• It has also improved a lot in the last years. PHP5 and especially versions older than that weren’t very good and deserved a lot of the criticism. PHP7 and onward are much better languages and don’t deserve the hate.

    • I worked a lot with PHP3 and 4, they work by the “Here is a flat C style API and here’s all the functions to use.” principle, and a lot of the work was finding the needed function, and how to use it.

      I know PHP5 did a lot of redesign especially with classes, but have never used it, hope PHP5+ feels more like Pythons toolbox.

      If I should write a web application today, I would start looking at Python based frameworks: Django (I have used it before)/Flask/Etc. as I am not sure I would like to work with JavaScript, or have to re-learn PHP.

      • A fun story about the origin of some of PHP’s first function names. The hash function in the table for function names in the interpreter was strlen(), so names were chosen to have a wide distribution of lengths.

        (source)

      • A fun story about the origin of some of PHP’s first function names. The hash function in the table for function names in the interpreter was strlen(), so names were chosen to have a wide distribution of lengths.

        (source)