It's a fact that I can't deny any of the bad points you have exposed about
PHP. I even agree with you that most of this problems are really awful and
it's pointless to hide them. But the fact that PHP is by preference the
language for developing small and middle web solutions aimed to be economic
and rapidly developed is also undeniable. All languages have their pros and
cons, and trying to compare them outside of the context of the target
market
is pointless. It just happens that PHP pros fit better the desires of the
web solutions market, and they also don't care much about current PHP cons.
Most people aren't aware of the cons, thats my point :)
For example:
If Mr. big wig was aware that phpBB has a history if being uber
hackable and even being used in a rootkit scheme a time or two he'd not
choose PHP. But its shiny so he says "go with that it looks nice".
That is how its popularity has grown, ignorance of the facts.
Anyway, this market is evolving and its needs are changing, so it's normal
for developers to try and anticipate future development needs and try to
make PHP fit into other philosophies, methodologies or technologies it was
not designed to work with, and everyone who has tried this (including me)
have started to hate PHP in a certain way. But that's all there is to it, I
hate not having a proper application framework, I hate not having
namespaces, I hate the overhead of working with OOP, I hate magic quotes,
but I still use PHP because it is still the most appropiate development
enviroment for a small or middle sized web solution.
Why not use Perl, it has all the "pros" but does not have the cons :)
In fact, I use it for several high volumn websites:
- with persistent database connections and persistently running
instances of the script
(which is the *only* positive PHP has, except it means running PHP
as "nobody" and with really really bad permissions)
- without doing *anything* with apache
- works with SuExec so it runs as the user so the permissions can be
700 and config files 600 - try that with PHP without days of fiddling
and breaking stuff and finally giving up ;)
Now you have the only "benefit" of PHP (but better) without *any* of its
downside.
I'm guessing this part, but I think you think alike and that's the reason
you're still on this list and trying to make a point out of your bad
experiences with PHP. We can still hope that this problems will be solved
It won't, for "backwards compatibility" they'll have to keep the cobbled
up mess. Or else make it new from scratch and remove the crap, but in
that case itd be a brand new langauge and would have all the problems
inherent with that :)
> Thanks for sharing your opinion and concerns, I really appreciate them.
My pleasure, I've been managing hundreds of servers for nearly a decade
and PHP has always had seriouse drawbacks. I've really honestly tried to
make a go of it but its just to much overhead to be worth it, IMHO :)
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