Good and bad points of PHP? [closed]

Question

Was asked in an interview yesterday to name three good and three bad things about PHP. It was a junior position and the interviewer wasn't expecting all questions to be answered/answered correctly.

I'm a hobbyist web developer mostly, so what are the good and bad points of PHP?

Answer 1

Good points:

1. It's everywhere, on every system/server meaning you don't have to worry about installing it.
2. It's popular, there's a huge community of developers meaning you can easily get help and find reusable scripts to use
3. php.net is a pretty good resource

Bad points:

1. It has lacked features which other languages have had for dozens of years. For the most popular versions up until just recently ( closures, anonymous functions, namespaces ). They are available in 5.3+esque but that's not commonly used.
2. Inconsistent function names, inconsistent function argument ordering. It's a mess without namespaces.
3. Lacking in unicode support
4. PHP4 lacks in the OO support and it's still widely used despite being officially dead, meaning for some client work in which you don't control hosting you are forced to code for PHP4's horrible OO.
5. Not thread safe, can't take advantage of Apache2's multithreaded mode
6. Fraking magic quotes

Answer 2

I like this post by Jonas Maurus describing PHP's bad points.

In summary the good points are:

• PHP makes it easy for beginners to get things done
• PHP is easy to install

Bad points: pretty much everything else. Jonas does give good reason to why they are bad points though.