When I saw the introduction of PHP traits in 5.4.0 I was eager to learn all about them and how they worked. [...] PHP traits, in my opinion, are handy and very flexible. I guess that is the "love" part of my relationship with them. [...] However, I feel that traits also meddle with a bit of the inheritance rules that have been proven time and time again. Is it possible to love as well as hate something at the same time?

He talks first about "the love" he feels for using traits in his code. He talks about their usefulness for geting around PHP's single inheritance structure and being able to "bolt on" functionality as needed. Then comes "the hate" of them, noting that in the wrong hands, they could lead to very messy and lazy coding practices (including the deadly diamond of death problem).

I recently read Kevin Schroeder's blog post about 10 Reasons To Use PHP. Then -- silly me -- I started reading the comments. It only took a few before the obligatory anti-PHP hater came out and started insulting the language and the people who use it. That made me think about why that hate exists.

He points out that some of it probably has to do with people not really understanding what PHP is all about (no, reading a blog post dosen't make you an expert on it) and mentions PHP's dynamic typing as a sticking point with several developers.

Usually someone hating on PHP does so because they don't understand it, are upset by what it lets people get away with, feel it makes it too easy for someone to earn the title of "developer," or because they're dicks who have to insult other people because they can't simply be happy with their own choices.

Listen to a couple old dudes complain that they don't like PHP anymore. Yes, I know, this sounds pretty compelling.

They specifically mention the PUT method support in PHP. You can download the mp3 (about an hour and a half long) and check out the two hosts on Twitter: Chris and Ed.

I have been programming in PHP for 5 years now. I did not choose this language, I had to learn it to work on the code of the company my bosses bought. Since I started, I heard many rants about how bad PHP is. Some where valid, but a lot of them are just blaming the language for bad code written by bad programmers. I am by no mean an expert in programming languages or PHP, but here is my take on the language I use every day.

His "good" section mentions one of the most popular things about the language - its quality of documentation. He also talks about the interactive shell and the community that surrounds the language. In the "bad" category, though, he points out things like the low barrier for entry ("a blessing and a curse"), the changing order of parameters in function calls and that a constructor of a child class doesn't automatically call the parent's constructor.

I'm still bored and lacking posting ideas, so I figured I'd give a hyper-critical breakdown of "Four reasons to hate CakePHP" by A.J. Brown. Let's get right into it.

He responds to comments on: CakePHP's "heaviness", the (in)flexibility the framework allows, alpha releases, changes between versions, no namespace considerations and its use of global functions.

You can see the original post here: Four reasons to hate CakePHP as well as his AJ's own response to comments he recieved - Maybe I was too hard on CakePHP.

This is a short smug entry, written in the "Yeah, well I liked them before they even had a record deal" style associated with trend snobs. Except in this case, its the opposite, I am claiming that I hated something back when it was cool. Thanks to blogging my opinion earlier, I even have proof! PHP should stand for Pretty Huge Problem.

He mentions some of the rants, langauge switchers, and general complaints that have come up about PHP, including the combination of code and HTML, the "safe mode" feature, and PHP's "battered on" nature of development. He also goes off a bit on the (inevitable) backlash that Rails and Ajax will see in the future, and wonders how far off it will be.]]> Thu, 23 Feb 2006 07:26:24 -0600