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by chrismorgan 778 days ago
This article focuses on added features, but although some of them may help, those features weren’t really the problem with PHP. I haven’t meaningfully used PHP since about 2010, but https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/ generally rang true, and I get the impression that most of that is still valid (though some points have certainly been fixed).
2 comments
tasuki 778 days ago
It is hard to blame PHP for having been badly designed when... it wasn't "designed" to begin with. Rasmus Lerdorf had to following to say:

> I don't know how to stop it [...] there was never any intent to write a programming language [...] I have absolutely no idea how to write a programming language [...] I just kept adding the next logical step on the way.

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1oooqooq 778 days ago
some good usability points on method names, but the bulk is mostly complaints by someone clearly unable to understand webservers or security. complaining that error level hides errors from output is very amateur. also complaining about info missing from the manual in open source is silly. test the two failure cases and send a manual improvement patch, instead of being annoying and wasting more effort on a blog post
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chrismorgan 778 days ago
You’re looking at it too simply. These are complaints of an expert with broad experience across PHP and similar systems, who found a steady stream of problems wherever she looked. These are systemic issues. The foundations themselves are unsound, and that’s difficult to ever fix. I think the analogy is good to give a basic sense of all this. And then the remainder of the article was written in such specific and extensive detail deliberately to counter shallow dismissals like yours.
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