I think the “bad rep” is coming from developers that stopped developing themselves.

chuckadams 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I've written PHP off and on since the .php3 extension was a thing, and I can say that PHP very much deserved the bad rap it had for some time. It's evolved beyond most of that, but a lot of that is due to the composer ecosystem making up for it while the behavior of many builtins remains beyond repair. Which is fine, every language has baggage and warts. PHP's warts are sometimes heinously ugly, and they're on full display in many legacy codebases, but modern PHP is something I actually find to be fairly pleasant to develop with, far more than Go or vanilla JavaScript.

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esskay 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

A lot of it came from the rather harmful "php a fractal of bad design" article that used to get posted everywhere despite being highly inaccurate and out of date. Thankfully its fairly rare to see someone daft enough to still try using it in a discussion. PHP's come a very long way since then.

	▲	thayne 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		What is inaccurate about it? Maybe it is out of date now, but when I first read it about a decade ago, when I did a fair amount of PHP development, I had personally encountered most of the issues mentioned in there. I've heard that PHP has improved a lot since then, but I don't see how you could really fix all the inconsistencies, global state, and "oddities" without a lot of breaking changes and really making it into a different language.

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fg137 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

No. Bad rep comes from developers who used other languages and never looked back.

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frutjgma 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I did PHP for 15 years. Modern PHP looks good but I still wouldn't go back.

	▲	phplovesong a few seconds ago \| parent [-]
		What is even "modern php"? It has the same warts than it had back in the day, last i looked nothing is fixed.