PHP: A love and hate relationship

It so happens that every once in a while I get really annoyed with PHP. Like, for example, right now. I got myself worked up and now I am ready to pour my frustrations out. But let me clarify. I am not annoyed with PHP itself, rather it is the community that gets up my nerves. Please read on and I will be happy to explain (also, please note that I’ve stolen the title for this article from here).

I will be direct: the problem is that the majority of PHP users feel so good about themselves and their level of knowledge that they are confident to speak out their thoughts. Needless to say, I do not have any problems with knowledgeable people speaking out. I want them to speak out. However, they are in a serious minority. This is not anything new, I hear you say. You are right. It is only that several recent events have brought me to the state where I am now…

Take a look at this article published at Zend. It teaches people how to create an authentication system with privilege levels. But! Wait a minute! It uses cookies to store the privilege level! And, it requires register_globals to be set to on. And, it doesn’t escape parameters before using them to construct database queries. And, the the author feels he’s done nothing wrong (he has posted a comment to the article). And, the people in charge at Zend know about this and they haven’t pulled the article off. Oh, I am so sad.

Then, look at this article at phpPatterns. It advocates the use of PHP (fine) by slagging off the competing technologies (not so fine). The problem with the article is that most claims are complete nonsense! The biggest point of PHP seems to be that it can interoperate with other technologies (.NET, COM, Java). Back in the real life (as anyone who has tried will tell you) that simply does not work.

Finally, pay attention to the fourth paragraph of this article where the author describes why he is against the MVC architecture. Now, MVC is *not* meant to help you with viewing permissions. The author doesn't know that but that is not stopping him from speaking against "Smalltalk consultants turned Java advocates". It is important to note here that I do not think everyone should know MVC. What I object against is people not being humble.

These examples are just the tip of the iceberg. One example is from Zend.com, the single most important business entity for PHP. And the other example is from a long running PHP related web log whose author has written a popular database abstraction library. So, let me ask you: if these people promote such a low level of quality, where exactly is PHP as a whole going? I’m not telling but it’s nowhere good.