Discussion on: Which mainstream programming language has the ugliest syntax?

[Mike]

PHP: it’s not a bad syntax, it’s just not what some people like, and they’ve formed opinionated debates over it.

[Anas Ismail Khan]

I agree. There's nothing bad about the syntax. True, the language could be better. There are 99 reasons to dislike PHP but syntax is definitely not one of them.

[Jeroen De Dauw]

PHP has been my main language for 10 years.

-> instead of . is rather unfortunate. Much harder to type :/

$var instead of var is also not idea if you ask me, though at least not as silly as needing to hit 3 keys.

That does not make the syntax as a whole ugly though.

[Ryan Haber]

Lol. It helps. :D

[Ryan Haber]

True enough. The syntax isn't bad as in defective or overly verbose. It does look inelegant to me, though.

[Antonin J. (they/them)]

Especially if you look at more modern PHP. I really like Laravel's code style.

For non-PHP developers, a few syntax niceties:

1. All variables have a $ prefix. So $post = getPost($id).
2. Accessing class properties (non-static) is done via an arrow: $request->has('name')
3. Accessing static properties is done via :: (by far my favorite). Route::get('/api/posts', function() {});

I also like PHP namespacing:

namespace Vendor\Lib\Class;

and accessing the namespace:

use Vendor\Lib\Class;

[Ethan Stewart]

As someone who's used PHP in the past, all of your niceties are among the many reasons I don't care for the language 😆 to each their own though! 🤷🏻‍♂️

[Antonin J. (they/them)]

Haha, I can understand that. I actually liked the namespacing so much, I wrote a babel plugin that rewrites import paths in JS to work similarly. Not EXACTLY the same, but it's very similar.

[Ben Sinclair]

I really dislike PHP namespacing.