I would rather be unemployed than forced to write code in PHP

• October 28, 2015
• technology  
• php  
• stupidity  

My blog currently uses WordPress. I’ve written numerous times about the various PHP based attacks I see every day because of the stupid security mistakes PHP programmers make. I’ve also made a few changes to the WordPress software to make it saner about handling and logging requests. Thus I knew PHP was awful from my own limited interaction with it. Then I came across this article: PHP: a fractal of bad design. This one point from that article should be enough to result in a death sentence for the language:

PHP’s one unique operator is @ (actually borrowed from DOS), which silences errors.

Holy shit! The developer(s) of PHP remind me of a coworker in my first post college job. He thought he could design and implement a new language. Yet he had no idea what the computer science terms “parser”, “lexical analysis”, “tokenizer” etc. meant. I suspect he would be welcomed by the PHP community.