After over two decades of working in PHP, I'm now working in Java. PHP is basically Java-lite. I am absolutely loving the compile-time safety of Java, but I dearly miss PHP's maps and arrays. In Java, the amount of verbosity for defining a map/list and operating on it is overwhelming.<p>Modern PHP is great. Many powerful language features, excellent performance, great community and package ecosystem, and decent enough safety with modern static analysis tools.<p>I'm not too sure I agree with the author's complaints here. When using something like array_filter, you're typically mapping from collection to collection (i.e. you don't care about the first element--you care about the whole thing) and so this problem is really a non-issue. The next follow up step would usually be foreach, or another operation like array_map, in which case it's a non-issue.<p>If you really do need the first element, you can use array_first. And if you really do need a fixed-sized collection, you can use SplFixedArray.<p>The point on properties is valid to an extent, but IMO not really an issue you commonly run into in the real world (regardless of language, your constructors should generally return an object in a usable state).
If I have an “array” and can do array[0] to get first item, but when I filter this array and array[0] throws an error, that’s super weird. What is the meaning of [] or what is an array even? The language forces me to understand how it is implemented under the hood. That’s exactly what the author says: leaky abstraction.
That also often shoots you as when json_encoding it only becomes an array when ordered "correctly" (numeric 0-based keys without gaps), otherwise an object. So to be safe you generally need to array_values after filtering.
If in your testdata you only remove elements from the end you don't catch that before production data hits.<p>To get the first element there also is reset().<p>I love PHP though.
An “array” in PHP is an ordered map.
Have you tried Kotlin? It's a less clunky Java. The syntax is IMHO Ruby-level charming (for an OO-first lang), but with types that are quite a bit stronger than Java. Java interop is quite smooth.
Php has compile time safety too but compile time occurs at roughly the same time as runtime lol
All PHP needs is python's flexible and convenient manipulation of lists/dicts/objects. Plus dropping the end semi colon and it would riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiip the fabric of spacetime.
Have you tried Lua or one of its variants?
> Modern PHP is great. Many powerful language features, excellent performance, great community and package ecosystem<p>I heard this a long time ago about perl. CPAN is great.<p>Well ... perl entered the fossilized era. I think people do not really observe things correctly. I am noticing the same with ruby right now - everyone sees that ruby is in decline, very strongly so, in the last 3 years. Yet you have blog posts such as "ruby is not dying - it is aging like fine wine". And these are all NOT BASED ON FACTUAL ANALYSIS. I still think ruby is a great language, but if people are not realistic in their assessment of a situation, what does this tell us about people's evaluation in general? People seem to shy away from criticism. You can see this on reddit too, where moderators ban and censor willy-nilly, or even on github, where you can also quickly get eliminated for not conforming to xyz. It's as if some people are very afraid of strong opinions. I don't understand why - an opinion that is objectively false, can be shown to be false.
People absolutely have VERY strong opinions and voice them constantly. True of every language but especially php. Almost feel like it’s more acceptable to rant about php than to praise it
I attended a talk by Rasmus Lerdorf at a FOSS conference in 2006. It has been a long time, so I remember only a few things from the talk, but one thing I remember him talking about is how people love to complain about PHP, often on forums that are themselves written in PHP.
I know I used to have the impression of PHP as a messy language because I last worked with PHP4. It's come a long way since then, though I don't use it.
Mate, not to be rude but your <i>entire comment</i> isn't based on factual analysis; it's a rant about unrelated languages.
> objectively<p>> Ruby is dying<p>How exactly do you define these “objective” criteria for such sensationalism?
> People seem to shy away from criticism.<p>What actual criticism of PHP is anyone shying away from?<p>PHP got bashed for such a long time, while simply nothing steps up to <i>do what it does better</i>. Something that, for example, is available on every webhost you can just throw files at, where all (meaningful) config and state can be <i>in</i> those files.
I used to really love the dead-simple ease PHP brought to server-side dynamic web stuff too. But when shared cpanel type hosting was orders of magnitude cheaper than anything else, that was a way bigger deal. Today you can deploy a node.js app (all the same “just a script” advantages of PHP) to a half dozen places for free, and for the next step up, a smallish instance at Hetzner, DigitalOcean or whatever, where you can just run any arbitrary container, costs less than those shared hosting once did.<p>Why do I bring up containers? Because part of why PHP was so dope in this way was the way you can just define 1 file per endpoint and drop it in public_html, and have no server setup to do. Running say, Rails or ASP.NET or a Java site back then meant doing… a lot more, to your server.<p>But with Docker, you can just steal a good Dockerfile template from someone else, and it’s just like 3-4 simple files for you to manage for a simple Sinatra (Ruby) or node.js version of the “one-off PHP file” things.
But I don't want to manage 3-4 files, I want to manage zero files. I don't want half a dozen hosts, I want hundreds of thousands. It's not about costs, I really mean the simplicity and pervasiveness. PHP apps that are simple (in that they don't require any "rare" modules to be enabled) can easily be written to not run in relative folder structures, you can move them around like .exe files if you will. Not "like moving an exe file and then just updating a few lines in this file over there", that is a completely different thing for me.<p>edit: Granted, I agree that if you want to do all sorts of things on the internet, maybe PHP is not the right choice. But for simple, dynamic web things that I want to just make and then run like this forever, that I <i>can</i> work on but don't <i>have</i> to? PHP and vanilla HTML and Javascript are where it's at for me, hands down. Everything else I know is either too new or seems to have constant churn or issues. That you hear nothing about PHP other than complaining it's "outdated" or whatever from the outside -- always "why are you using this?" never "why oh why am I using this?" -- is because it just hums along, IMO. I like it better than Python, and I kinda view it as in that class.
> Today you can deploy a node.js app (all the same “just a script” advantages of PHP)<p>You still need to build a router and a web server in said nodejs script. And manage everything, including taking care that requests don't accidentally mutate global state.<p>PHP in contrast is stateless. <i>Way</i> less bs to take care about.
I've always thought that the core idea of PHP, the intermixing of code and HTML is an incredibly elegant solution to a very difficult problem. But at the same time, the language itself does suck (although I won't discount the improvements it has made). I would really love for there to be an entirely reimagined PHP from the ground up, and to hell with backwards compatibility or availability.
There was. It was called Hack[0]. Among other things it had XHP built in so you could write HTML natively (as opposed to concatenating strings) and define your own templates easily[0]. It even handled escaping. It really improved on a ton of PHP's flaws.<p>Unfortunately newer versions of PHP killed it and it's dead now, and even more unfortunately while PHP absorbed a lot of features from Hack, native XML was not one of them. There was even going to be a Hack version of the Composer package manager but that never got finished AFAIK. Distros stopped supporting it. I think I still have my half-finished attempt at a Hacker News fork in Hack sitting around on a hard drive somewhere. I can't even find an environment to run it in anymore.<p>[0]<a href="https://docs.hhvm.com/hack-overview/" rel="nofollow">https://docs.hhvm.com/hack-overview/</a><p>[1]<a href="https://docs.hhvm.com/hack/XHP/introduction/" rel="nofollow">https://docs.hhvm.com/hack/XHP/introduction/</a>
You can say the same thing about lisp (and C in some regards). Sometimes a language is done and anything you add to it is breaking things for no sizable improvement. And if your primary target is Unix, it’s often so easy to write a shim for C/C++ libraries that you don’t bother implementing your own version of stuff.
yes I say this now very often, that PHP has morphed into runtime Java. Quite nice in some ways.<p>In PHP though the STDlib is not very well thought out, it may be fun(needle,haystack) or fun(haystack,needle) and you just have to remember<p>empty() will do weird stuff like a string with the value "0" is also empty, so not great for parsing things.<p>A lot of footguns and the best way to avoid that is with a decent linter that lets you be picky<p>another thing I mention is avoiding the array_ stuff because of aformentioned reasons, it's easier to remember/reason about boring loops unfortunately.
Why not just use a proper code editor with inlay hints, inline documentation, and autocompletion instead? These things are a non-issue, unless you’re working with Notepad++ or something.
I have worked with countless programming languages and they all have little oddities.
I hadn't done any PHP in almost 20 years, not since my studies when LAMP was still the way to go. But recently I had a reason to create a dynamic web page (not what I usually do) and went with PHP. Haven't regretted it.<p>I haven't run into any of the quirks. I keep things simple, and it just works. The only problem I ran into was the realization that PHP is the wrong tool for long running tasks. After some rogue requests/users running my whole service to ground, I had to move the long running endpoints to node.
> This lax behaviour for property definitions makes writing code around them harder. Especially when you take into account that any object can have properties dynamically added to them:<p>Doing so now raises a deprecation warning, unless you add #[AllowDynamicProperties], and PHP 9 will convert it to an error. I'm told this will simplify internals and unlock optimizations.<p>Arrays are still fairly awful, but generics may become a reality sooner rather than later, and on that could be built Vec and Dict types, à la Hack. PHP is going to be stuck with arrays as they are now for forever, but they'll at least become optional for new code.
I've been writing PHP for 20 years now. It's my bread and butter.<p>The one thing I really wish PHP would add is structurally typed objects. I really miss it when moving back and forth between PHP and TypeScript.<p>They could call them anonymous objects if they want to (that would be a more culturally correct analogue to anonymous classes).<p>Like, I wish it was possible to do<p><pre><code> {
string $mystring = $myvar,
}
</code></pre>
and have it be equivalent to<p><pre><code> new class($myvar) {
public function __construct(
readonly public string $mystring,
) {}
}
</code></pre>
and then be able to typehint it like<p><pre><code> function ({ string $mystring } $myobj) {
echo $myobj->mystring;
}
</code></pre>
and honestly, why not go all the way and allow type definitions/aliases, something like<p><pre><code> type myobj_type = { string $mystring };
</code></pre>
That'd be great.
You can do that. Of course, PHP's native types are quite limited, but a phpdoc syntax should work with static analysis tools. For instance:<p><pre><code> /** @psalm-type MyobjType = object{mystring: string} */
/**
* @param MyobjType $myobj
*/
function (object $myobj): void
</code></pre>
Here are some documentation and examples:<p>- For Psalm, see <a href="https://psalm.dev/docs/annotating_code/type_syntax/utility_types/#type-aliases" rel="nofollow">https://psalm.dev/docs/annotating_code/type_syntax/utility_t...</a><p>- For PHPstan, see <a href="https://phpstan.org/writing-php-code/phpdoc-types" rel="nofollow">https://phpstan.org/writing-php-code/phpdoc-types</a><p>It may work in your IDE (autocompletion, etc.) but there is no standard on this side. Some IDE have their own parsers, others use one of the LSPs for PHP.
Yeah, at the moment we use arrays as anonymous objects and phpdoc+phpstan to verify the types, but I want it in the language. PHP already supports intersection and union types, it really feels like just skipping the naming part and going all in on structural typing is not that far fetched by now.
PHP has quite a lot of oddities such as how loose comparisons (`==`) are made, numeric-strings, and type coercion. But the two oddities mentioned in the article are not that "odd" with a bit of context.<p>- PHP has `SplFixedArray`[^1] that work similar to the standard arrays you expect from other languages. SPL extension is always available in PHP 5.3+, it is not even possible to compile PHP without it anymore. There is no specific type for list-arrays and associative arrays, but there is an `array_is_list` function to quickly check it.<p>- For typed properties, if a property is not typed, it is effectively considered `mixed $var = null`. If the property is typed, and has no default value, then it is considered uninitialized, and not allowed to access.<p>[^1]: <a href="https://www.php.net/manual/en/class.splfixedarray.php" rel="nofollow">https://www.php.net/manual/en/class.splfixedarray.php</a>
> <i>You just have to know that, or else you end up with subtle bugs.</i><p>This might as well be PHP's slogan, tbh.<p>I've worked with PHP since... good lord, 200...2? And it's wild that this is still the case.
There's a subreddit dedicated to this.<p><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/lolphp/top/?t=all" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/lolphp/top/?t=all</a>
> Despite all the critiquing I've done in this article, I still think the amount of hate PHP gets is undeserved.<p>As a person who also codes in PHP at work, I still dislike the language syntax part. JS/TS also has terrible parts, but IMHO, compared to PHP, I don't face them as much and they are much easier to avoid when you have enough knowledge and stick to good parts.<p>As the author mentioned, in my experience PHPs arrays are quite annoying to work with, and you can't do anything about them. This C-like procedural syntax for array and string manipulations makes discoverability harder. Some functions (in_array, implode, shuffle, trim, stripos, lcfirst, etc) still have inconsistent namings despite many of them have a standard prefix in their name, such as array_ or str_.<p>I mean OK, PHP is still widely used, has new features and is still and far from dying (mostly for reasons other than syntax), but please don't pretend that it hasn't some issues with basic stuff which are still there even in 8.x version.<p>Just to not write a full article, you can read here: <a href="https://waspdev.com/articles/2025-06-12/my-honest-opinion-about-php" rel="nofollow">https://waspdev.com/articles/2025-06-12/my-honest-opinion-ab...</a><p>If interested, I also listed some annoyances of JS: <a href="https://waspdev.com/articles/2025-04-16/what-i-dislike-in-javascript" rel="nofollow">https://waspdev.com/articles/2025-04-16/what-i-dislike-in-ja...</a>
About undefined vs. NULL:<p>> Not a warning—a FATAL error occurs if you try to access an uninitialized property. This comes up a lot in cases where you try to deserialize data into a PHP object. If a field's data isn't present you might not initialize the property at all.<p>I don't think that is an issue, except in interpretet type-unsafe languages it is harder to anticipate when writing code whether that value is NULL or undefined/uninitialized. E.g. it is basically the same in C#, but here the compiler warns you that the value is not initialized and forbids some actions (like reading the value of it).
The last part about "$" is epic.
Arrays in PHP are mostly confusing if you are used to them in other languages.
Instead of $array[0] - the first element is accessed via array_first().<p>Having them as key-value means, that you can easily just remove some items in the middle, during iteration etc. No automatic shifting happening.<p>The thing which bites me is when some internal functions actually reindex the array. array_filter does not, but for example array_reverse, array_slice etc. do (preserve_keys always defaults to false). And for array_merge too, but there it's no array_merge(preserve_keys: false), but instead the + operator. (Why is this operator overloaded?!)<p>On the topic of the uninitialized state, as co-author of that RFC:<p>I agree with the author that nullable properties should have been auto-initialized to NULL. I haven't ever seen any benefit of an uninitialized state for these. Some co-authors of that RFC disagreed and wished for consistency with the other typed properties. The good thing probably is, that we still could opt to change this with a relatively minor BC break.<p>For non-nullable properties, I do think there is value. Not every value is actually available/ready in a constructor. Sure you can assign dummy values to properties. But it's requiring you to then manually guard/assert that the property is actually initialized. If you happen to access a non-nullable typed property without isset(), then your code is likely broken anyway and I'm grateful for the Error exception thrown.<p>Also, PHP has this peculiar feature of ReflectionClass::newInstanceWithoutConstructor(). This is forcibly having an object in an uninitialized state. Whether that feature should exist or not is a good question, but in practice it's helpful for object hydration for example. This was one further motivation to introduce the uninitialized state.<p>The author of the post suggests checking at the constructor boundary. But this doesn't inhibit objects leaking / not finishing the initialization properly. (class Foo { public stdClass $object; function __construct() { global $foo; $foo = $this; } } new Foo; $foo->object ... is now still existing? PHP doesn't have mechanisms to invalidate objects at a distance. That would be the alternative, but also spooky.) Some choices need to be made, and all choices will have some rough edges.<p>Side note: I personally never use is_null(), but nearly always isset(). This nicely checks for the uninitialized state too. Static analysis tells me anyway, when I access a variable or property name which can never exist.
There's one problem with arrays that I haven't seen mentioned here or by the OP: when inserting a key-value, the type of the key may change.
For instance ["4" => "four"] === [4 => "Four"]<p>This can lead to some unexpected behaviors. For example, I've already been bitten by `array_merge()` whose result is different if its parameters are arrays with numeric indexes.<p><pre><code> array_merge(["4 " => "four"], ["5 " => "five"])
// ["4 " => "four", "5 " => "five"]
array_merge(["4" => "four"], ["5" => "five"])
// [0 => "four", 1 => "five"]</code></pre>
The key type changing is generally not a problem per se, but it's definitely odd with the default re-indexing behaviour depending on whether something is integer keys only or not.<p>That's exactly what I've been complaining in my post above. If there were no automatic reindexing, then this wouldn't be a problem either.
To note, it is surprisingly refreshing to completely forgo instanciable classes on a modern codebase.<p>Phpstan deals well with type definitions, arrays are powerful enough to contain whatever needed, and functions can be stored and passed around easily enough.
Array shapes are still second-class citizens defined in phpdoc, with an inferior editor UX, and lack of any run-time enforcement. A proper record type for PHP with value semantics would be an ideal solution for me. Would go nicely with the pattern matching proposal that's still incubating.
If there is one thing I love about Clojure and Common Lisp, it’s that you’re not supposed to care about the shape of a complex data if it’s external to the module. What really matters are the functions that are exported and their signature. Anything that’s not standard in the library should be used as an opaque blob. And something like CLOS is about making this easier to define.
I’d love to see a post like this for JS that actually talks about things people run into. Usually when people make a post like this in js, its about archaic things nobody actually uses.
How could you leave out left-associative ternary operators?
surprised not to see <a href="http://phpsadness.com/" rel="nofollow">http://phpsadness.com/</a> here
Every time I work in another language I miss PHP’s arrays.
Basically every other language has the same functionality (or better) as a hashmap.
That array keys are auto-coerced to integers has bit me multiple times.
They are an incredibly versatile tool for sure. Even more so wrapped in a Laravel Collection
For me, it's the exact opposite. Every time I work with PHP, I wish I could have TypeScript's properly typed arrays and dictionaries instead of the janky untyped 2-in-1 mess it actually has.
Absolutely. If you don’t know PHP arrays aren’t actually arrays, the other languages feel inferior.
if("0") {} being equivalent to if(false) {} still gives me nightmares even though I've stopped using PHP for at least 6 years now :)
I knew this in and out, but as a Full-Stack PHP/Symfony/Frontend/JS guy who pivoted to mainly TS for b2b stuff, I still have to occasionally enter<p><pre><code> !""
</code></pre>
into the browser console just to be sure, during code reviews :D
In JS/TS:<p><pre><code> "0" == false : true
"" == false : true
" " == false : true
"1" == false : false
!"0" : false
!"" : true
!" " : false
!"1" : false
</code></pre>
In PHP:<p><pre><code> "0" == false : true
"" == false : true
" " == false : true
"1" == false : false
!"0" : true
!"" : true
!" " : false
!"1" : false
</code></pre>
Honestly the only way to remain sane in either, but especially if you use both, is to always use === and never use boolean logic (!) when a string could be involved.
That's what I say in code reviews as well. Same for numbers.<p>!someValue is useful only for:<p>- booleans, <i>including optional booleans</i> (which is why every bool flag should default to false)<p>- undefined, null (falsy), or object/function (truthy)<p>It's nice for the second variant to also cover falsy NaN or things like this, for example for forms.<p>I guess that's where<p><pre><code> !!""===false
</code></pre>
comes from.<p>But it's this exact case that keeps tripping me up.<p>What about empty arrays?<p>Per my original comment, now I'd have to look up if<p><pre><code> ![]
</code></pre>
is false in PHP, or just
empty([]) === true<p>.<p>So yea I agree, and extend your case to PHP "arrays" (in JS,<p><pre><code> !![] === true
</code></pre>
is<p><pre><code> true</code></pre>
Also `empty("0") === true` is a common gotcha.
I think the “bad rep” is coming from developers that stopped developing themselves.
I think the biggest problem is that the main way to use it is as a HTTP response handler, whereas other languages are more general purpose.
So when a developer wants to develop themselves outside of a HTTP response handler, they need to switch languages.<p>Of couse it can be argued that PHP can be used outside this one way as well, but even e.g. <a href="https://symfony.com/doc/current/mercure.html" rel="nofollow">https://symfony.com/doc/current/mercure.html</a> is using golang.
I've written PHP off and on since the .php3 extension was a thing, and I can say that PHP very much deserved the bad rap it had for some time. It's evolved beyond most of that, but a lot of that is due to the composer ecosystem making up for it while the behavior of many builtins remains beyond repair. Which is fine, every language has baggage and warts. PHP's warts are sometimes heinously ugly, and they're on full display in many legacy codebases, but modern PHP is something I actually find to be fairly pleasant to develop with, far more than Go or vanilla JavaScript.
The most under appreciated thing about PHP is the fact that after 20+ years I can still develop in PHP and never had to learn a JS framework, Rust, Go, Ruby, Java or .NET.
A lot of it came from the rather harmful "php a fractal of bad design" article that used to get posted everywhere despite being highly inaccurate and out of date. Thankfully its fairly rare to see someone daft enough to still try using it in a discussion. PHP's come a very long way since then.
What is inaccurate about it? Maybe it is out of date now, but when I first read it about a decade ago, when I did a fair amount of PHP development, I had personally encountered most of the issues mentioned in there.<p>I've heard that PHP has improved a lot since then, but I don't see how you could really fix all the inconsistencies, global state, and "oddities" without a lot of breaking changes and really making it into a different language.
> What is inaccurate about it?<p>It's been debunked so many times over the years, I'm afraid I don't have the energy or desire to do it again when it's really not needed if you're far out of the php ecosystem that it really won't make a difference. Suffice to say the PHP it is talking about is nothing at all like modern PHP.
PHP should learn from JS where you have to abandon frameworks every two years.
No. Bad rep comes from developers who used other languages and never looked back.
I did PHP for 15 years. Modern PHP looks good but I still wouldn't go back.
I like the arrays, they make it feel like a bit of a low level language and there are some weird tricks one can do with them. As for class property behaviour, I kind of get nervous if my properties or the constructor don't enforce default values I can then fit into downstream logic.<p>One of the best things with PHP is PsySH, or "Tinker" as the laravelists call it. It's not a REPL in the Common Lisp sense, but it is quite nice for an interactive programming shell. I've spent countless hours solving problems very, very quickly in it, and alongside Picolisp pil + and Elixir iex it's one of the earliest tools I install on a new system.<p><a href="https://psysh.org/" rel="nofollow">https://psysh.org/</a><p>The thing I miss the most is a nice concurrency story. It has become better but it's still a bit of a mess, often it's nicest to just implement workers as PHP and then implement control somewhere else, e.g. Elixir, or grab one of the application servers that are nowadays a thing in PHP.
> This example exposes the "uninitialized" state that a property can be in, which is NOT the same as NULL. This distinction frustratingly comes up when you try to do a null check on these properties:<p>If you're accessing an uninitialized property or checking if a property is uninitialized, you're probably already doing something wrong.<p>The point of class properties with no default value is that you're supposed to set them either in the constructor, immediately after creating an instance, or via some other method that guarantees they'll have a value by the time you need to read them (such as deserialization with validation).<p>If you want your properties to have a default "unset" value that you can trivially check for, that's what null is for. The author doesn't make it clear whether they are aware that you can declare a nullable string and give it the default value of null, but I hope they are.
I think anyone would agree with the “you’re doing something wrong” part, but if you declare that a property is typed and non-nullable, it would be nice if a constructor that <i>didn’t</i> populate its non-nullable properties would cause an exception to be thrown or something, as the constructor didn’t construct a valid object by its own specification. The wrongdoing was in the constructor so the constructor should be where that happens, not the innocent caller later who trusts the type definition.<p>Maybe it’s too impossible to do that, but the behavior described seems like it puts you right back in the world of completely dynamic anything-goes (PHP’s legacy, basically).<p>I thought part of the point of types was to give the caller confidence that simply accessing a typed property is guaranteed to return a certain type (null being a type that may be included).
PHP is fundamentally broken, and unfixable. Its a toy language, and there is no reason to pick it in 2026
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All of PHP is an oddity. It is a practical oddity, but also ugly to no ends. I am glad to have abandoned it many years ago.<p>Surprisingly enough, I was more productive in PHP than I was in perl. Perhaps perl is even stranger than PHP.
Modern PHP is pretty good. I’ve been using it for a while so it’s comfortable.<p>I’ve been doing so Perl maintenance lately and I miss PHP. Perl is a lot weirder than PHP. If I didn’t know C or had dabbled in Perl before I would be completely confused. There is More Than One Way to do it (the Perl rallying cry) causes a lot of confusion. The one nice thing about Perl is that it doesn’t really change anymore, and you can see where it positively influenced others.
I have not seen "PHP" listed as a language used in any Hacker News job posting in a very long time. Everything is Javascript/Typescript now, with the occasional Rust, C/C++, Golang, Python, Ruby. I never see PHP ever.
I feel like somebody needs to be reminded of “PHP: a fractal of bad design” :D<p><a href="https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/" rel="nofollow">https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/</a>