PHP 8.5

A lot of people are too proud to be associated with PHP. I am ready to admit that know nothing about the language except that a lot of people make cool things with it.

My favourite PHP product at the moment is BookStack (https://www.bookstackapp.com/), a really good wiki. I run an instance for my family and it's great.

But there are loads of things. And I notice that many of the sites I like using...are built on well maintained PHP stacks.

PHP is a very pleasant and straight-forward language to work with. I enjoyed my time working with it, though I did also see quite a lot of very poor code.

I think the danger with PHP is more its ability to easily cause *very bad things*.

This would partially be poor training (my University literally taught PHP with SQL-injectable examples), and I think the language itself making it very easy, such that less-experienced developers using it - most of them, early on - don't realise what's wrong until it's gone wrong.

With PHP being such an early tool online, and the above properties existing, it earned a reputation for being insecure and bad.

> I think the danger with PHP is more its ability to easily cause very bad things.

Is there any language where you can't?

Probably not, but not most languages are not inviting to do them.

Give me an example where PHP invites developers to do terrible things and I'll show you 2 other popular languages that invite equally bad or worse things :)

Or as Bjarne Stroustrup put it: There's two types of languages: The ones people complain about and the ones noone uses

You can do crazy things in every language. However, in a language like Java, the crazy things are more conceptual (factory for factory of factories) and not basic things like what does == mean or problems with weak typing and implicit conversions. A lot of the issues with PHP can be avoided in modern PHP using things like strict_types=1, but most of the time, we don't get to work with projects using best practices. And I'd rather work with a bad Java project than any bad PHP project (which I have had the misfortune of maintaining).

Funny that you picked == as an example when == is very counter intuitive in Java and is one of the common pitfalls for beginners:

    String a = new String();
    String b = new String();
    a = "test";
    b = a + "";
    
    if (a == "test")
    {
        // true
    }

    if (b == "test")
    {
        // false
    }

    if (a == b)
    {
        // false
    }
        

Just like PHP, you have to read the docs to use it properly.