Discussion
I first met PHP circa 1995, back when it was a ghastly Perl knock-off—Perl 4, at that, no OOP or test harnesses or attempts to tidy the language up. The only thing it brought to the table was slightly tighter web integration, and it wasn't worth the added suck elsewhere.
Everything I have learned about PHP since 1995 has only confirmed my decision to have *nothing* to do with it: it seems to be a loosely coupled lexicon of security exploits flying in loose formation, not a language.
@cstross yeah the use case for PHP is wordpress and maybe mediawiki
@davidgerard
Nextcloud and most CalDAV implementations are also PHP :/
@cstross
@viq @davidgerard @cstross And most of Facebook, Etsy, Slack, Wayfair, Mailchimp, and Tumblr. 😉
@cstross PHP was someones neat hack for their web page, and it got out of hand. Kind of like make and C and many other items
At least it's not node.js
@etchedpixels @cstross Pretty much, yes, but what we have now doesn’t share any semblance with that first version.
It has never been the most elegant of languages, but you can read PHP code written by other people without having a sudden urge of taking out your own eyes. That can't be said of Perl. At all.
@jcurioso You've never learned how to write maintainable well-structured Perl, I see.
(There's a lot of bad perl out there … just like there's a lot of bad C. But there doesn't have to be. Whereas I have yet to see any evidence that PHP can be made NON-bad.)
@Tubemeister @cstross @jcurioso remembering an NT admin coworker (extremely good at the NT stuff) who somehow wrote perl in the style of DOS batch files
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@cstross Then you haven't actually looked at the language since then, and it shows. Modern PHP looks nothing like Perl, has strong typing, the best package manager of any language (seriously), and much, much more.
And you got your facts wrong. 95 was when the first release happened. PHP 4 was in 2000, and had OOP features.
Love your work, but this is an uninformed opinion based on a knee-jerk reaction to the news today. You can do better.