Why some people hate PHP?

First I want to say the article "a fractal of bad design article" is a good reference. A complex tool gives the possibility of a complex solution. You don't need a complex tool to create something complex. Complexity should lie in the business code, not the framework/language. This is why Go is gaining momentum but it's also a hype (because Google).

PHP as a coding standard only since 2012 github.com/php-fig/fig-standards/c...
PHP had outdated tutorials for years and the "standard" framework Zend was/is paid so it was rarely used. So it also trained programmers with bad practices.. like common SQL injections.

As example, Python was there as long as PHP but from the the start they decided to impose a coding standard. Python PEP-8 exists since 2001. You don't hear much people complaining about Python because it was done simple and with a standard from the start. The Zen of Python is the best thing you can have in programming in general even I think.

Because people use Y, and it's clearly better than X.

All languages have strong points and weak points. These pros and cons also vary based on domain: there are some places where PHP is useful, and other places where it's utterly useless.

Every coder should know multiple languages. I think it's a legitimate concern that if somebody knows only PHP* that their coding knowledge is somewhat limited. There are so many differnet constructs in other languages that you might just never see in PHP. Granted, it, like all languages, evolves over time.

*My concern applies basically to any language. You can't know just one and expect to be a good programmer.

PHP is the best worst programming language.

I love it, and hate it too.

A lot of it is because it's the cool thing to do! Especially when it comes to PHP and JavaScript, the mockery is because it's just "common knowledge" that they're bad languages even though if you press someone to explain why they won't be able to. Even if they have a reason it usually involves arbitrary examples or really specific expressions that fail in surprising ways that don't really have real world examples.

PHP and JavaScript both came out of a particular moment in history and seem to have a lot of overlap in their issues; loosely-typed languages often do.

The noise with Javascript has died down considerably in the past 5 years, though. People are less certain about their mockery because of how big Node.js has become and how robust some of the frameworks written on the front end have become.

It's still easy to find, though.

Some people do legitimately get burned, though. Languages all have landmines, even strongly typed languages.

I agree with you, most of the time, when we "love" a programming language or something else, we also hate it or get frustrated, because we always find something difficult that we can not find a way to solve it unless we spend a few minutes/hours playing around with a tedious documentation... XD

I wrote my opinion there :)
code-artisan.io/love-letter-to-php/

Programming languages are tools. Some languages are more suitable for a particular domain.

PHP is a tool for a fairly narrow problem domain, albeit an incredibly popular domain.

For all the PHP haters out there, the next question ought to be "Well what would be a better tool to use in this problem space?"

To quote Bjarne Stroustrup, "There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses."

My primary programming language is C++. I have a love-hate relationship with C++. I've been using it for the last 27 years.

When I consider my project, there is no ROI in rewriting the application in a different language. It would take years to port. Assuming the entire team was working on such a ill-advised rewrite.

Be that at it may, as a thought experiment, I've considered what would be suitable alternative languages that would be better than C++ for my project. Maybe... C, Go, C#, F#, Scala, Clojure, Swift, D, or Delphi/FreePascal/Oxygene. That's a big "maybe", and for each alternative language to C++ there are pros/cons tradeoffs, rather than clearly superior language.

PHP is likely in the same situation. What would be a viable alternative languages to PHP, for problems which are well suited to PHP's wheelhouse?

I think it is a mixture of the language and what people did with it. It provides a really shallow barrier to start programming, so a lot of newbies started doing stuff with it (I did as well) and so the "average code level" is or was lower. And I think that's just natural, because we all started a some point and (hopefully) learned a lot since then. But the impression from these early days can stick in people's minds.

The second part is, that the makers of PHP were learning how to create a language while creating one as well, which led to entry and removal of magic quotes, auto variables etc. and also inconsistent names and parameters for the functions (search with needle and haystack or array and item?).

And when the people have set their mind and start making jokes, it is hard to give it a fair chance again. That being said, I personally prefer other languages today, with static typing and a carefully designed set of language features. But PHP today also is not PHP of the early days anymore.

Most of PHP bad rep comes from wordpress and beginner programmers, I think. Wordpress might work, but it's literally PHP4 old. It still contains shims for PHP4, and overall it's behind at least 10 years.

I complain about PHP a lot, but I don't hate it. In fact I'd say the opposite; I find it very hackable, it is fast, it's a free open field unlike other languages that instead drag you in their quirks with no way out. Many times I've considered switching to another language, but there was no clear winner over PHP.

I want to point out, that many of the hating people got to know PHP sometime in the mid 2000-s, when it slow, poorly designed procedural language with no real company or driving force behind it. It didn't have any coding standards nor real OOP support. It lacked a lot of features that every decent programming languages have. It was vulnerable to SQL injections and XSS attacks. Tutorials supported bad practices and had no consistence at all.

Now PHP's a completely different language. It's got great object oriented support, allowing you to use classes, traits and interfaces, static methods and many more. There are a lot of design patterns commonly used by many MVC frameworks making web development a breeze. When you use modern mainstream framework like Laravel, it feels almost like RoR and it's surely feels better than Django to me.

ORM, ActiveRecord, Composer package manager, lots of great Symfony bundles - all these makes writing performant PHP solution with ease. PHP-FIG delivers coding standards that make our code look consistent. The performance of PHP 7 almost equals Java's one in single threaded cases making it unbeaten among interpreted languages.