PHP is a fine language. It started my career. That said, it has a lot of baggage...

radium3d · 2026-03-05T17:22:06 1772731326

Pretty sure we've seen people coding in essentially every other programming language also shoot themselves in the foot.

Sohcahtoa82 · 2026-03-05T18:04:55 1772733895

Every language has foot-guns of some sort. The difference is how easy it is to accidentally pull the trigger.

PHP makes it easy.

radium3d · 2026-03-12T02:45:23 1773283523

Back in the day people were all about languages like C that made it incredibly easy too.

Sohcahtoa82 · 2026-03-12T15:44:27 1773330267

We didn't have anything better unless you wanted to take a massive performance hit and/or lose a ton of flexibility and capability.

jjice · 2026-03-05T19:20:43 1772738443

Yeah of course PHP isn't the only programming language you can write bugs in. I don't think you can make it impossible to shoot yourself in the foot, but PHP gives you more opportunities than some other languages, especially with older PHP standard library functions.

One thing I particularly hate is when functions require calling another function afterwards to get any errors that happened, like `json_decode`. C has that problem too.

Problems don't make it a _bad_ programming language. All languages have problems. PHP just has more than some other languages.