I understand your pain - the real reason for that is that PHP was the first “hobbyist” programming language so a lot of self trained folks built websites that ended up slowly morphing into successful businesses.
One of the things I’m actually most proud of from the PHP community is that around 5.2 the maintainers looked around and saw sites like Quora and StackOverflow were littered with the worst fucking PHP advice endorsing functions like mysql_query and ill-advised features like magic_quotes so the community invested a lot of resources in purging answers that preached anti-patterns and replace them with non-terrible answers.
I work in PHP and it’s perfectly serviceable now, we’ve got strict typing, namespaces, lambdas, all the nice shit you’d expect in a modern language.
I understand your pain - the real reason for that is that PHP was the first “hobbyist” programming language so a lot of self trained folks built websites that ended up slowly morphing into successful businesses.
One of the things I’m actually most proud of from the PHP community is that around 5.2 the maintainers looked around and saw sites like Quora and StackOverflow were littered with the worst fucking PHP advice endorsing functions like
mysql_query
and ill-advised features likemagic_quotes
so the community invested a lot of resources in purging answers that preached anti-patterns and replace them with non-terrible answers.I work in PHP and it’s perfectly serviceable now, we’ve got strict typing, namespaces, lambdas, all the nice shit you’d expect in a modern language.
That really helps explain the context for one of my favorite PHP bashes ever.
https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/
It’s a great read but it should be noted that the post was written in 2012 and considered under such a context.