Actually, most of those lists are based on PHP4 or older (meaning their opinions are fully eight years out of date; a LOT has changed) or are made irrelevant by changing one or two quite well-documented confit settings. The little that's left over are mostly complains that PHP isnt something that it's not trying to be (strongly typed, most commonly)
The only legitimate complaints I read as someone who uses an up-to-date version tend to revolve around the wildly inconsistent naming conventions, and a couple of extensions with rather poor documentation. The recent releases (5.3, 5.4) really did a lot to make it just as feature rich as other scripting languages.
If you want to use something else, be my guest. But I for one am tired of the misinformation that PHP bashers spread. I happen to like a language that doesn't get in my way, has extremely thorough documentation, and almost any question is answered in the first search result. At the same time, I hate the lack of documentation on the actual source (I have a few things that are a huge pain to do in user land, so writing a native extension is a huge pain), and of course the wacky parameters and return values on the old functions.
>Actually, most of those lists are based on PHP4 or older (meaning their opinions are fully eight years out of date; a LOT has changed) or are made irrelevant by changing one or two quite well-documented confit settings. The little that's left over are mostly complains that PHP isnt something that it's not trying to be (strongly typed, most commonly)
Sounds an awful lot like you are just ignoring the things you don't want to hear. It isn't just that PHP is weakly typed, it is that it has absurd type conversions that no other weakly typed language does, that aren't even consistent, and explicit casts don't serve the expected purpose of forcing the correct type:
PHP is full of bugs. Ancient bugs that have existed since PHP3, and which are still there. Serious bugs where the lexer or parser is outright broken:
$ perl -le 'print 07'
7
$ perl -le 'print 08'
Illegal octal digit '8' at -e line 1, at end of line
Execution of -e aborted due to compilation errors.
$ python -c 'print 07'
7
$ python -c 'print 08'
File "", line 1
print 08
^
SyntaxError: invalid token
$ php -r 'print 07;'
7
$ php -r 'print 08;'
0
$ perl -le '$foo = 1; print(($foo == 1) ? "uno" : ($foo == 2) ? "dos" : "tres");'
uno
$ php -r '$foo = 1; print(($foo == 1) ? "uno" : ($foo == 2) ? "dos" : "tres");'
dos
PHP is written by absolutely incompetent developers. There were 37 exploitable vulnerabilities in 2011. Compare that to 3 for python, 3 for perl, and 7 for ruby. Steffan Esser was the only person attempting to make the PHP project give a shit about security, and he ended up giving up on it because the other PHP devs absolutely refused to consider security as important.
These are not problems that are fixed in recent versions of PHP. They are not misinformation. If you want to revel in your ignorance, feel free. But don't expect the rest of the world to tip toe around the facts to avoid inconveniencing you with reality.
The only legitimate complaints I read as someone who uses an up-to-date version tend to revolve around the wildly inconsistent naming conventions, and a couple of extensions with rather poor documentation. The recent releases (5.3, 5.4) really did a lot to make it just as feature rich as other scripting languages.
If you want to use something else, be my guest. But I for one am tired of the misinformation that PHP bashers spread. I happen to like a language that doesn't get in my way, has extremely thorough documentation, and almost any question is answered in the first search result. At the same time, I hate the lack of documentation on the actual source (I have a few things that are a huge pain to do in user land, so writing a native extension is a huge pain), and of course the wacky parameters and return values on the old functions.