marco: on PHP
But what I don’t like are criticisms based on the ability to write bad code, or the large amounts of bad code in tutorials and popular PHP software. These are both mostly because PHP has been so popular (and so easy) for so long.
Disclaimer: I’ve only had casual contact with PHP for around three years now, so I might be out of date, in addition to being flat-out wrong.
But: this is the same argument used to explain the difference in malware distribution between Windows and OS X. While it may be true to a certain extend, I do not believe it to be a sufficient explanation, let alone the primary reason.
For one, PHP does not lend itself to writing good code. Of course you can produce good as well as bad code in any language, no argument here. But some languages make it easier to shoot yourself in the foot than others, and PHP falls into that camp.
Secondly, the PHP community does not emphasize good code as much as they could. You need to look no further than the comment section of the official PHP documentation to see what I mean.
While the first issue is admittedly hard to fix, some effort spent on the latter one might already go a long way.
(Source: , via marco)
