fuzzy notepad
eev.ee › blog › 2012 › 04 › 09 › php-a-fractal-of-bad-design
PHP: a fractal of bad design / fuzzy notepad
The language, the framework, the ecosystem, are all just bad. And I can’t even point out any single damning thing, because the damage is so systemic. Every time I try to compile a list of PHP gripes, I get stuck in this depth-first search discovering more and more appalling trivia. (Hence, fractal.)
Hacker News
news.ycombinator.com › item
PHP: A fractal of bad design (2012) | Hacker News
August 7, 2021 - I think the mistake is thinking of PHP as “designed” as a language, rather than built to solve some real problems. More important is how well PHP works rather than how far away it falls from an imagined better-designed language · As Stroustrup quipped, there are two kinds of languages: ...
PHP: a fractal of not so bad design - PHP - SitePoint Forums | Web Development & Design Community
And it seems every time I come up to a discussion on the pros and cons of PHP, almost always this article gets quoted PHP: a fractal of bad design and the poster just says something like, “Ha, look at this blog post and decide for yourself!”. What is even worse, people who are asking about ... More on sitepoint.com
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February 17, 2016PHP: A Fractal Of Bad Design | Piwigo.org
Hi very interesting post about how PHP is badly designed compared to other languages http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/ph … ad-design/ I can relate when I was totally stuck on an incomprehensible error during half an hour because I had a silent cast somewhere on my code. More on piwigo.org
PHP: a fractal of bad design
I still get paid plenty to write PHP code sooooo.... Thanks for the cheat sheet! More on reddit.com
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April 10, 2012PHP: a fractal of bad design - 7 years old and still relevant
I love how r/lolphp is full of php apologists 👍
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April 10, 2019Reddit
reddit.com › r/lolphp › php: a fractal of bad design - 7 years old and still relevant
r/lolphp on Reddit: PHP: a fractal of bad design - 7 years old and still relevant
April 10, 2019 -
One of the best articles describing the true nature of PHP is 7 years old! This article has made multiple rounds on the internet, and 1000s of developers have probably learnt what PHP truly is.
In these 7 years many of t issues the article explains are still part of the core, without a fix or patch.
https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/
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I love how r/lolphp is full of php apologists 👍
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Numero uno is still a thing and never going to change the the entire language is predicated on this method of stupidity: the notion that it's better to fuck up data and keep chugging instead of throwing errors and stopping.
Everything with the type coercion is an antipattern. It's just bad.
PHP "arrays" are just...bad and they should feel bad. One data structure is trying to behave like a list and a dictionary, and doing poorly at both. And it's all implemented on a hash table. All of the C-style top level functions for manipulating them will happily do their thing without regard for what kind of data is in the structure, doing potentially unexpected things and destroying data without any indication of what happened. So you can have your script run and behave in bizarre ways, and have no hint as to what the hell is going wrong when you made a mistake. Because it's opaque at a glance and not easy for a linter to flag.
Lobsters
lobste.rs › s › v7qdfg › php_fractal_bad_design_2012
PHP: a fractal of bad design (2012) | Lobsters
September 24, 2025 - Most programmers who have only casually used PHP know two things about it: that it is a bad language, which they would never use if given the choice; and that some of the most extraordinarily successful projects in history use it. This is not quite a contradiction, but it should make us curious.
LWN.net
lwn.net › Articles › 492714
PHP: a fractal of bad design (fuzzy notepad) [LWN.net]
April 17, 2012 - The language, the framework, the ecosystem, are all just bad. And I can’t even point out any single damning thing, because the damage is so systemic. Every time I try to compile a list of PHP gripes, I get stuck in this depth-first search discovering more and more appalling trivia. (Hence, fractal.)" (Thanks to Paul Wise.)
Michael Tsai
mjtsai.com › blog › 2012 › 04 › 10 › php-a-fractal-of-bad-design
Michael Tsai - Blog - PHP: A Fractal of Bad Design
PHP’s suckiness is because it started out as a bunch of tools that were not even intended to be a language. And then it attracted a lot of people who were either non-programmers or programmers who were not experienced with languages or making good APIs. I think a bad culture is self-perpetuating. To anyone interested in a nicely designed language, it was obvious early on that it was too fundamentally flawed to be fixed, so why try to be part of that community?
DEV Community
dev.to › tanzimibthesam › revisiting-php-a-fractal-of-bad-design-with-context-343g
Revisiting 'PHP: A Fractal of Bad Design' — With Context - DEV Community
September 7, 2025 - Even better, try reading it aloud. You will find a number of doubly-pasted or unexpectedly truncated text fragments. As well as quotes from original improperly ordered with your responses. Overall, the article is not much convincing the reader that now PHP is a "fractal of less bad design".
Maettig
maettig.com › 2020-09-16-revisiting-a-fractal-of-bad-design
Re-visiting »PHP: a fractal of bad design« in 2020
Most of PHP was never really »designed«. It started as a library of scripts, written in Perl, never really meant to be an actual programming language. Some design mistakes have been made back then. And they are hard to fix when you don't really have a deprecation strategy, and a community that isn't used to deprecations and keeping up with possibly breaking changes. When asking the question, »what is better, making people angry because a design mistake is never fixed, or making people angry because of breaking changes«, for a very long time the PHP community's answer was to stick to the old behavior.
WIRED
wired.com › article › web semantics: php, a fractal of bad design
Web Semantics: PHP, a fractal of bad design | WIRED
April 11, 2012 - "PHP is full of surprises: mysql_real_escape_string, E_ACTUALLY_ALL "PHP is inconsistent: strpos, str_rot13 "PHP requires boilerplate: error-checking around C API calls, === "PHP is flaky: ==, for ($foo as &$bar) "PHP is opaque: no stack traces by default or for fatals, complex error reporting
SitePoint
sitepoint.com › php
PHP: a fractal of not so bad design - PHP - SitePoint Forums | Web Development & Design Community
February 17, 2016 - It just works and I don’t have to be a Michael Schumacher to drive it. That is a good little quote. Eevee (the author of the PHP: a fractal in bad design) used the analogy of PHP being a tool box full of funky tools.
Hacker News
news.ycombinator.com › item
It's been 10 years since "PHP: a fractal of bad design" [1] was written. It's re... | Hacker News
January 23, 2023 - It's remarkable how the language evolved, and how many of the issues mentioned have been fixed and improved over the last ten years · 1. https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/
Piwigo
piwigo.org › forum › viewtopic.php
PHP: A Fractal Of Bad Design | Piwigo.org
» PHP: a fractal of bad design · mistic100 · Former Piwigo Team · Lyon (FR) 2008-09-27 · 3277 · Hi very interesting post about how PHP is badly designed compared to other languages http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/ph … ad-design/ I can relate when I was totally stuck on an incomprehensible error during half an hour because I had a silent cast somewhere on my code.
Reddit
reddit.com › r/php › php: a fractal of bad design
r/PHP on Reddit: PHP: a fractal of bad design
April 10, 2012 - It's called first_unicode_implementation and is more like a tag than a branch, and was created so PHP 5 development could move forward. That's the reality of it. Roughly 70% of the functions were converted before it died.
SitePoint
sitepoint.com › php
PHP: a fractal of not so bad design - #16 by s_molinari - PHP - SitePoint Forums | Web Development & Design Community
February 18, 2016 - tl;dr; - I need help creating an article that clearly promotes PHP. I was wondering. I know PHP isn’t perfect. However, I feel it gets way too much of a bad wrap. And it seems every time I come up to a discussion on the…
Chuniversiteit
chuniversiteit.nl › programming › weird-php-tricks
PHP developers hate him! Find out these weird tricks they don’t want you to know! | Chuniversiteit
There are plenty of ways to make PHP developers dislike you. I would know, because I do it all the time. Not by sharing the infamous “fractal of bad design” article (which is something that only programmer boomers do) but by writing awful code.
Tumblr
willitscript.com › post › 21314400012 › php-a-fractal-of-bad-design
PHP: a fractal of bad design
April 18, 2012 - As I see it PHP promotes bad design, which isn’t a good trait for a programming language.
Raspberry Pi Forums
forums.raspberrypi.com › board index › programming › other programming languages
HTML and PHP - Raspberry Pi Forums
August 14, 2020 - I love JS because it so extremely ... imagine anyone using PHP as a general programming language. There are so many better options. And PHP is a "Fractal of bad Design": https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fr ......
Stronglyemergent
stronglyemergent.com › blog › 2013 › the-prisoner-of-zend-dot-php
The Prisoner Of Zend.php - Strongly Emergent
June 18, 2013 - Because PHP is a treacherous tool whose use pollutes the commons, it should be torn out and demolished like an unsafe bridge or building · Part of why “Fractal Of Bad Design” commands attention is the sheer volume of issues with PHP it collects and contextualizes.
Richiebartlett
2022.blog.richiebartlett.com › category › Work-仕事 › Programming-開発
Category: Programming_開発 | - Blog.RichieBartlett.com
Richie is an Entrepreneur, Technologist and Cloud Architect. Loves how technology brings the promise of an easier life, but enjoys the challenge to make it work. Work achievements, play, & fatherhood are the things that drive Richie.
Froscon
cfp.froscon.org › en › froscon2012 › public › events › 1022
Lecture: PHP: a fractal of bad design? | Saturday | Schedule FrOSCon
August 25, 2012 - PHP: a fractal of bad design? We've all read this rant collection (and others like it), but how much of it is actually true?