PHP Sucks (originally by czth)

Note

This is a copy of a page that went offline from czth.net. I'll add links to it below.

PHP Sucks. "PHP is an abomination." - David Robins, December 17, 2002.

• PHP annoyances (broken link as of 2008-11-17)
• Some comments from use Perl;
• Experiences of Using PHP in Large Websites
• Nathan Torkington's list of PHP's shortcomings
• GNU-Friends article by lupo (broken link - parked domain)
• PHP in contrast to perl systematically points out PHP inconsistencies
• Joel on Software mentions PHP's willful ignorance of character encodings[1]
• The PHP::Strings perl module will provide much enlightenment

[1] character encodings are a pain in the neck, but they are necessary

Some points of my own:

Of course you can write complex scripts in PHP - it's Turing complete. It's just painful. (See Paul Graham's Succinctness is Power article.) You can write complex scripts in assembler; it's also painful. But assembler has a niche, a place where it shines: when you need to hand-optimize something or write low-level code (think kernels, trampolines, compiler magic). PHP doesn't. There's nothing for which it is the best choice.

A simple problem and a perl solution: remove all matches to id=some integer value (at the end of a string) from a list, also stripping off id=value from the other strings. (Admittedly this seems a little contrived but it was actually needed by somebody at some point.)

@array = grep { s/id=(\d+)$// ? $1 != $value : 1 } @array;

[2005-02-04] Finally there's a PHP equivalent from Jason Sweat, after almost 2 years:

$array = array_filter($array, create_function('$v','return !preg_match(\'/id=\d+$|id='.$value.'$/\',$v);'));

At least it's possible, but note the following two things: it has to parse code at runtime (think eval STRING), and that it makes use of perl regular expression matching (beats reinventing the wheel I guess). It just doesn't have the elegance of the perl (IMO).

More Links (by Shlomi Fish)

• "The Month of PHP Bugs"
• "PHP more maintainable than Perl, also Pepsi way better than Coke" - post to the Joel-on-Software board.
• Coding Horror: "PHP Sucks, But it Doesn't Matter"
• "What I don't like about PHP" -by Edwin Martin.
• Slashdot.org Review of the book "Securing PHP Web Applications"