Why not PHP?

Question

Experienced programmers often rant against PHP. But so far I haven't come upon a summarized list of reasons. Anyone care to explain?

Answer 1

I suspect it boils down to the fact that it's too easy to problem badly/insecurely, etc. due to the low barrier to entry.

That said, there's a pretty comprehensive discussion here: Defend PHP; convince me it isn’t horrible

Answer 2

The main disadvantage of PHP is the lack of a pure object oriented methodology. Also the performance might not be as good ad compared to other high level programming languages. It does not encourage modular programming.

The pros of PHP are higher compared to cons.

For rapid development PHP is one of the better languages. Its database connectivity with all SQL Servers is too good. And the final one it has a huge user base.

Answer 3

I think one of the main reasons is that it's very easy to combine the PHP code and HTML markup for a page into one big, unreadable and unmaintainable file. However the same thing applies to probably every other language / framework, e.g. ASP.Net. It is possible to organise PHP code nicely; I think this is also easier with the new bits of PHP 5.

I guess as middaparka says, it has a low barrier to entry, so it's more likely to be picked up and used by developers who don't have as much experience of maintaining large projects, hence the descent into "spaghetti code".

Answer 4

1. Everything added after version 3 has been an afterthought.
2. goto 1;

Answer 5

I think PHP is an excellent and capable language, but also find some of the naming conventions for functions etc., to be quite arbitrary, inconsistent and unintuitive.