That Faltzer Ain't One of Ours

I've always hated PHP, ever since that day where I had to learn the language to make rough modifications to phpBB 2. I had only known Perl and Ruby back then, and I learned Python a year later, and they proved to be leagues better than PHP, no ifs or buts. Whenever I am attempting to debate the quality of PHP, I'm always treated with the same old, tired arguments that look more like bad attempts at covering the fuck ups the language has made instead of actually explaining how they aren't fuck-ups or admitting that they are. The most that can be summarized is that typical "PHP takes patience to get the hang of, just like every other language. It's actually very good and straight forward, no excessive complicating involved" excuse. That's bullshit. Like many articles out there degrading PHP for the terrible language that it is, I too will give some common and my own reasons as to why PHP sucks, and why I hate it.

There are so many built-in functions that the reference has been changed from a flat list to one-hundred eighty categories of functions. There are at least 22 functions alone for finding something in a string, depending on if you want to be case insensitive, if you want to replace that something, if you want to search from the end first, etc etc... some of those functions also have flags, which is a bit self-defeating. The reflectiveness API looks absolutely nothing like the rest of the language and actually more closely resembles a failed attempt at wedging Java into C. The developers can't even decide whether or not they want underscores in function names or not. is_object vs isset? base64_encode vs urlencode? str_rot13 vs strpos? Straightforward indeed.

To the best of my knowledge, the built-in database access functions don't use or even allow the use of variable binding, which is possibly why I hear about so many common PHP applications with SQL injection exploits. There are, of course, several different ways to get around this, including a flag in a config file that affects every script on the whole server, impairing everybody else, and a function named mysql_real_escape_string. (I eagerly await the announcement of mysql_fake_escape_string.) There are also dbx_escape_string, escapeshellarg, escapeshellcmd, pg_escape_bytea, pg_escape_string, pg_unescape_bytea, addslashes, addcslashes, preg_quote, quotemeta, mysql_escape_string, mysqli_real_escape_string, and sqlite_escape_string. Why? Who knows? Perl’s DBI extremely strongly discourages ever inserting user input directly into a SQL query; even if the RDBMS doesn’t support prepared statements, DBI will fake them for you. SQL injection is thus impossible. I don’t know why you PHP guys haven’t been using mysqli; this is an absolutely trivial problem that was solved years ago, yet I keep seeing more and more convoluted hacks to emulate functionality built into both PHP and MySQL. Of course, Perl, Ruby, and Python are all big on ORMs lately, and there are at least a couple solid ones for each language. To add insult to injury, there's both MySQL and MySQLi for PHP.

Arrays and hashes, despite being completely different, are merged into the same data structure because I guess it would just be hard to expect new programmers to tell the difference. Teaching by removing difficult details; what a concept. Does PHP even have namespaces or closures yet? I don't think so, really. Oh wait, yeah, I forgot I meant "classes." Silly me; I forgot that \\ for namespaces was a good idea. I'm also not a fan of having the same operators for numeric and string operations either, but almost everyone does that. Python blocks take LESS time and space by definition, since you don't need a line with a lone brace on it at the end of a block. Ruby just uses a keyword to end a block that otherwise looks the same as it would in Python, and uses braces for closures.

Bad programs do not a bad language make, but there have to be some criteria for a bad language, and I'm pretty sure these should all be on the list. PHP started out as a quick templating language for non-programmers, and it's still not very good for anything better than that. I could write a symbolic algebra package in Malbolge, but that doesn't make it a good idea. PHP is a horrible language for a new programmer and a pathetic language for a seasoned programmer. If you want a decent language also aimed for beginners, use Python. If you want a powerful language with vaguely-consistent syntax and lots of easy-to-use libraries, use Perl or Python or Ruby. If you want to put a cute little counter in otherwise-static HTML, use PHP.

PHP's map() doesn't even allow for inlining as far as I know (anonymous functions are just too complicated?). Sorting is ridiculous; I count twelve different sort functions, several of which exist only to work around the array/hash hack (and none of which, of course, have the array_ prefix that the most common array functions have). Searching a string is still thoroughly ridiculous. Database access... who even knows, it's different for every database. It's almost as if nobody except Zend knows how to write PHP modules, and since all this stuff is built in everyone else is rather discouraged from trying to write anything better.

These and these and these and these and these. What do they have to do with Web development? Oh but right, you can choose to just not compile them in, if you happen to be the administrator of the machine you're on and want to remove them from everyone else who may dream up a reason to use them.

PHP's very poor in regards to modularity, and Python, Perl, and Ruby all have ridiculously huge libraries available with modules contributed from users who actually want to give people an incentive to reuse good code and allowing people to extend and build up on it as an accepted solution (to not reinvent the wheel, but it seems PHP does the very opposite). To add insult to injury, PHP's MySQL extension, which is used ever-so-often, is set to not compile by default. Again, if you happen to be the administrator of the machine, you have to recompile PHP again, applying the same fucking flags you did before just to add DB support. It is trivial to connect to a database with any of them. With Python it's just a simple `easy_install mysql-python`, granted that you have setuptools Python extension installed. Perl/Ruby both have DBI modules which are easy to get and install as well. For PHP it isn't. They haven't even mustered the concept of modularity, and instead think that bullshit like PEAR/PECL is going to fix what should have been in the language from the very beginning. Oh, but sure, modularity and dynamic loading is for nerds!

We could all write our Web applications in C or even assembler, but for some strange reason we don't. PHP has inconsistent syntax, far too many functions that do almost the same thing, weird scoping rules, and far too much old junk lurking around. It almost seems deliberately designed to encourage obfuscation and require having a manual open at all times. Any of the more commonly-used features in one of the four P's can be duplicated in C with some library or other. Granted, something like Catalyst or Ruby on Rails would be a wee bit more difficult to do, but I don't think we're really talking on that level.

Speaking of frameworks, I have yet to see one that is not some wannabe Ruby on Rails knock-off. Most of what I see are mock-ups trying to reinvent the wheel when there are other, (while still sub par, accepted) "solutions". To shift away from the topic of frameworks, this is also a problem with PHP in the community as well: Every Tom, Dick and Hary is off making their own implementation of x software instead of improving the already existing and accepted y software. The community is built on separation; nobody is working together; it's everyone going off on their own path, building shoddy piece of software, which again, contributes to spaghetti code lying all over the place.

Yes, it's a matter of preference of what to use, but it's a preference that leads to ugly code all over the place and a lot of "programmers" raised on PHP who think they rock for being able to make counters but can't really do anything else. As a developer, I do happen to care about what goes on under the hood; I care about code reuse and modularity and clean code and such, because it makes the world a better place. As a developer I do occasionally have to poke around this code other people have created and am treated to messy code written in a messy language by people who think this is normal. It also leads to a lot of jobs I might otherwise want to take revolving around the language, so you can see where that ends up. The language seriously seems to either train or attract the bottom of the barrel and thus coats the Internet with lots of scripts that can only be described as analogous to <marquee>. At least the other languages have communities and documentation that tries to teach people how to code. I have this thing about people using crappy tools, as some may have noticed.