http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2 ... php_5.htmlarborint wrote:I think it was Larry Wall who said that "PHP takes 'worse is better' to new lows" which if you don't understand it was a compliment.
According to my observations, most of the "big", "serious", etc. companies do not use PHP.Secondly, it's an overgrown templating system. People want to make dynamic webpages; they want something that lets them do that quickly and dirtily. They don't care about how well it is designed and engineered so long as it's just dead simple to get into. It's crap, but it lowers barriers to entry. In Perl, you'd have to learn the language and a templating system and a database interface and all of that separately. With PHP, you just learn a wishy-washy conglomerate of bits that makes your dynamic webpages work even if you barely have any clue at all. A few years ago, beginners would hack together horrible CGI code in Perl. Now they use PHP, and their concoctions are just a little less awful. Matt's Script Archive is dead; long live PHP.
It's a classic example of "worse is better".
I think it has to do something with hundreads of thousands of lame, vulnerable and hackable PHP applications written by "developers" like the ones mentioned above ...