| I hear what you're saying and I appreciate your answer to the question I asked. But I still can't see it that way. I worked in PHP5 for many years. The "survivability" thing didn't make anything cheaper, quicker, or more practical. It just made it harder to find bugs, and slower to develop new code that could pass tests (since getting your tests to pass is the process of eliminating bugs). Achieving correctness is not hard in most languages. It's possible in PHP, but more difficult than most. I'd say the same for readability, given PHP's wide array of naming conventions. So if we're crossing off cheap, quick, practical, correct, and readable, what do we have left? I suppose if nothing matters, then programming language choice doesn't either. But I think what we have left is "using PHP". The reason people use PHP is because using PHP matters to them. It's just what they want to do. Look at the post we're commenting on, where nearly the entire argument is "I use it because I've always used it". It's fine if people want to use it. What gets me is when a manager wants to use PHP and I explain what a poor decision that would be, and in return I get sent a blog post like this one which makes a bunch of strawman arguments without actually addressing the real issues with the language. Your attempt to address them is among the best I've seen, but I'm still not buying it. With regard to survivability vs. correctness, I'm glad the language is going the other direction now. It looks like they added a bunch of errors to PHP8. I am holding out hope that as every major decision in the language gets reversed, eventually something unrecognizable and much better will emerge! |