Desk Checked

What do you most dislike about PHP?

December 17th, 2008

The title of this post is probably a little bit flamebait-ish, but I’m actually genuinely interested to get the Internet’s opinion on the following:

Pick any three aspects of PHP that makes you feel dirty as a developer, and post them as a comment here.

For me it’s:

• The standard library is a huge, monolithic mess. This has been covered before, so I won’t beat a dead horse. I’d love to see the standard library reorganized and some sanity introduced around the naming of certain aspects.
• Superglobals because they behave weirdly in certain scenarios and make unit testing a pain in the ass.
• omg\namespace\separator\is\Backslash, which has effectively killed this long-awaited feature for me.

Again, I don’t intend for this to be about hating on PHP or its developers (read: comments that don’t contribute anything meaningful to the discussion won’t see the light of day). Instead, I want to formalize what causes people pain when working with PHP today. Who knows — maybe somebody, somewhere will listen?

Categories: PHP, Software Development |