PHP - Why Coders Hate... 

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gettype(), get_class(), isset(), is_null()... beautiful consistency 😍

I was evading php for years as student. My first job offer was php, I declined I wanted to do backend with python or c#. Guess what, I'm currently interviewing for php position lmao

Every time a magic combo of "easy/productive" programming language comes up and gets pretty popular, all the "professional developers" that take pride in making "good" software "the hard way" belittle it and start a campaign of badmouthing that can last for decades and kill entire tech stacks There is a whole history of perpetual developer snobbery: COBOL guys dismissing PL/1, PL/1 dismissing C, C-shell dismissing bash, emacs dismissing vi, vi dismissing nano, dBase dismissing FoxPro, C++ dismissing VB6, Java dismissing C#, Flash/Silverlight dismissing HTML5, CORBA dismissing SOAP, then SOAP dismissing REST, native mobile devs laughing at html5 mobile apps, and so on. History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes over and over again, as if us developers can't stand to not feel like a "genius", so when an easier approach comes up and gets popular, the first step is to belittle as much as they can to keep feeling special for managing their behemoth of a toolkit that "only us" can understand. PHP has suffered from this for many years, but keeps getting stronger and more popular as well LOL

I am currently that "intern" that is learning PHP to slap together an inventory management system for my department. We already have other departments wanting to add their data to ours. I was giggling the whole time relating to the story.

You can write horrible code in whatever language of your choice, I mean, that argument at least is not very solid.

Php is great language for web development ... and love it.

Writing php apps using Symfony or Laravel is almost the same as writing Java apps with Spring or C# with Asp.NET .. everyone saying PHP looks bad has never written it using a framework..a REST Api nearly looks identical from design pattern point of view and the corresponding code. And I've written all three for 5-10 years now... so please dear hobby programmers , don't judge what you don't know. This especially refers to the nodejs World, where front end js devs think they know anything about Software Engineering and Development..

The apparent ease of programming in PHP gives the impression that anyone can develop. This is the problem.

I learned to program about 6 years ago from your unity videos. I still remember how amazing it was to have those first games run. Since then I have learned more than 20 languages and even though I have drifted away from unity and game development, and more into node and backend web dev, game development will always have a special place in my heart. Thank you for making these awesome tutorials years later for new people to try and experience the same thing that I did.

I'm exactly the guy you spoke about in the video. I am currently moving to a small company to work in a education management system and the guy before me said in my interview that the code base was really messed up and it was easier to write another one from zero using another language than php. However, the CEO agreeded in creating the system with another language after implementing the new feature the system needs, so I'm quite happy Edit: if I wrote something wrong, please tell me. English is not my mother language. Thank you

Hi Eli. My relation with PHP has been as a roller coaster, sometimes I'm glad to work and study it but sometimes the language is not neat and prone to making mistakes in my case. I tried to understand more structured languages to apply similar concepts with PHP and I'm glad to say it has been working. Despite of PHP has been condemned by developers, it is widely required by small or medium-sized corporations and its maturity turn into an important technology that even ranks the most important positions among surveys.

I love PHP. Writing readable code is a problem caused by the writer of the code, not the language. I can write unreadable code in Python too. Someone shouldnt blame the language for writing bad code. I will use the language for web development as long as it is supported.

PHP is the beginning of a journey for many people. PHP is fun. PHP is something that is accessible and can be explored. That being said, new PHP developers typically do not see the long term problem with mixing the bulk of their logic with their views. Newer PHP coders tend to not be software engineers. They do not have the benefit of thinking "maintaining code like this will be harder if it's all mixed together." PHP has a results based culture that over time has tried to put more attention on best practices (OOP, PDO, etc ...), but this has not stopped many from making single page, procedural, SQL/HTML/PHP code mixed together, websites (that work!). Someone that knows the ropes does not architect their projects like this. Architecture and modeling is what's missing from the results based PHP culture. This has been outsourced to MVCish frameworks.

PHP is a valuable language and the low entry point is a massive asset to it! you just need to know what you're doing when you accidentally start a dev shop with it! :)

If it's the right tool for the job and you can write code well, then your PHP will be good. If you can't write good code, writing it in Java, Python etc. won't make it any better.

A lot of the problems you described with PHP are actually fixed thanks to PHP adopting OOP programing and most big applications using the MVC structure.

Thanks for expressing this so well. Definitely my go to video to explain this phenomenon.

Never seen people in real life hating php. Only articles and videos about why people hate php.

I love PHP it saves my career as a Web Dev

How do you blame PHP for the programmer's mistake? For the web PHP is king but my advice is do you, there is space of all programmer and you can always learn another language. 😉

I appreciate this video. I just started a new job right outta college writing PHP websites. and I love PHP! Seems easy and straightforward like your saying. But I would like to learn more about why people say it’s bad thanks.

You only described bad programmers, not the language itself. Actually it is one of the most logical languages with oop. Keep in mind it is server side as well. Python I find is a pure scripting mess with no logical flow.

php lover from Argentina. Good Channel eli. Cheers !

Your are taking about php in 2010 it's has changed and improved a lot ....a whole lot

Old PHP code is disgusting, that's true. But today, modern PHP has in my opinion nothing to envy to other object oriented languages since it is itself object oriented and structured, with the arrival of composer project, modern frameworks like Symfony or Laravel in their latest versions, and PHP 8. The readability of the code has nothing to do with that of the time, as long as conventions and good practices are applied. But yes, there are still many small and medium-sized companies that continue to use old-fashioned PHP, and this will surely cause the disappointment of future developers who will have to take over this code, I give them all my strength!

PHP is good. Chinese has a slang. 黑貓，白貓，會捉老鼠就是好貓！ Mean,no matter white cat or black cat, if can catch mouse, it's a good cat!

Thank you Eli! I watch a lot of youtube. Your teaching videos make me smarter. Honestly, a lot of youtube videos that I watch make me dumber. Lol

Here's some more food for thought. It's not even just the language or the culture of newbies which throw people off, but the core people behind it. The core developers practice a very toxic brand of office politics with people plotting and scheming and trying to twist people's arms to get features in and suppressing features until other factions kowtow to their faction to add what they want or to otherwise compromise. Other languages on the other hand tend to be led by skilled professionals who know what people want, never take compromises, and generally speaking, you know exactly what to expect from them. With PHP, sometimes you see really high profile people who really worked hard and fought to modernise the language resign in a rage, rant on a blog, and then, eventually return to the language because of how toxic the core community is. The toxic people will hold critical features hostage two weeks before feature freeze with the next opportunity to fold those features in without the changes they want being five years away. It's like dealing with the government.

It is one of issues You don't know most of service developed without document making in Japan And Japanese PHP engineers not sure deference between each php version well So it is have to upgrade latest version from older one as PHP5 PHP is end of contents however fixed the security holes

PHP is awesome. As long as you don't need async requests, any sort of paralellism, reasonably high performance, memory leak free programs or want to enjoy higher level constructs (lambda functions, function pointers, stream processing, etc.).

Welllllll, for a guy who comes from Perl It was a smart thing to do learning PHP a few years back :)

I'm happy to see that you're still around! I used to watch your very first videos in that basement with the train as background noise :-D (When emojis looked like that, too)... I had some doubts with php and remembered you, I'm happy that you found a way to monetise your content and that you're still creating it!

Because of the big community and it's easy to learn... there's so many unprofessional tutorials and inconsistency in function naming...I also don't like how the process starts from Zero for each request....but if you know what's you're doing it's really a ready to go language and honestly looks very organised

Quite strange that a desktop technician would go as far as coding a PHP database app rather than knocking up an Access file with forms and reports over couple of days. :) That is what we see far too many times... but yes, PHP can be hard to follow if someone else wrote it. However most CMSes now are still in PHP, somehow...

As an intern learning php specifically for going back through code built years ago, I took offense to this hahaha.

ELI IS BACK!!! Keep it up man, missed your educational videos so much.

Hey Eli could you please start a php 7 tutorial from noob to a level where one can create applications such as the ones you talked about in the video. But with clean code adhering to best practices and taking care of the security .

Having spent years working in Classic ASP, I found PHP the easiest language to move to. Messy code works.

I am far from being an expert but as a tinkerer, I like PHP. It's fairly easy to understand and write all of your own functions... so in that sense you really get to see how websites/apps work. There are also plenty of frameworks for PHP which will aid in understanding things like Django or ROR and also can be used to make secure and nice, readable code. PHP will also make you appreciate Python or Java or whatever language you use "for real" more. If you were given a Mercedes as your first car you might not appreciate it or even come to understand how it works. Better to start off with a beater where you have to replace brake pads and change the oil yourself. PHP builds character, hahaha....but Python is actually pretty great from what I can tell as a non expert.

PHP 7+ is a lot better then the older versions, faster too.

whoop de doo, glad I'm not the only one, just got hired on the spot for a PHP developer position 😭😭

Hey I was a desktop technician and I could code, knew higher mathematics(double integrals, or what about different kinds of infinities?), have a better sense of humor and of course more creative than the vast majority of paid coders out there. But also, I would never have put a huge file with 1000 lines of code, thats like the basics of making your code readable. And then 90% of people dont really follow a "coding standard convention" they just make sure their code is readable, and explain parts with comments while dividing classes into different files etc... ie basic documentation, which ISNT really standardized company to company contrary to what the person in this video implies.

Should we call PHP C for the internet?

I personally LOVE PHP. All the languages are pretty fun. There are just different learning curves. Its all good stuff if you can take it....bit by bit ;)

It is a problem with documentation, and commenting your code, not the language.

If you are building websites for small companies.. try to convince them that they need a Kubernetes cluster, when the other developer can install wordpress on a 3 € (per month) webspace. There is more to look at, than the language itself.

I think it's more about database design. PHP should just serve as an interface to the DB.

i really dont appreciate the condescension. "even a secretary can use it" "lower level professionals" I do webdesign and this year looked into php because I need it for back end stuff for our website. Barely anyone at my company knows how to use php and I work in an IT company. To on one hand shit on PHP saying it is so easy, yet basically none of our devs use it (they do C# and python for example) but on the other hand say "dumb people like secretaries can use it" is also fucking shitty.

i don't think there is a better programming language for web development than PHP, i mean Javascript is being used for backend these days but it doesen't have all the neat built-in functions that PHP has, like communicating with the DB or creating/openning files so if your goal is to JUST learn web development i think u have to know both javascript and php but if you want to be a programmer in general who builds software for different operating systems then by all means learn Python or c#. at the momment i want to get a job as a web developer so im just learning PHP and Javascript(i'm more focused on backend) and i don't need to learn an entire language like python which is way more complicated than PHP or JS, JUST to build websites using Django which has a very different syntax by the way.

Ok so you talking about a system that is ugly and works, what is the other option? Wonderfull and expensive?

Good afternoon mr Eli, i just have a question which i really wish u answer it directly if u may , when you talk about a topic in ur videos like now, are u reading ur words out of a board or something?...or its just right from ur head..?

Pretty sure people will say exactly the same about Python some years from now. I think the hate of php started by frontend developers and the rise of Node, that brought them the illusion they can do backend without learning anything else.

Wait are you the guy Rossman bad mouths?

Maintainability is the most important thing currently

i told myself i would never be a php developer when i started learning to code. first job: PHP Developer, didnt have much of a choice since i couldn't get anything else without experience. i had to learn quick and fix so much bad php code i developed health issues from all the stress from deadlines and lack of rest. now work at a different place and hope to never work with it again

At the end, it depends on the situation, but a lot of web is PHP written,...

PHP: Can't XOR string without lot of appending. Can't disable request array making (a[0]=do&a[1]=not).

programing language only seem to matter for coders, a programmer doesn't care about the language because it can be anything as long as it performs and suits the tasks that are required for the specific application or program or even an entire OS

I thought you left youtube for good! I was really considering joining your other website.

ok, understood. Does using a php framework, reduce writing dirty code?

Can anyone suggest me any in depth php free or paid tutorial from udemy or any platform... Recently i went through programming with gio n his videos are ok2 n its hard to grap his teaching

So if I got this right, if you have a non-coder make a mess of PHP code, it may become a problem way down the line? That's true of every programming language ever created. The truth of PHP is, it gets the job done. Version 7.0+ has all the security features and is much faster than Java at run time and Python thanks to be anchored in C, and lets be honest, to the people saying PHP is old and you should use python or Java... Python, Java and PHP were all created in the early 90's, yes each of them, there's no old grandpa in this mix, only incorrect assumptions and incorrect perceptions. If you want to build web apps, python is a major pain in the ass to get going. The amount of effort it takes to setup the web server for python and the amount of effort it takes to learn django on top of python is so much greater than simply using php for the job in any web app. 80% of all websites that use server-side code are PHP. Some of that is because wordpress is such a ridiculous market presence but a lot of that marketshare is because PHP was made for this purpose. It goes hand in hand with HTML and doesn't require a bunch of third party bullshit to get up and running. It's a core tech.

Good work buddy..keep doing the good work🔥🙏

Ahh Wordpress must run on c++

Thanks for explaining why everyone hates php. I'm new to this...but I'm stunned at how much hate php gets

PHP is cool.

no mention to Laravel?

Really value these videos

I feel PHP will be the primary way forward for the current WWW as we know it for some time, and Id personally recommend PHP as a starting point, With some experience in the field you will learn to adapt to new languages quite easily, most job listings seem to be for PHP or ASP.NET

i don't care if you use tabs over spaces or spaces over tabs, the most important thing is that can you code efficiently? and also i don't care if they do OOP or POP the important thing that i ask them is that can you get the job done in time?, i don't care if they use whatever kind of programming languages as long as they can deliver. If i heard them arguing about tabs and spaces war i always say "Talk is cheap show me the code by Linus Torvalds."

"something cooler". I dont give a fuck if its cool. It must do the job. I must do the job. And if i dont get paid for a low level language then i use high level language. You get what you pay for. But the example of the growing company was pretty good. But imo that does not depend on the language. This can happen in any language.

What you said is absolutely true. My PHP programs have such dirty codes. Hope to get better on this matter

As a PHP dev for 10+ years I would say that there would probably be more sense in investing in NodeJS with a flavour of typing such as typescript or flow. PHP is a server side scripting language and really is only useful if you intend on developing ONLY server side rendered apps. Most employers/clients want devs who can do both front end and backend nowadays. At least that is what the job market is indicating. By investing in NodeJS you only have to maintain your skills in one language but have the ability to develop for both front and back end. To all the people who say NodeJS sucks... well good luck to you with that attitude. Just shows your unprofessional side. NodeJS is a lot like PHP in the sense that the technology itself is great but the community, the fan bois and the haters talk up or sling mud making it hard to be objective. This is so, so unfortunate for people just looking to find the right tools for them.

PHP isn't bad first programming language to learn , it's probably one of the easiest to deploy to web as free and inexpensive hosting is widely available. Learn some good design patterns , unit testing for negative and positive testing to catch broken code when refactoring etc ... learning how to use GitHub would also be useful. Having said that , if you are looking for a development job , learn JavaScript/TypeScript , There's QA automation job using protractor , back-end using NodeJS , front-end using Angularjs/React/Vuejs. If you get into a company writing QA automation , its very easy to find a opportunity to move into development role. I should also suggest learning some NoSQL and SQL.

Why don't you never give real life examples. You say: it's very easy to write unsafe code with php. Which unsafe code is easy to write in php but not in other languages?

idk why people hate it , it is such a nice language

PHP is hated because his flexibility. There are nothing like bad design.

Iv been using PHP for about 10 years, its the way that was popular when i was getting into web development so maybe I am biased. I feel the reason views of PHP can be like this is not because of any reason listed in this video, its not because PHP is easier than c# or any less secure. Its because the WWW dominates the internet, and PHP dominates web servers - its only logical your most used tools will get blunt right? these are the tools of our generation and we just need to teach people how to sharpen their knifes and not accept the clients word; just like you wouldn't write your employees blank cheques for them to fill in their salary

You can write bad and ugly code in every language. Just go to stack overflow. You´ll find some ugly snippets in every language (incl python, java, javascript, c#). All these languages are seen as ´the best´. Php is evolving and php 8 has many good options to give you the possibility to write cleaner, less error prone code. The idea that php is ´bad´ comes from the pre php-7 times. And the haters... probably never tried to program php in a decent way.

That's exactly the kind of situation I am trying to deal with right now...been given php code to edit, I can't even right click on a function and go to its definition coz I guess it has been imported from some other file.......Maan really frustrating. But it's a job so just have to figure it out....

You don't hate php code, you hate php coders.

Generation X IT folks should stop talking about PHP 3 once and for all. That's a history for god sake! If someone don't know OO programming, PDO, etc. he/she is NOT PHP developer! PHP is still the King when it comes to back-end programming and PHP 7+ is stable, secure, reliable and, by the way, faster than Python. Generation X ignorants and hipsters on Node.js and Python hype should start listen reasonable people and stop whining about how PHP is bad. It's not and it doesn't going anywhere! Laravel (just one of many prominent PHP frameworks) is taking over Django and Express.js (the main competitors of Python and Node on server side), while Ruby on Rails is sinking slowly but surely. Should you learn PHP first? I don't see why you should learn anything else before PHP for server side purposes.

To be honest, not most coders hate PHP. Usually, those who are not experienced in PHP dislike/hate PHP. So, it becomes a strerotype. On the other hand, experieneced coders/developers may hate PHP due to its performance when compared to NodeJS for fast, real-time web application. In the term of maintainability, and its OOP, PHP has come much more better than what it is used to be.

Videos like this don't age well in fairness, considering where PHP is now as a language in 2022 thanks to 8.1

Exactly!

Is there a clear+concrete example showing why PHP can become a mess while others don't ?????

I can debug JavaScript or c# for hours. But php error gives me headache 😜

okay in php is easy to break conventions, how to learn the convention?

One Word : Wordpress. Enough Said.

It functions, unless you're dealing with 3rd-layer imports. Import a file in a file that is in a different directory from the file you are executing and your relative code imports start to crumble.

The biggest flaw is allowing peeps to create variables on the fly, besides others such as not enforcing strict variable types, programming in php is like hiring a cowboy builder, might get the job done quick but....

Php framework helps?

There are som many mistakes!!!! The people that they are juging languges like: you are not writing clean code there etc are people that they are not able to write applications with vanilla code, but only with frameworks. The only programming language that forcing you to write a stractural code is Pascal!!! I found shity code in PHP, in Java, in Javascript, In C, in C++, in Visul Basic, in C#, in Python etc. the problem is not the the languages! the problem is the people that they didn't learn the programming basics (algoryms, data stractures and design patterns). If you know how to write a good code, you can write it also in PHP and you can have a clean code too. Laravel, Django, Express.js all thease are frameworks not the language.

PHP wasn't designed to be "easy to use". Rasmus just threw a bunch of code to make his homepage work, without any forethoughts. As a side effect, it was easy to use, because the culture at the time didn't require you to know any software design theory, just throw a bunch of code to production.

I've been told the same thing

It's just as easy to learn as Javascript.

Even if it was 2019, you talked about issues of php from early nineties. Please make yourself more up to date next time 😄, and by the way, an ugly code can be written in any language.

ouch!

I'm having a booting problem whenever my computer shuts automatically....I'm too having a Hard Disk problem...Does cleaning my 1TB HDD will make it a new HDD?...Do I will face this problem again in future