP nearly-catching-up-to-decent-interpreted-languages when the entire culture is based around godawful hackery, misuse, half-arsed ports of 4.3 codebases and developer laziness and insecure anti-patterns and other shit buzzwords I can't be fucked to mention but most likely apply to the majority of PHP code out there?
PHP. Never. Again.
Also Wordpress.