zlacker

>>TimWol+(OP)
The worst part about PHP is constantly hearing from its detractors, who are often people who haven’t used the language in many years. Haystack needle order, $, fractal of bad design, it just gets old.

The language isn’t perfect but I love working with it, these 8.1 and 8.2 improvements have really made it sweet.

My biggest gripe at the moment is the (very old) behavior of e.g. preg_match() and sort(). You’ve got a small handful of these common functions that operate on their input by reference/in place which is gross. A new version of these would be welcome.

>>user39+j7
The truth is, no language is perfect.

PHP just happens to be good at getting stuff done fast, so it's found all over the place, and thus has a lot of eyeballs on it. The negativity is a byproduct of it's usefulness and staying power - the price of popularity, if you will.

I love PHP, especially with the new event loop based modules that let you do things asynchronously, much like Node or Go.

If you know how to use it well, PHP is awesome, and it's getting better with each release.

>>osrec+Xc
PHP was the first open source language in which just anybody could write server-side web applications without terrible management problems for the sysadmin. First people wrote cgi-bin scripts in Perl, which were not efficient because they forked a process for each request. There was mod-perl which was more efficient but prone to memory leaks. A few people wrote cgi (or fast-cgi or Apache module) programs in C/C++ but that was insane since a return after a 𝚜𝚝𝚛𝚌𝚙𝚢 is Turing complete in C and there weren't any mitigations for this in the 1990s.

PHP opened the door to cheap web dynamic web hosting and in turn you had self-hosted applications like Wordpress. It was a few years later that languages like Java and C# became really attractive for back end work, you also had Ruby, Node, etc.

I wrote a lot of PHP in the early 2000s because that is were the work was, that’s what you could write open source code that people would use in, and it was really straightforward to build apps (like a social network for a secret society) without an ‘ops’ team watching your every move.

>>PaulHo+Qd
I think the big thing PHP offered was people could easily deploy their project just by copying files to a directory. A link directly to the file got dynamic content. Most shared hosting also put index.php in the default indexes to check for directories. So it was simple to have clean looking links without using a rewrite module.

Deploying to the cgi-bin directory was more convoluted and error prone for end users. Even when you did it right all of your URLs had an "ugly" cgi-bin component.

The easy deployment and cheap shared hosting with their managed MySQL instances really helped boost PHP's usage.