Phil Sturgeon has reposted an answer he gave in response to this Quroa entry about why people "think PHP sucks".

There are a lot of reasons people "hate" PHP, or at least look down on it. Some of them are founded, some are not, and some of them are circumstantial.

He mentions seven of the reasons people commonly give for not liking PHP:

• "Inconsistent haystack / needle"
• PHP is a HTML file, with logic
• No standards
• Lack of Quality Packages
• Misconception (about the current PHP features)
• You were doing it wrong
• Elitism ("not using PHP is cool")

There's even more discussion happening on the subject in this reddit post with thoughts from both PHP and non-PHP developers.

There's an interesting post Jeff Atwood has made to his blog about PHP - its lack of standards, the way the language is structured and why none of that matters when it comes to its popularity.

PHP isn't so much a language as a random collection of arbitrary stuff, a virtual explosion at the keyword and function factory.

He includes links to several other articles that follow the "PHP sucks" train of thought too, but he notes that none of that really matters - its the popularity of PHP, its use in major corporate and social networking applications that is seeming to help drive it even more for developers to pick up and learn as a first web language.

Why fight it? I say learn to embrace it. Join with me, won't you, in celebrating the next fifty years of glorious PHP code driving the internet. Just don't forget to call the maintain_my_will_to_live() PHP function every so often!

Responses from the community:

• Stas on the PHP 10.0 blog

The results of the latest International PHP Magazine are in and posted today on their site. The question this time was asking developers and visitors alike what they think sucks about PHP.

Choices included "No lexical scoping", "PEAR", and "Worst Configuration System" but one climbed to the top far above the others - "No namespacing". Trailing that at a distant second were two, getting the same number of votes - "No lexical scoping" and "Can't afford a vowel" (hmm, interesting).

Up for this week is a new poll that asks those out there that have used the Symfony framework to cast their votes about what they think is the best feature the project has included. Check it out and cast your vote today...

The results of this week's International PHP Magazine poll have been posted. The question this time asked which, out of the four choices they gave, was the most popular opinion when dealing with objects in PHP.

Coming out on top with 33.3% of the votes is "Folks who follow design patterns religiously are missing the point" - an interesting choice for most of the developers out there. Design patterns can be one of the most useful bits of functionality in an application if used right. The option, however, is a bit vague - do they mean that they only use design patterns in their code or that they use them at all?

There was a tie for second place between the "Other reasons" and "Classes and inheritance are not new to PHP 5" options. Pulling up the rear with only 5.6% of the votes was the last option, "Managing state between pages is very straight forward in PHP".

Be sure to check out and vote in this week's poll (a bit better subject matter) that asks the question "Why Does PHP Suck?".

It's official - Javascript sucks. Well, at least according to Harry Fuecks and the group from the last WebTuesday meeting.

The surprise outcome of last nights webtuesday - Javascript sucks harder than PHP. I still can't quite believe it. Maarten took the PHP corner against me in the Javascript corner, both of us shamelessly advocating each language under various headings.

1 minute max per topic-no outright lies although often bordering on truthiness. Verdicts provided by the audience, based on who could shout loudest from a choice [ranking].

Of course, Harry does comment that the comparison is a bit unfair (server versus client side), but there are alternatives for both (client-side PHP and server-side Javascript) so make a foundation for enough of a comparison. At the end of the night, though, the results of the votes were conclusive - Javascript was in worse shape than PHP, though the winner was "he one that came out hurting less".

On the Zend Developer Zone today, Cal Evans looks back some more at his experiences at this year's OSCON and mentions his personal favorite session attended while there - the PHP Lightning talks.

The absolute best session I attended at OSCON 2006 was the "PHP Lightening Talks". Some of the presentations were interesting, others were hilarious. Theo Schlossnagle's Why PHP Sucks was both. Theo is a facilitating to sit and listen to, as you'll soon see when I post my interview with him. He's also quite funny when he wants to be. His presentation was interesting. It was part tongue-in-cheek and part dead serious but Theo left it to you to decide which was which.

He also points out another post about the talk from Chris Shiflett where a rather large discussion started about the contents of Theo's slides. And Cal hits the nail on the head:

The talk was good, don't get me wrong, but the conversation it inspired is much more interesting.

Chris Shiflett mentions in this new post today Theo Schlossnagle's Lightning Talk from this years OSCON. The topic? "Six Reasons PHP Sucks".

Theo has posted the slides of his PHP lightning talk in PDF format. The topic? Why PHP sucks.

I've never disputed the fact that PHP has problems, but for some reason, everyone who tries to explain why PHP sucks misses most of the actual reasons it does. It's astonishing.

Chris also makes the comment that he doesn't actually give six reasons, but the first three of the ones he gives are solid ("No lexical scoping", "No namespacing", and "World's worst configure system").

Jonas looks first at the comments that Tim made, looking that the "reasons to like PHP" first (two items, according to Tim's opinions) and then goes on to list six other reasons as to why PHP sucks.

Included in those reasons are things like:

• There are 3 incompatible versions of PHP
• (string)"false" == (int)0 is true
• PHP isn't thread-safe
• The quality of PHP's compiled-in libraries differs widely

He does note, though, that of the dynamically-typed langauges out there, PHP is the most approachable. He mentions some instances where he believes it's okay to use PHP too - along the lines of the "right tool for the job".