In my experience most developers are extremely lazy despite knowing better, and have very lofty, unrealistic, academia-esque definitions of the word “elegant”. How often do you write code in other languages, then revisit it in 12 months to make changes and stare at it in awe, thinking, “wow, this is really great stuff”?

I can understand arguments about PHP code looking eye-gougingly sloppy when interspersed with HTML, CSS, etc. It truly is. But the same can be said of ASP, JSP, ASP.NET, etc. That mishmash of code is often an amateurish way of doing things to begin with – this is the kind of mess you see in so many tutorials out there, and unfortunately is how people learn the language. But it is NOT forced on anyone by the language itself.

I started using PHP in 1997 when version 3 was out, and have seen the language and my skills with it come quite a long way since then. And I can confidently say I’ve been writing clean code in PHP (and a slew of other languages) for many years now, which did what it was supposed to do, did it well, and have never had trouble maintaining it — that is, unless I didn’t put enough time or effort into designing and writing it well to begin with. Perhaps that’s because I write OO code 95% of the time, keep my view-layer code entirely separate from model and controller level code, spend at least an equivalent amount of time designing than I do coding, generally make the code readable by properly spacing things out, don’t name my variables $a and $b, and don’t name my functions doit() or go(). I’m not saying you do any of this specifically, either — but my point is that I’ve developed good, language-independent habits that have allowed myself and others to maintain my code without problems, and have made collaboration with other developers easier. Continuing those good habits in PHP has not been an issue for me in the least. So while I can definitely agree with you that most code seen in the wild is terrible, I profoundly disagree that it is PHP’s fault.

Blaming the language is a cop-out for laziness. Plain and simple. If you can only write crappy, unmaintainable code in PHP, that’s all on you. Perhaps if you spent less time whining about the language and more time focusing on your own shortcomings and using that knowledge to improve your actual process, you’d be happier with the results.

Next thing: if your code is messy, try learning the language! PHP is as forgiving as you want it to be. If you want it to be forgiving just don’t do anything. If you want it to be as strict as Java, then check data before working with it. If you want it to be stricter, there is no one to keep you from implementing it.

If you can’t organise your code, then it is not to blame on PHP. Java will allow you to create a complete mess of your code as well. Try it by starting a new project and putting everything in a single method.

The point I’m trying to make is that you can make it as bad as you want to, in any given language. It is your job as a developer to not do so. And whether you’re going to work in C, Java or PHP. They will all allow you to create a mess! It’s about how you deal with it.

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    I strongly disagree with most people here!!!

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Wow… all I can say to all these guys here that don’t like PHP is: you are simply bad programmers and just don’t know how to write well organized code in PHP! The problem is not PHP, the problem is you.

I have been working for 6 years on a single PHP project, a huge and very complex website, and once I organize my code correctly I have had NO TROUBLE. I just LOVE PHP, because it gives me so much flexibility to do all kinds of things and do it so easily. But it’s true, the programmer has a RESPONSIBILITY to organize code – and unfortunately many programmers don’t do that.

As someone here said “Ultimately, it is your responsiblity as a programmer to write good code, and that is entirely possible with PHP.”

I have been working with other languages as well (eg. Actionscript, C#) and just the complexity of doing a simple little thing makes me very hesitant of embracing them.

I’m not saying PHP is the single and only solution for everything, but based on experience in PRACTICAL and LARGE programming projects I do have my strong love for PHP because it’s so powerful and mature.

You can write good php code with it. When you look at a symfony project you have not written, you are very confortable to understand what is inside.

See : http://www.symfony-project.org/

The nature of PHP is that it’s easy to write crap code that works, but as a programmer you don’t have to and you shouldn’t ever do it.

Ultimately, it is your responsiblity as a programmer to write good code, and that is entirely possible with PHP.

Also it’s a good idea to look into frameworks. Ruby as a framework called Ruby on Rails and Python has one called Django. PHP has many, the most popular is probably CakePHP – http://www.cakephp.com

Zend is more of a library than a framework.

“Was it var $variable or simple $variable?” var $variable is only valid in PHP4 where visibility operators were not supported. $variable is your normal variable.

“Was it public static var $variable or … ?” in PHP 5, it’s public static $variable – the use of var is discouraged in php 5.

“Is it self::$variable or self::variable?” use self::$variable to access static variables. use self::variable to access class constants. Although it should be in upper case.

“Is it $this or this? (parent, self)” this is not valid syntax, unless you were meaning to access a constant. “parent” is used in all languages as is “self”. Are you a programmer? or just some kind of troll?

“Is it $this->$variable or $this->variable?” Both are valid. PHP Supports dynamic variable names.

so you could do something like:

$variable = ‘foo’; $this->$variable = ‘bar’;

echo $this->foo; // returns ‘bar’

As put in a not so eloquent way by “Dan you dork”, you need to read up on your basic syntax before using PHP – let alone any language.

Hope this helps

You dork! haha

I don’t know. I write clean, maintainable code in PHP all the time. Of course, it helps to use a somewhat MVC design pattern, and a decent framework (I use Fusebox). I really hate these criticisms of PHP development problems as if they were parts of the language.

REDESIGN PHP!”

LoL you need to get a clue Dan… log onto http://www.php.net and do some research. If the syntax confuses you, then you’ve got no hope learning PHP let alone any programming language.

Try looking at Ruby syntax you’ll have a ball with that one. mwahahahaha get a clue! lol

REDESIGN PHP!