Don't take people's opinions on programming topics too seriously, form your own opinion. Not that you should look into PHP, but if you don't understand the reason why someone thinks a technology is bad, it often means the person stating that actually doesn't know either.
I graduated in 1990 in Electrical Engineering and since then I have been in university, doing research in the field of DSP. To me programming is more a tool than a job.
I have some experience with PHP, although I wouldn't call myself an "expert." However, the inconsistency of the API is the first thing I noticed. Ruby has been designed with the principle of "minimal surprise," PHP seems designed to maximize the surprise.
Fortunately, there is a nice manual online, without that programming in PHP would be a nightmare.
It does have inconsistent api for functions, however the reason is that function names are same as underlying libraries function names.
So there is strpos and str_replace (str meaning string), but they differ in naming because strpos is from one library and str_replace from other.
That is the short explanation at least.
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Don't take people's opinions on programming topics too seriously, form your own opinion. Not that you should look into PHP, but if you don't understand the reason why someone thinks a technology is bad, it often means the person stating that actually doesn't know either.
+100. Don't listen to me :D I made a joke. PHP is (was?) known for having inconsistent API but I am not an PHP expert by any means.
I have some experience with PHP, although I wouldn't call myself an "expert." However, the inconsistency of the API is the first thing I noticed. Ruby has been designed with the principle of "minimal surprise," PHP seems designed to maximize the surprise.
Fortunately, there is a nice manual online, without that programming in PHP would be a nightmare.
There's also some good replacements, for example the laravel helpers. I very rarely use the standard library.
It does have inconsistent api for functions, however the reason is that function names are same as underlying libraries function names.
So there is strpos and str_replace (str meaning string), but they differ in naming because strpos is from one library and str_replace from other.
That is the short explanation at least.