I HATE PHP.

I hate it with all my guts.
It's weirdly cobbled together, nothing fits for anything, it's a NON PROFESSIONAL TOOL. AT. ALL. PLEASE STOP DOIN' STUFF WITH IT AND REWRITE YOUR STACK IN COBOL/BRAINF**K.

I HATE IT.

It's the only language where I actually struggled with such a difficult concept as using Unicode.

Just use a framework for it.

Laravel

I can only say that, having started in PHP, I could hardly believe how much effort it was to do really straightforward things in VBA and Python. For the web, core PHP is easier/quicker than anything else, by far. A huge amount of what I do (database-driven web apps) involves working with arrays, which PHP makes simple. You can have arrays of mixed types, arrays of other arrays, associative arrays, anything, and virtually any array function you need is there and native. Python and VBA almost need handwritten notice of intent before you can add another item - waaaargh!!! You changed the number of things in the array!!! Without telling me!!!!! Whaddami gonna do now?!????? [explodes]. I love the way PHP just works and does what it does, all the time.

great plan to rewrite PHP stuff in an even older language 'COBOL'...

For me, PHP is just good. It works and does the job.

No special requirements for hosting it.

@Grumm * plays sarcasm card *

@ojt-rant a framework hides a lot of stuff, they are usable but still the tooling seems so unpolished.

Xdebug, phpunit... hell, even make 'em work is sometimes a nightmare.

@spongegeoff seems like a tony the pony post :D

@8lall0 it was built so that you could decide to use it however you prefer. For me I just use the controllers, my own custom services and basic bade files (also webmix for minifying and importing js and css). The rest is just there if you need it.

And its CRUD syntax is *chefs kiss*

@8lall0 I have no idea what a 'tony the pony' post is? Agree it can be hard to get Xdebug up and running, but if you did it once and documented the process you have it forever.

I beg to differ. PHP probably sucks in 5.6 era. But it got good at PHP 7.4. Then it got very good by PHP 8.0 and 8.1.

It finally has everything that I needed. It has namespace, it has class, it has all essential OOP features such extending existing class, overriding methods, etc.

Also it allows us to define method's parameter type and return type now. Those two are important so that we won't make accidental silly mistake. It also allow IDE's intellisense to suggest accurate methods to us.

My only remaining complain is, how PHP's variables are scoped. That's one of it's great flaw that hasn't been fixed. If we create/declare a new variable inside a conditional block, or a loop, that variable stays available even after that!

If PHP maker fix this bug by next release, probably by allowing us to change scoping by putting a new value in php.ini, I would be very happy.

PHP is a good language with a whacky core API. The only real problem of it is that it allows single-braincelled devs to run complete garbage.

@daniel-wu Variable scoping is unlikely to change. But you can always just make your functions/methods smaller.

Looks like someone's is stuck maintaining a wordpress site

Good rant!