I haven't seen the obligatory fractal link yet!

sigh http://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/

Worth reading once, if you keep wondering why everyone is slagging off the language you love (and that language is PHP).

http://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/ (it's actually a pretty decent article, anti-PHP or not.)

I've started using this to measure the quality of a PHP thread. When a thread reaches 3 Fractals you may as well bail.

You wait that long? I go into them knowing from the start that the whole thread will be divided into "PHP is terrible", "PHP is terrible but it gets the job done", and "PHP is my second language (after javascript) and I think it's great" camps - no particularly useful discussion will occur from the first two camps, but we can at least draw some positive value from the thread by enlightening the third group (or laughing at them, depending on how stubborn they are).

Not much of a conversation when someone says "That's not why..." and then they don't expand on it.

Obligatory standard explanation, which has been linked a thousand times already[1]: http://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/

[1] not yet in this thread, but at least once each in a thousand other HN PHP threads