WordPress made IE look like it was on top of security.

I don't like PHP at all, but judging the language by one nightmare application is unfair. Yes, PHP might make it harder than necessary to write safe code, but there are worse offenders, like assembler or Hunchback-Gollum-Salvatore.

Looking at perl, let's not forget Matt's Script Archive, which is a good example for bad Perl code. And while we are at it: strict is off by default. warnings are off by default. Taint mode is off by default except when running on Unix and real and effective user and/or group ID differ. Warnings and strict are off by default even then.

And don't make me start complaining about the documentation of Exporter (1, 2) or CGI (1).

Alexander

Oh, I know and I specifically thought of mentioning MSA but the CPAN was a better comparison for what I saw. This was c 2003 and it wasn’t some lone dude’s awful code that unwitting people were using, it was one of the PEAR packages that *everyone* was using while also putting passwords in GET query strings as a standard practice. I know the community and code improved since then but a lot of the training wheels without the bike critique of PHP still applies.

Like all new religious movements they needed to position themselves against the established competition, and this was ingrained into the believe.

Christianity did this with Judaism (godkiller, etc.), the Quran speaks at long length where Christianity went wrong.

And Python like Islam has the tendency of claiming to have the final truth, the seal of the prophets.

I remember seeing a blog-post of the angry backslash when the Ruby-folks tried to imitate those anti memes but now against Python.

Having a boogeyman is very useful for a movement.

The "paradox" is that the most vocal enemies are often the least competent. Many people which have abysmally small know how are the biggest "zealots" - another religious term BTW.

Nobody likes to admit he's incompetent, but the "pre-formatted" Python syntax is visually more likely appealing to any static data-type (Java etc) programmer, and by imitating the anti-Perl "credo" they can pretend to be experts.

I had my aha-moment when I met this team-leader who hated Perl and told me at long length why he loved Java for its strictness and bash for it's flexibility. It didn't make much sense.

My theological 2cents. :)

I prefer PHP to Java FWIW. :P

Scylla and Charybdis. But if forced to choose I would probably agree.

I'd choose Python over either and I really don't like Python.

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PHP to Java

What an interesting comparison - to me at least...

In my very limited understanding, PHP is pretty much universally used server-side for producing web pages. Java is mainly used for applications. (Does anyone still use JSP and Applets?) So in that sense, they are not even comparable. It would be very tricky to replicate the function of one with the other.

If I had to chose between them I would opt for Java as I do know a little. I had to take a Java programming module at university but it was pretty simple stuff. I have also created a few basic Android apps using Java. Whereas PHP I know nothing about other than looking at some code a few times and instinctively not liking what I saw.