Quote:
Originally Posted by LoneAngelIbesu
What's with all the hating on PHP, might I ask? Not that I want to get into a language battle, but it is pretty popular (and relatively easy).
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Other languages are easier. It is "easy" because you can put a script on a server and something will immediately happen. Usually it takes more effort to get something that a layman would consider "results", but I cannot think of a single non-ironic language in which is harder to understand what is actually going on or write "good" code by any metric, or any single aspect of the language that at least five other languages do not do better.
It is bad the people who made it have not idea about either language design or implementation, and it is crippled because of the way that it evolved from an uninspired starting point into no real direction with lots of stapled-together functionality.
There is all kinds of anecdotal evidence* that the guys behind it are not really who you want to trust either your learning as a programmer or your important projects to.
It teaches you bad organisation, bad API design, bad security practices and introduces you into a community of self-delusion and mediocrity.
In short, there is no reason to choose it as an introductory programming language. Go with javascript (you already have it installed, it has neat higher-level functionality, obviously about everyone ends up using javascript "programs") or something like lua (really compact language that is reasonably easy to actually understand in full, with some neat ways of doing the more complicated stuff) instead, or alternatively find someone who is willing to mentor you in whatever language they like most.
* like the time there was an integer overflow bug in one of their memory allocation functions and they fixed it by using floating point numbers instead of integers, or that random non-english token in error messages, or how it was purposefully made "slow" so the guys running it could make money selling software to make it "faster".