PHP is uniquely bad in that the people behind it continuously make bad choices in designing the language. T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM has existed since PHP 3 and is still visible as part of parsing errors today. It should be renamed T_DOUBLE_COLON but somehow still hasn't been, and the manual entry makes it seem like it's a cute and quirky feature of the language. Oh look! You have to know a very specific subset of Hebrew to work your way around the code!
PHP doesn't abort execution and show a 500 on error. No. Instead it just sends the half-finished paged with an error at the top that is guarenteed to break the page.
PHP wasn't designed with you running a server process, and any framework that tries to use PHP this way undermines itself completely by having to spend 98% of its development time working against the fact that they're trying to run a modern 3D game on top of SNES-like architecture. PHP was made to be the OG serverless language, running per-requests instead of as a daemon process. But even that very core feature of PHP was butchered.
No attempt has been made to standardize the signatures of standard library functions. Sometimes snake_case, sometimes pascalCase, sometimes nocase, sometimes the verb is first, sometimes the noun is - and for array functions, sometimes the array goes in first, and sometimes last!
PHP is the only language with a configuration file assigned to it. Not a list of language features to turn on/off, no. Configuration that will change the way the language works. Which means you can't take the code from one server to the next and expect things to work. You also have to take into account the configuration of PHP itself.
While JavaScript has its share of "wat"s itself, comparison in PHP, and more generally type coersion in PHP is a PITA, and that's a huge euphemism. Oh, and while JavaScript's == is weird but understandable, PHP's ==, oh boy...
These aren't usage errors, where the developer wrongly assumes something about the code itself and unexpected behavior emerges. These are weirdness coming from the language itself, which makes it extra hard to wrap your head around how to use the language itself, and as a result makes you more prone to errors.
Finally, someone will say "oh but language X or Y also has these quirky features". Oh it's okay then, some other language is weird in this aspect, therefore it's okay to put it in PHP. Therefore PHP really is Frankenstein's Monster of programming languages.
PHP is uniquely bad in that the people behind it continuously make bad choices in designing the language.
T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIMhas existed since PHP 3 and is still visible as part of parsing errors today. It should be renamedT_DOUBLE_COLONbut somehow still hasn't been, and the manual entry makes it seem like it's a cute and quirky feature of the language. Oh look! You have to know a very specific subset of Hebrew to work your way around the code!php.net/manual/en/language.oop5.pa...
PHP doesn't abort execution and show a 500 on error. No. Instead it just sends the half-finished paged with an error at the top that is guarenteed to break the page.
PHP wasn't designed with you running a server process, and any framework that tries to use PHP this way undermines itself completely by having to spend 98% of its development time working against the fact that they're trying to run a modern 3D game on top of SNES-like architecture. PHP was made to be the OG serverless language, running per-requests instead of as a daemon process. But even that very core feature of PHP was butchered.
No attempt has been made to standardize the signatures of standard library functions. Sometimes snake_case, sometimes pascalCase, sometimes nocase, sometimes the verb is first, sometimes the noun is - and for array functions, sometimes the array goes in first, and sometimes last!
PHP is the only language with a configuration file assigned to it. Not a list of language features to turn on/off, no. Configuration that will change the way the language works. Which means you can't take the code from one server to the next and expect things to work. You also have to take into account the configuration of PHP itself.
While JavaScript has its share of "wat"s itself, comparison in PHP, and more generally type coersion in PHP is a PITA, and that's a huge euphemism. Oh, and while JavaScript's
==is weird but understandable, PHP's==, oh boy...These aren't usage errors, where the developer wrongly assumes something about the code itself and unexpected behavior emerges. These are weirdness coming from the language itself, which makes it extra hard to wrap your head around how to use the language itself, and as a result makes you more prone to errors.
Finally, someone will say "oh but language X or Y also has these quirky features". Oh it's okay then, some other language is weird in this aspect, therefore it's okay to put it in PHP. Therefore PHP really is Frankenstein's Monster of programming languages.
Oh yes. That and more.
On a sidenote I thought that T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM was fixed in recent versions but it seems that it was actually not. 🤦
I'm surprised there is no other languages in the error messages though