[Shish2k]

> The last few years have brought insane progress to the PHP language

I’ve been hearing this for ~20 years, and yet somehow I still find it more painful to use than other languages that didn’t even exist 10 years ago…

(Except for “being easy to deploy on any random bargain-basement shared web host”, which is a hugely important factor where PHP is genuinely best-in-class and no other language even seems to care about competing, and is the reason that I still regularly need to use it)

[vegai_]

This. PHP is PHP just like Javascript is Javascript. Their growth process was a bunch of people needing things and just implementing them one by one without a grand design. It kinda works, but it'll never be Good in a theoretical sense.

Disturbingly for us language geeks, it doesn't seem to matter at all that they're not very good.

[astrange]

PHP has value types - the one "every data structure at once" type gets deep copied when you pass it to another function. That's enough to make it a good programming language, whereas Python is unnecessarily 90s class-based OOP with reference types.

[vegai_]

I don't quite understand what you mean here. Do you have an example?

[astrange]

If you have a dictionary and pass it around to someone else's code and it gets changed, those changes affect your code too instead of copying it, which is annoying and less safe.

[Beltalowda]

The real problem with PHP was always the standard library and its many caveats, outright bugs, and inadequacies, rather than the PHP language itself (there's a few language issues as well, but I found those less painful than the standard library).

A few of these things have been fixed, but by and large the situation has remained unchanged for a long time. It's not an easy problem due to compatibility reasons; adding new language features and such is comparatively easy.