[sixthloginorso]

In a Universe where consistency, soundness, orthogonal API design, modularity and evidence that the developers gave some thought to their language is expected. I would like to believe that this is such a Universe.

I mean, many of the endless list of functions imported into the default namespace were named so that their hashing distribution worked well with strlen for a hash. How much work went into working around the fact that just about the worst hashing function that you can come up with in three seconds was used?

And we can enumerate such blunders all day here. There are many better languages with good tooling, and guess what, they're free. I wouldn't use PHP if I can avoid it, and there's ample chance to avoid it nowadays.

[ThomPete]

You are in the wrong universe mate.

And you are missing the point. It's not just about the language it's about all the other things around the language.

How easy it is to find a webhotel and get started, how easy it integrates with HTML, JavaScript, CSS.

Of course it's ugly, but who besides a bunch of snobs and people who actually can't use it really cares? Who should care?

[sixthloginorso]

> how easy it integrates with HTML, JavaScript, CSS

No more than any other language or product written in such.

> Of course it's ugly, but who besides a bunch of snobs and people who actually can't use it really cares? Who should care?

You see, this is a big part of what's wrong with the PHP community, the apathy and immaturity. How on Earth is dismissing the reasoned criticism from professional peers and academics as "bashing" from "haters" or "snobs" an appropriate response?

[ThomPete]

Critique is fine but it just need to be based on other things than taste.

Point to a thing you cant do with PHP and you have valid criticism.

Critiquing PHP because you you think it's ugly or not elegant enough is only valid if you care about such things and then you are by definition a snob.

[eropple]

"Point to a thing you can't do" is bitterly disingenuous. Nobody's saying you can't do things in PHP, they're saying it's extremely disadvantageous to do so. Technical debt can't be wished away by screaming about "haters" and it's juvenile to try.

[ThomPete]

And that is the point. For most people it's not disadvantagous so they use it.

[eropple]

Having spent a very long time in the PHP community I doubt that quite a lot. I am strongly skeptical of the notion that most are in the headspace to be able to evaluate alternatives effectively if they know they exist. Because most of them sound like you in your posts in this thread: circle the wagons and call everyone who says PHP isn't a smart choice a "hater". It's a very insular, very screwed-up social dynamic that resists change (despite the efforts of some really smart folks like @fabpot to drag your average PHP programmer into some semblance of good practices).

[evilduck]

You're reframing all criticism towards PHP to "can it be done with x" from "is it best done with x".

> Point to a thing you cant do with PHP and you have valid criticism.

s/PHP/Brainfuck

Does your argument still hold? Are you now a snob?

[ThomPete]

The OP was about beautifully written PHP code.

The comments I am reacting to are those who are reframing that discussion into a discussion about PHP as a tool in general.

So no I am not reframing anything. I am reacting to the reframing if anything.

[ytdtty]

> How easy it is to find a webhotel and get started, how easy it integrates with HTML, JavaScript, CSS.

Good! We can see you clearly haven't tried using any of the many frameworks that easily integrate those things.

> who besides a bunch of snobs and people who actually can't use it really cares?

The people who later have to re-write these garbage projects, for one. I guess you've never had a client with a failed PHP project who needed the thing fixed. Also, people who do things more complicated than geocities pages.

[ThomPete]

Oh please.

Plenty of jobs no matter what language have to be rewritten for many different reasons.

The fact is, and that is what you guys seem to have a problem accepting is that PHP is a perfectly reasonable tool for many reasons and for many situations.

Get over it. Make it as easy to get started with your preferred language rather than blaiming PHP.