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Jaimie Carter
Jaimie Carter

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The fascinating phenomena of PHP trashing????

Navigating my way through this new and exciting world of writing code, I am facinated by PHP trash talk. It 'does what it says on the tin' as far as I can tell.... ??? Someone please enlighten me!

Is this like admitting you like Savage Garden...? Or have a pair of stonewash jeans? Or drive an Astra?

*** Disclaimer: I have no allegiance or impassioned viewpoint. Though I did once wear stonewash jeans and drive and Astra. But never listened to Savage Garden. Honest.

Top comments (11)

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matthewbdaly profile image
Matthew Daly

PHP nowadays is a pretty decent language. However, that wasn't always the case, and unfortunately some of us are stuck with legacy codebases from that era. Composer and PSR standards, as well as the newer generation of frameworks, have made a big difference, but there's still a lot of crap out there in production.

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jamonjamon profile image
Jaimie Carter

Ah, I see. That's starting to put it into context for me. My only experience is very limited and starts at PHP7.... And it's pretty good. Though I have no idea what I'm talking about

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matthewbdaly profile image
Matthew Daly

I maintain a Zend 1 legacy application with a long list of issues stemming from years of neglect, bad design decisions (such as the bright spark who said "Let's not use the built-in table gateway classes, we'll roll our own models for that"), and copy and paste coding. It's definitely taught me a lot about refactoring, but it does emphasise the fact that PHP was a lot worse in the past than it is now.

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jamonjamon profile image
Jaimie Carter

Ahhh. You've not seen a mess until you see my app (patch.team). Though to be fair to myself I knew pretty much zero about programming before building it (I used the whole 'if you're gonna learn something- build something' approach). Talk about a monolithic spaghetti mess!! Was fun though.

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anwar_nairi profile image
Anwar • Edited

I think this is just people being people. You will always have those little wars.

The most important is to listen to all, and build own thought.

I love PHP, but JS fill my heart with its prototype pattern. Python for its simplicity and the forced indentation that put a clear guidance and make us avoid spaghetti code.

There is good in each, bad in each. It is just a matter of how you feel which is better to do the job 😉

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jamonjamon profile image
Jaimie Carter

Yeah, I kind of like PHP, though I have nothing to compare it to. Doing a Node project next.

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babrown93 profile image
Bill

In my opinion, PHP sucks because everything will take longer to do. It gives me a heavy vibe of sitting there gaining weight with a beard coding in the dark with a linux server.

I write in C#, using MVC, full featured development tools and superior debugging experience. I love the full MS stack, even the hosting environment and database manager. I develop with MVC, use MSSQL and host with IIS on Windows.

I also drove an Astra, not sure on the stone wash jeans though.

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jamonjamon profile image
Jaimie Carter • Edited

Yeah, I like the idea of C# and .NET I'll definitely be looking at it.. oh and I'm not buying the not having stonewash jeans. Astra drivers standard dress code

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garthvador profile image
Quentin Caillaud

It was already said before but a lot of people's opinion on PHP were made long time ago, when it was honestly quite a dirty language.

But the main reason, I think, is that some people, who are not necessarily the more numerous, but those who scream louder, have really strong and arbitrary opinions about what they like. And they seems like to think that the better way to defend their choice is to trash other people taste...

And it's sadly not limited to development, as you said it's like "bad" taste in music (no I don't like Nickelback but you do, good for you, enjoy it !).

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jamonjamon profile image
Jaimie Carter

Oh come on Quentin, you've got a Nickelback song in your playlist! Yeah, I'm getting the feeling it must be something in the past that was the basis for this. I really enjoyed using PHP and found it very very easy to use. We'll see how node, then python goes for me. It's a very exciting new world, this code thing!

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Brent Roose

Every language can be trashed to a certain point, especially if the ones trashing it are hopelessly outdated on the topic. I actually wrote a post about this exact issue a month ago: stitcher.io/blog/php-in-2019