Alex Munroe:
Now imagine you meet millions of carpenters using this toolbox who tell you “well hey what’s the problem with these tools? They’re all I’ve ever used and they work fine!” And the carpenters show you the houses they’ve built, where every room is a pentagon and the roof is upside-down. And you knock on the front door and it just collapses inwards and they all yell at you for breaking their door.
That’s what’s wrong with PHP.
Alex goes on to lay out the criteria for a good computer language:
- A language must be predictable. It’s a medium for expressing human ideas and having a computer execute them, so it’s critical that a human’s understanding of a program actually be correct.
- A language must be consistent. Similar things should look similar, different things different. Knowing part of the language should aid in learning and understanding the rest.
- A language must be concise. New languages exist to reduce the boilerplate inherent in old languages. (We could all write machine code.) A language must thus strive to avoid introducing new boilerplate of its own.
- A language must be reliable. Languages are tools for solving problems; they should minimize any new problems they introduce. Any “gotchas” are massive distractions.
- A language must be debuggable. When something goes wrong, the programmer has to fix it, and we need all the help we can get.
Then demonstrates the various ways that PHP fails these criteria. It’s quite persuasive.