In which I write about PHP for the first and the last time

Tuesday, 21 Feb 2006 [Monday, 16 Apr 2012]

Tim Bray wrote a short piece on PHP and kicked up a huge hullabaloo in the land of weblogs. Here’s my contribution to the echolalia.

Tim writes that it’s his experience that systems written in PHP are all spaghetti. I don’t think that’s a coincidence, and there are two sides to that coin.

One side, which all the PHP apologists are citing with full justification, is that its nonchalant everything-but-the-kitchen-sink “standard” library approach and its wide deployment present such a low barrier to writing and re-/deploying code that a lot of people who only have small needs are empowered to meet them on their own, however messily. I have argued that this enabling function is a good thing and I stand steadfastly by that position.

But on the other side, well, PHP is… lousy. Just wretched. Why?

All of these flaws are interconnected; the morass is simply the result of the language being a templating system that grew too big for its breeches. I don’t believe the problems can be corrected in any sensible fashion; PHP will always be a templating system, however much it may be straining against its clothes.

And let me tell you, it’s still a great templating system! If all you need is to write a web app that consists of two pages, running four queries over a five-table database, there is nothing that will get you up and running faster.

But that doesn’t make it suitable for large-scale systems. It’s not that the premise does not scale, it’s just that this particular implementation of the premise does not. Apologists will sometimes argue that the flaws are a necessary evil in achieving the low barrier to entry; worse-is-better style. I don’t buy that argument for a second. There is no reason that a language could not be designed to address the precise problem space that PHP aims at, but be created from scratch to be big enough for its britches, without the slipshod, organic growth. There is no reason it would have to be any harder to get things done with a standard library that encourages good practices as the obvious and easy way to accomplish things.

PHP is ripe for having its lunch eaten, really.

Update: Eevee rants about it, comprehensively.