How can you say php sucks? My webpage is a very small example of how great it is, and I didn't even know how to use it properly when I coded that site. PHP is a server side based scripting language that uses common syntax from many languages. It has decent error messages, good security built in functions to do things like contact mysql, open socks ports. It can build files on the fly and it's fast enough to do it.

What is your suggested alternative?

Java or javascript ? They both run on the clients pc which is very unpredictable

Perl? CGI? Older, slower, perl needs to be compiled even.

What would suggest we use instead? I'm not saying that I'm sure php is the best, but you aren't providing ANY evidence that php sucks. Back it up or step down.

Quit drinking your stawberry milk. Java sucks. PHP rules.

I can say that PHP sucks because of 3 years of experience working with it. There are many examples that I found in daily work, and as they will cross my way again I will report them. The range is from the absurd "Magic Quotes" feature to inconsistent return values of functions.
For the record: I don't like java either. And real alternative? I don't have any at the moment, my next look would be on python and ruby. Webobjects may be an option too. But that doesn't mean that PHP doesn't suck. And I want to step back from Web-Development anyway, because it's just too limited. I like GUI applications, and especially Objective-C and Cocoa on Mac OS X.
Mark: Java does only run on the client pc if you do applets, when you do software on an application server then it runs on the server. And javascript is not a replacement for things you do with a server based language.

PHP is not a language, it's scripting like batch in dos
------------------------------------

So there are inconsistancies in the code i.e. you can use echo or print you can use " or '

The one thing I have noticed that I don't like is

if($array['index'] ==1)
{
}
In the above statement re require quotes but

echo("$array['index']");
But that statement will actually cause an error.
However, I would like to see a WELL WRITTEN function in php that returns unpredictable results. I sincerily doubt it is the fault of php, but if so it would greatly shake my trust in the language I think but I think it's just the fault of the coder.

in the end... php is OPEN SOURCE and FREE

ASP is definately not free and you can't argue that it's faster because it's just plain slow :)

You should be using DGJPP or at least MingW C object oriented crap is slow, unfortunately because I did like some of the lazy nestle you can get into with inheretance....

Try a simple for loop in visual c++ and then try it in basic, you get the same speed. Java is 3-4 times slower and PHP is 3-4 times faster. C for dos or MingW will blow it away.

If you've got proof that php has flaws why not send code examples into them that exploit the flaws, they are working hard to produce a fully developed server side scripting language FOR FREE. You might critisize it now but how many people run Apache?! We just paid $900 for office XP when we could have used Open Office and no open source is not subpar!

Free BSD
Open Office
Apache
Mysql

I mean cmon! these products are top notch and as far as I'm concerned right now one is missing from the list...

PHP

Btw I saw you examples of POORLY CODED FUNCTIONS which don't work properly. Well it's your own fault for being to lazy to not code your OWN functions. Only the base code in a language should be used in my opinion. If you use a function that you didn't write it'll probably be so generically written so anyone can use it that it'll at best be ineffcient. Write you own functions, PHP is not to blame for poorly coded functions.

FOR FREE. That's an arguement. It's free yes, and its out there. That does not mean it is good. Neither does it mean complaining about bad things is not allowed. But when you argue down the track please don't let Microsoft Technologies race angainst it, let it play against other free stuff like ruby or python or cgi-lua or or or.... there are plenty of them out there.

I'm ranting about PHP, not on apache neither on mysql nor open office. And the inconsistencies are huge. And furthermore if I would stand up to the PHP developers and tell them like you argue "PHP is not a language, it's scripting like batch in DOS" they will beat the hell out of me. That's an even bigger insult than just to say PHP sucks man.

Mark, quit trolling (and making a fool out of yourself).

Please note:
* What's the point of having a framework, when you can't use it?
* Open source is not a sign of quality.
* Shouting does not prove points.
* PHP considered harmful: http://www.ukuug.org/events/linux2002/papers/html/php/index.html

Oh and Golbez, stawberry milk rules.

Quit drinking your strawberry milk. Only fools who like Java drink strawberry milk.

Your link http://www.ukuug.org/events/linux2002/papers/html/php/index.html proves nothing. PHP Rules!

The design of php is excellent, no open source is not a sign of quality and you are right yelling does not get a point across.

"Framework" as you call it I can't only assume you mean bifs is for the lazy. "Re-inventing" the wheel as people like you often dub it in my opinion is necessary because more often than not I find it's square to being with.

However, we all have our opinions and obvious common interests. You go on and drink you strawberry milk as golbez puts it. I hope it's warm enough :)

p.s. you'd be very very surprised what dos batch can do.

There has been absolutely no valid points brought up against PHP. Now, I'm not saying those who support php are bringing up great points; but they ARE bringing up points.

"It sucks!" "I know it sucks, I've used it!" "I have 3 years experience, and I can tell you - PHP SUCKS." The statements have no value.
There is a difference between bullshitting and fact.
There is a difference between bias and fact.
There are no facts here.

What I find most humourous is "And I want to step back from Web-Development anyway, because it's just too limited." The entire business world is running on web applications - has been for years. There is nothing limited about web applications within the scope they are designed for.

For Example, consider that a single web application, at a corporate site can be run by an reasonably unlimited amount of branches- all at once. Transactions are updated instantly in the financial databases. The most up to date warehouse information is constantly available to the vendor. All product data is sent out from, and returns to, a central location. For only to cost of creating the application.

What are you, a game designer? Go home.

map: thanks for the great article, I totally agree and had tons of problems with the setting of register_globals and magic_quotes_gpc.

Dave: many valid points are in the article refered to by map, no sense of unicode support is a point I made in this posting, another point is made in Why PHP sucks, Part II and others will be made in other blog entries yet to come. And for the record: I am not a game designer, but I certainly do respect good game designers.

Come on, dom. You are faking these people, aren't you?

Remember those strawberry milkshakes we had last WWDC?
Yummy. http://0x2a.no-ip.org/mt/images/milkshake.jpg

Look, it's your own fault if you can't turn register_globals off in the php.ini (not to mention it's off by default). Personally I have it turned on because I believe that with proper sercurity coding you can make it easier on yourself by not having to manage the $_Get[] and $_Post[] arrays. I suppose in the end it is fine but if you people are the kind who have problems with such an elementary issue I can understand where you are coming from based on the demonstrated calibre of your understanding in the first place.

Like dave said....

"Go home!"

If you hate PHP so much you should ger rid of php 4.2.2 that's installed on your server.

Php sucks. I'm sorry, but it lacks a hell of a lot.

1. Decent Templating
2. Proper OO
3. Decent level of abstraction.
4. Good database support.

Plus, Major changes between minor revisions.
Code I write in 4.0.0 may not work in 4.0.1. Unacceptable.

JSP and ASP also suck. Coldfusion Sucks. CGI Sucks.

Zope rules.

Well I'll look into this "Zope" of yours but since you seem to be a "pro OOP" guy I've already brewed a bias against it. I mean OOP is an awful awful way to program no matter how lazy you.

"Godd database support" should not be part of the language, code your own again "lazy".

However, you have made 2 good points

1) JSP, ASP, Coldfusion, CGI suck.
2) Old PHP code does not work on new versions quite often. I have not noticed this myself for two reasons
i) I do not frequently upgrade
ii) I don't use functions in php I write my own

However, I do agree that this is unacceptable but so is OOP and Java, JSP, ASP, Python, CGI, Javascript, XML, DHTML. I'd give reasons but ehhnn, I'm tired of argueing with the wind. You, zope guru, have yet to be deemed "the wind" but that will be decided and the basis of that decision will be the caliber of your language.

This is illegal PHP. You can't chain dereferences. This is completely arbitrary.

object->methodOne()->methodTwo();

This is legal PHP. All undefined variables are assumed to contain "". Why? This feature saves typing one line every once in a while, but frequently conceals bugs.

function getPi() { $pi = 3.1; return $pie; }

PHP sucks. Painfully. Because it sucks so much, the majority of people who have any clue at all do not choose to use it if they can help it. PHP advocates tend to be people who only know PHP.

To the women who posted at 16.02.04 time 20:25, go program in Java. Go do your object oriented garbage. PHP rules.

You say you want to it to required to initialize a field, yet complain about an error that only happens when you don't.

I know RPG (AS/400), CLLE(AS/400), Basic and other variants of it but more importantly Java, javascript and I've worked with ASP and Perl.

I suppose when it comes to web languages I do know php the best, because I use it the most. Because it's the most simple and efficient to work with.

BTW undefined variables are assumed to contain nothing it is assumed that they do not exist, hence not being defined.

Let me give you an example

Since this site stripes php tags I can't use quotes we'll assumed | = ?

||

echo isset($unsetvariable)

||

Try that one and see if it returns 1 or 0. For those of you who don't know since you are so blinded by OO land

0 = False
1 = True :)

The only time php has done something I don't agree with is when I have made a mistake. Yes all languages have their faults and I'll agree in most cases that it's the fault of the person coding not the language.

You guys are sickening and those of you who insulted Perl are stupid! PHP also is a server-side scripting. My first scripting language 4 years ago was PHP and I loved it then but I love PERL! And you must program in Perl to tell the real strengths! I feel sorry for those who use php. it is crap!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!11

Oh I don't have anything specifically against perl. My experience with it is limited. I didn't like how you had to compile and yes php is also a server side script. That's why I don't believe in much use of java or javascript because both are completely dependant on the user's browser (big mistake) just like midi. Some quick investigation led me to discover that perl was released in 1987 which interests me.

The author aparently said

"DESCRIPTION
Perl is a interpreted language optimized for scanning arbi-
trary text files, extracting information from those text
files, and printing reports based on that information. It's
also a good language for many system management tasks. The
language is intended to be practical (easy to use, effi-
cient, complete) rather than beautiful (tiny, elegant,
minimal). It combines (in the author's opinion, anyway)
some of the best features of C, sed, awk, and sh, so people
familiar with those languages should have little difficulty
with it. (Language historians will also note some vestiges
of csh, Pascal, and even BASIC|PLUS.) Expression syntax
corresponds quite closely to C expression syntax. If you
have a problem that would ordinarily use sed or awk or sh,
but it exceeds their capabilities or must run a little fas-
ter, and you don't want to write the silly thing in C, then
perl may be for you. There are also translators to turn
your sed and awk scripts into perl scripts. OK, enough
hype."

This is taken from perl.org. It seems I was obvlivious to the obvious subculture of perl that existed in an era that has fascinated me for years. However, I'd like to know what people were doing programming in perl back in '88 when they could have been using c or asm and logging onto BBS' instead of IRC. So I'll probably give it a look into. However, the fact that you say php is crap takes from your creditibility in my opinion php is great. PHP was designed specifically for parsing text exactly what I want to do. Perl seems to have many capabilities. Personally I don't like dvd,vcr combos but because of it's history I'm open to give it a try.

Real men program in Assembley, C, and Fortran for application development.

Real men use PHP for web development.

Would anyone like to speak up, or shall I end this sherade

The rants on this page are almost comical. I taught myself PHP in high school and thought it was great at the time because I could quickly write simple dynamic web pages. Now I strongly prefer J2EE.

Why?
1. No decent MVC framework: This is the standard design pattern for splitting business logic from presentation these days. You cannot get a job doing enterprise webapp development without knowing what MVC Model 2 is.
2. I've run into so many PHP bugs over the years, from session bugs to file access bugs that I can't even expect PHP code to do what it says.
3. No decent validation framework: J2EE OTOH has several free frameworks that offer declarative input validation. The declarative paradigm is well-suited for input validation.
4. No connection pooling: All php can offer is its "persistant connection" crap, which amounts to a connection pool consisting of a single connection. Worse, it's not even possible to hack an implementation yourself without changing php.
5. Performance: See http://www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/2003/06/04/nukes.html for one case study.

If you've wondered why there are no job offerings for enterprise-level php development, you've just seen the tip of the iceberg.

Java is the biggest piece of trash overhyped languages ever. Java is slow, uses alot of memory and is utter garbage.

Real men program in Assembley, C, and Fortran for application development.

To say I like C for such reasons as this

- I don't like java
- I don't like coke
- I don't like ford escorts

This is what you've done, your prefer J2EE not because of anything good about it :) ? Anyway, I'll get to the main points just thought it was funny that you need to attack other places instead of boast, mind you this is a php sucks webpage so I guess you came to the right place.

Now I'll admit I'm fairly ignorant in a lot sections of webpage development, but I find in industry where I work factual knowledge isn't an asset everyone seem to have. So what's php nuke package anyway? I'm not going to bother looking into it but your study doesn't look to me as though someone used php vs java. Looks like they are comparing products made in both, well that's hardly to speak for the language itself.

You know, my company does your "enterprise" developement on the internet and you know what we use ? Lotus notes, the "domino server". You want to talk about a joke? Now that's one. You think there are NO enterprises that run php ?

You wanna back these claims up? I run php and sql on p1 166 with 64mb of ram. I can use it's built in sql functions to cycle through and read over 17,000,000 records in 2-5 seconds. Now... I'm not saying I have hundreds of simultaneous users but I don't see why it would be a problem when my low old 1996 PC is running at such high class performance. If I put my server on a p4 you don't think it could handle 500 users? Cmon give me a break, wanna prove me wrong? Go ahead my server is www.modshrine.com, we'll setup tests I'll help you do them co-ordinate. I'm so sick of people talking out of thin air, let's do some tests, first hand proof. What do you suggest? It's your call, you should be able to win then. Of course I'm sure you'll have a J2EE solution that can outperform my php solution right? I mean, otherwise where are your grounds?

Get a life. PHP owns. You probably think it sucks because you're STUPID. Just to actually run perl on a server, you have to screw around with CHMOD file permissions.

Now to get into the features.
With php you can encode a string into URL format like this

and to do the same in perl, you have to write a complex regular expression. Handleing forms in perl is a joke. you have to use an object! in php, It's auctomaticly dome for you.

I pitty the fool who don't like PHP.

http://hc.hanszen.rice.edu/sports/CurrentReps/mr%20T.jpg

Zope makes life good again:

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/3/21/184222/896

Mario Bros 3 makes life good again:

1. Decent Templating
4. Good database support.
Are you a reatrd?

I'm doin' a web app project in php and it's just a real pain in the ass.

Php lacks of consistency and documentation, when you try ti use something else than core package.
Php leads you to mess in your code for hours.

Another thing that php can't do is refactoring, beacause it's own design : php is a real shitbag... Also There is no good IDE to help you code faster...

I'm sure that there are many other good langage for web app dev, but php is the worst. It is popular because it's simple for writing your first web app... but when you have a larger project to code it's really awfull.

hey Golbez, so real man code in assembly and C ??? Are you leaving in a cave ??? You look scared of OO, but try to use it and you'll see how life will be better.

I'm not lazy, I'm smart, and I don't want to rewrite again and again the same function.
Java have so powerfuls and consistents libraries, with real documentations and good tutorials. No more obscure package that you must decode and hack to let them work in your project.

Use what you want, Zope, J2EE, but please forgot php for something bigger than a school lab.

PHP has great documentation http://www.php.net/manual/en/. PHP owns and it's fast. That's fine you like Java, but Java isn't powerfull it's junk. Java is slow and uses alot of memory. Sure it's got a big junk library full of garbage that reduces coding but in the end it's slow.

well.. cgi is not that good but mod_perl with mason.. that is the best thing I found in web dev..

PHP CGI should never be used, what a disgrace that would be.

JAVA sucks? You're out of your mind. JAVA is an enterprise level language PHP is a stupid scripting language. One of the many pitfalls of PHP is the setcookie function, which doesn't adhere to setting multiple cookies (and yes you can, if you don't know how, look up the HTTP/1.1 specification).

PHP has many inconsistencies and bugs (just bumped into an in_array bug), but it is great for beginners.

Most web developers I know have moved on to Zope. I prefer the robustness of Python. PHP is no match for Python.

Java is gross. Getting furthur away from the cpu and hardware is very uncomfortable. Assembler and or C/C++ should only be used for application development. For web applications somthing fast should be used such as php or perl not Java.

The Java Servlet framework is about 50 times faster than PHP. It is also more reliable, has faster database access, has vastly superior cacheing, etc, etc, etc...

You can try it out if you want. Bytecode is made to be interpreted fast. PHP is not.

Assembler? C? Get out of the 70's. Jesus. Only the dorkiest of the dorks.

Anybody want to start up a HTML embedded SML engine? It's about time the web jumped on the Backus wagon...

Yeah but you better make sure you J2EE is under the UML supervisions of the XML.NET enterprise set. One time I had a friend who didn't sync his core JSP IIS Netware with his ASP port to his servelet server (insert perversions of the word server here).

You see bob, if you want to do real DB2 web application developement you have to QIE your RRX under the proper CVS ROSS.

That's why I hate the java world, you people make me sick inventing thousands of nonsense terms for SIMPLE concepts. On top of that most of you seem unable to understand anything but those terms you can tell right away who understands how a computer works and who reads too many pc world magazines when they start spouting more abreveations than actual words.

You think C had it's prime in the 70's??

"You're out the door"
"You're old news"
"You're out to lunch"
"He's the authroity on ___"

And so on. These are the kinds of things people say who like things called "virtual machine" and "C#OOP++ZQ""

I remember when programming used to be fun, then all this crap came out. GUI's for coding, point click application developement. Needless PC ports of server applications, client side scripts. People are getting so committed to programs that are "easy to maintain" and "easy to port" that they've forgotten about "easy to use".

50 times faster pffttt! Give me a break.

Programming something is a proffession. Sometimes it's fun, sometimes it's not. If you want to make something for you own personal website use php.
If you build something that's mission critical for a company, you have to build something that is reliable and well crafted. So you need an environment that is designed for that kind of use. Java 2EE and .Net are well equiped for that kind of use, php isn't.
A good programming language helps a developer to prevent bugs, by reducing complexity. PHP doens't do that. It can't deal with concurrency in a decent way, OO in a well structured way. It reintroduces problems in computer science that were solved 30 years ago. It doesn't even have decent modularity. Any language should have that! And what about decent exception handling, or scalability issues. Php has no decent design.
Offcourse good programmes can make good solutions with php. But php doesn't help.

Php is open source, but so is jetty, tomcat, jboss, ant, jstl...
Read a book about programming languages and concepts and see where the design flaws in php are.

PHP owns crap out of all you. End of discussion. Closed by God.

First off that "owns the crap out of all of you" wasn't me. Although I'm not totally opposed to it.

Second look at companies like ncix.com or just lately I noticed pepsi.com they are using PHP. You might think twice before going on with nonsense about not using it in a professional capacity.

Anyone who says PHP sucks probably just has no idea how to use it, or uses it for the wrong purpose.

It's a scripting language, not a programming language. You can't compare it to JAVA. It does what it needs to do in in relation to dynamic website design.

PHP Suxx Bigtime. Why should i waste my time in assemblies rather than spend my time in constructing something useful? i have experienced php in 3 years but it fails as to what all support asp or jsp gives.

If anybody on here can tell me just how to get PHP running with apache i would love it. I followed all the instructions and got frustrated and typed in PHP sucks and came here.
kevin.carson@cendant.com

Why suffer the Madness of choosing hosting language - (perl, php, jsp), when you can rent CHEAP Virtual Dedicated Server (security, guarantied cpu & resources - no contentions!!) where you can run the meanest, ugliest,
spaghetti assemblies from HELL if you wish... If enough people get on VDS, eventually competitions will drive VDS to even lower prices matching shared hosting....

This should be the way!!! Shoving Perl or PHP or other CRAP at people's throat is not the right way...

Php sucks, if you don't use it correctly, or if you overuse it. What I mean by that is, use php for projects which can be done in php usually medium to small scale. Use something else like jsp/servlets or Microsoft .NET for more complex projects.

For personal/shoppingcart/blog type of sites, php is pretty good. Its fast to code and executes well too.

Compared to the learning curve of Java, php is a much better. ASP is something that I would not like to get into since even production quality sites using the entire gamut of MS technologies like SharePoint, COM and ASP gave extremely poor performance. Its easy to make IIS go down using ASP/COM.

Php is pretty stable, and I like that. Also, its got an easy function library which lets me do stuff very easily I can't do even with ASP or JSP.

You have freedom with PHP, no one tells you to use a partucular framework like struts for the java folks, you are the architect, designer and developer. Doesn't that feel good? or would you be more happy spending weeks learning about some crappy - over sized - framework written by some folks who love to make things more complicated that they should be?

Atleast with php you know what you are getting into, do you know anything about the bugs which are present in your JVM or JRE ? visit http://www.internalmemos.com/memos/memodetails.php?memo_id=1321
to get an idea.

Cheers.

ok, its not like php sucks or something, but it is so easy to learn that this feature turns against it. You see, to program good php or java you have to be a software engineer, to program on the fly php you can even be a high scholl kid. So its not php's fault, its a part of the people that use it, that bring a bad name for it. Use php correctly and it is fine. But plz dont tell me that java sucks either. Java alone is a very platform independent, robust language, with jsp being the first to introduce high performance by using precompiled pages. Why do you thing asp.NET came to existence anyway?:P To follow up with jsp.

And plz, don't compare java with assemply will ya?
We are discussing web development here, not how to pass a 1 through a register...and C++ is great but more low-level than java, so java is perfect for those that it suits:) Finally Java and JSP are 2 different things.

Wow... OK PHP fans. I've been programming in PHP since '98. At that time I thought it was the best thing since sliced bread because the only web programming I had done before was using ASP, which is horrible beyond description.

PHP was great, because due to my inexperience, I could make things work fast and easily, and it gave me instant gratifcation. I gained a lot of confidence and started to really enjoy programming because of it.

As time went on, though, I made bigger and bigger applications. I got to be a better programmer. I was also introduced to languages like Java, Python, C, etc. and learned proper programming practices. I soon started using frameworks in Java like Struts, Baracuda, Cocoon and later Spring, Hibernate, and others. Using these frameworks and languages made me realize PHP was really something more akin to shell programming than something you write large applications in.

As you get to be a more experienced programmer, you start wanting things like strong typing, and sane standard libraries that have a consistent design. You want a language with less rules, especially less special cases. You want less keywords, and you want better ways to encapsulate functionality. Trust me when I say PHP is not it.

This is not to say I hate PHP. I mean, I'm working on a web app in it at this very moment. But for large applications, use something a little more robust like Java with a combo like Spring+Hibernate. You will find that:

a) It's not slow
b) You can program much, much faster in it as your applications become larger
c) You can unit test every component
d) You have complete database abstraction
e) You have separated content/functionality from presentation
d) You will have far less runtime errors, especially subtle ones that are due to PHPs "ultra loose typing".

Now, you can respond to this with "Java is teh lame! PHP RULZ DUDE!", or you could go off and learn more than 1 programming language, get 4 more years of programming large web applications under your belt, and actually figure out what I'm talking about.

To all the fools that thinks PHP is better than Perl. You are really foolish and don't understand the power of OO design and module re-use.

CPAN rocks anything that PHP has to offer. If you can think of it; it has already been built.

From Templating, DBI, ODBC, Flash File Parsing, PDF Creation, PGP, RSA/DES encryption.. the list goes on and on and on..

Example: Using the Template Toolkit I can output FULL CORED REPORTS (With Graphs, Line Graphs) with a single function call.. The most code I would have to write is 'use template' and the function call. Try that with PHP.

Can you say.. Re-invent the wheel.. I knew you could.

Use MOD_PERL and PHP really sucks ass. The Apache module that are available for MOD_PERL (Apache::Request, Apache::DBI, Apache::Template) blows PHP away on high traffic websites.

Comparing PHP to Perl is like comparing a Pinto to a Ferarri. Only an inexperienced programmer with think differently.