What are the gripes people have with PHP?

Where to begin? (Random order of my gripes about PHP that I can think of off the top of my head.)

First, you have to escape HTML with <?php tag. This not only clouds business logic with display but it encourages mixing them.

Second, PHP’s weak typing means you can easily run into issues because the language does not let you declare your intent. Perl’s == vs. eq is in the right direction.

Third, PHP has no namespaces and, my last count a week-or-so ago, has 5,312 functions thanks to all the modules/extensions.

Fourth, PHP has no naming consistency. strpos vs. str_replace.

Fifth, PHP has no argument order consistency. in_array($needle, $haystack) vs. strpos($haystack, $needle).

Sixth, unknown tokens are assumed strings. Consider define("MY_FOO_DEFINE", 10). If you accidentally use MY_FOO_DFEINE it will assume you want the string “MY_FOO_DFEINE” and continue on.

Seventh, it has forking (pcntl) but absolutely no locking ability. (I write off-line PHP scripts that utilize my app’s classes.)

Eighth, single inheritance on classes.

Ninth, lack of operator overload.

Tenth, references/aliases. They blow. Especially prior to, I forget exactly which version, 5.1 where objects were copied which made it insanely tedious to make sure all of your aliasing (adding & everywhere) were done right. If you miss a single one then you get a copy. Without pointers and a good debugger, this because nigh impossible to track down.

Eleventh, magic quotes. They promote laziness. Glad to see its slated to be removed in PHP6.

Twelfth, no one needs native unicode. Right?

Thirteenth, PHP has no official spec. It’s just whatever the developers feel like doing and adding (which I assume is the root for naming inconsistency and many other gripes of mine).

Fourteenth, PHP lacks good debugging and profiling support. I’ve attempting to use a couple debuggers including Zend’s debugger but they all lack or didn’t work. Introduce AJAX into your app and things get worse.

Fifteenth, complete and utter lack of objects for dates, strings, arrays, etc. No operator overloading exacerbates this. It would be very helpful to have $arr->in('foo') or $date->incrementDays(7);. Heck $file->write('flooby'); for files would be nice too.

Sixteenth, the arrays make combining lists and hashes into one data type but it becomes a chore if you specifically need one and its respective semantics.

Seventeenth, functions aren’t objects which means you can’t pass functions around. Creating an anonymous function with create_function is a joke and a hack to get around this problem….kind of.

Eighteenth, no late static binding (google it). Still.

Nineteenth, all of my interactions with the development group have been the opposite of stellar. The common response is a quick, terse, copy/pastes response and goes something like “that’s not a bug, it’s a feature.”

That’s about enough I think. For what it’s worth, I do have a list of things I like about PHP but you didn’t ask. :) In particular is the breadth of database support. I had trouble finding mysql support for Python and when I did (mysqldb module) I found out that it forces cursors for every query and it breaks when trying to do something (sarcasm) complex like joins.

PHP has its place and I hope it stays there! :)

The only potential disadvantage I can think of is the fact that variables don’t have to be declared, causing a larger chance of semantic errors (variable typos that aren’t caught). But then again you can make PHP catch this stuff on almost any server configuration. So what are the disadvantages you all have? I’d love to hear input. Thanks!

I used to be a fanatic PHP scripter even though I did plenty of programming in other languages (not for web purposes) and sure it’s alot easier than anything out there, just due to the un-intuitive (to me) implementation of OO in php 5 there isn’t really any IDE that actually knows what to do with those objects that just ’somehow’ arrive in your included php files.

javascript is finally advancing into something real and not a could-have-been language. A few years ago noone wanted to even really touch javascript –mostly due to microsoft’s implementation of jscript. Now with the AJAX-hype things have been looking up though.

this is not the place for that kind of questions (you will never get an answer, perhaps).

Try the support forums here at sitepoint or somwhere, if you’re looking for php tutorials search google for “PHP beginner tutorials”.