TL;DR: Because we used it. Like many people, many years ago I learned php. It was easy to deploy, and make simple dynamic websites. Many hosting services provided support for it. I was quite happy to use it for these things. Then in 2008 I interned at Facebook. At the time, there had not yet been any attempts to improve the language by Facebook itself. Using php in an actual codebase - real world software - made me realize just how terrible it was. I vowed to never use it again. I even present

A quick dive into any PHP-related topic on HN should yield significant answers. Part of the hatred comes from the fact that the way people know PHP is from 2005, when it was essentially one really long procedural program. It's not so much that people ignore the recent upgrade in tooling/modern language constructs so much as people aren't familiar that they exist. However, these is still a lot of vitrol for PHP. Because it is so easy to use, many people are able to pick it up without any pr

There are a lot of reasons already discussed, this one is especially famous: http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-de... PHP is not a exceptionally bad platform from a technical perspective, it usually gets the job done, is reliable, easy to operate and performant. But i guess the real reason why so many developers - including me - hate PHP is that plain PHP is pretty boring. It doesn't have opinions on anything and no exciting concepts or

There are a number of reasons why PHP is so disliked by outside communities including but not limited to MAGZine's points. 1) As mentioned there are a number of language inconsistencies, much more so than comparable languages. This includes naming schemes for functions 2) PHP and most major projects written in it are insecure. Even up-to-date Wordpress installs are vulnerable to attacks. 3) Testing still isn't in vogue. Few projects have any testing and for those that do the testing tools are

Essentially because it wasn't a well-thought out language, but a hack, it became used widely, but that lack of thoughtfulness shows on larger projects quite a bit. It is a hack that need to become more formalized with time, but it hasn't quite done that. Whenever I still see "needle" and "haystack" in documentation I think "Wait what is this? Oh right..." >Facebook uses it Not really, I mean Facebook doesn't use the PHP that a common person uses.They've made so many changes and their codebase

Several reasons, I think. For one, it's no secret that PHP was an amateur undertaking that inadvertently ended up powering >80% of the web. It started off as a bunch of helper functions that were meant for Rasmus Lerdorf's personal use. He has frequently acknowledged that he was never particularly skilled and that PHP was never meant to be used on such a large scale. Among the countless WTF moments you would expect from a personal project, PHP once used strlen() as a hashing function. [1] Thu