[quote name='way2lazy2care' timestamp='1355232911' post='5009411']
You know they still build a lot of houses out of brick and mortar...

PHP's positives are also negative as well. It has a very active community. The majority of it's community however are amateurs. It's very much a case of the blind leading the blind and occasionally someone sees the light and realize how bad PHP is as a language and moves on to something else.[/quote]
This is the same with pretty much every community. I have seen tons of bad C++ code. I have seen tons of bad Java code. I have seen tons of bad javascript. The problem isn't that most php developers are amatuers; the problem is that most people are amatuers. Maybe php's nature of being friendly to novice coders amplifies the voice of novices in communities, but I wouldn't say by any means that php is in isolation in having a large base of amatuers.

What I'm saying is, if you're new to web development and looking to learn, stay away from PHP. It's a black hole of poor language design, lousy management and amateur users.
[/quote]
This might be what you're trying to say, but it is coming across more like, "PHP SUCKS. YOU SUCK BECAUSE YOU THINK IT HAS REASONABLE USE CASES. YOU ALL KNOW NOTHING ABOUT WEB DEVELOPMENT. LEARN TO USE A REAL LANGUAGE SCRIPT KIDDIES." It may not be quite how you intend to come across, but you're being very abrasive toward people who hold differing viewpoints and outside of some semantic errors the points being made by them are at least worth voicing.

This is the same with pretty much every community. I have seen tons of bad C++ code. I have seen tons of bad Java code. I have seen tons of bad javascript. The problem isn't that most php developers are amatuers; the problem is that most people are amatuers. Maybe php's nature of being friendly to novice coders amplifies the voice of novices in communities, but I wouldn't say by any means that php is in isolation in having a large base of amatuers.

This might be what you're trying to say, but it is coming across more like, "PHP SUCKS. YOU SUCK BECAUSE YOU THINK IT HAS REASONABLE USE CASES. YOU ALL KNOW NOTHING ABOUT WEB DEVELOPMENT. LEARN TO USE A REAL LANGUAGE SCRIPT KIDDIES." It may not be quite how you intend to come across, but you're being very abrasive toward people who hold differing viewpoints and outside of some semantic errors the points being made by them are at least worth voicing.
[/quote]


Fair enough. I'm okay with that. If I save even one developer from stumbling into the abyss that is PHP due to my dramatic arguments against it, I am happy. ;)

To be fair though, this thread is about a newbie wanting to get into web development. Not about choosing a web server technology from a business standpoint.

A of when I posted this:
IE ( 26% market share ) doesn't support 95% of HTML5
Chrome ( 37% market share ) doesn't fully implement HTML5
That means that over 70% of web browsers that click on one of my sites, will have issues ( Source: HERE )
"Failing Gracefully" usually refers to making some Java Script equivalent .... It takes 5 times longer to do this ..... also have to deal with browsers that do not have Java Script ....

Also, PHP has it's own stack trace when something goes wrong - I get all sorts of orange boxes on my testing server telling me exactly what broke, and were it is.[/quote]
Every modern language supports stack traces. Not exactly a huge selling feature of PHP.

** Post a link to an anti PHP page that doesn't worship another language, and I may read more than the first paragraph.
[/quote]
I already did and you had trouble comprehending it.

One of your arguments was that PHP has no debugging capabilities.

array() and a few dozen similar constructs are not functions. array on its own means nothing, $func = "array"; $func(); doesn’t work.
[/quote]
^^ No crap, you didn't declare $func as a definition or function. It was declared as a string.[/quote]


Apparently you don't even understand the language you're trying to defend. In PHP if you throw parens after a variable it will try to execute the string value as a function name.

http://php.net/manual/en/functions.variable-functions.php

The point the author was making was that php has a handful of things that look like functions, but are actually language constructs and behave differently than actual functions.

@fopen('http://example.com/not-existing-file', 'r');

What will it do?

• If PHP was compiled with --disable-url-fopen-wrapper, it won’t work. (Docs don’t say what “won’t work” means; returns null, throws exception?) Note that this flag was removed in PHP 5.2.5.
  
• If allow_url_fopen is disabled in php.ini, this still won’t work. (How? No idea.)
  
• Because of the @, the warning about the non-existent file won’t be printed.
  

Global variables need a global declaration before they can be used.
[/quote]
No #### Sherlock. Almost all oo languages have global and local variables.
[/quote]

It's not the concept of globals that's the problem, it's how it implements globals. Most languages will default to the global variable unless you specifically say that you are creating a local variable. PHP does the opposite where it will automatically create a local variable unless you specifically ask to use the global version.