:D have fun guys

In that case, using a consistent approach that might be overkill for a single project offers huge advantages over time in terms of maintenance, portability, extendibility, re-use etcetera. Most teams I’ve worked with have found out the hard way that the attitude “it isn’t worth it for this small project we can code with our eyes closed” comes back to bite them in the ass.

There is rarely an excuse not to use well structured solutions that stands the test of time.

Namespaces are surely useful. I don’t thing that lack of it is a major problem, but it’d be nice to have them – especially for those experienced programmers, used to have them in Java or C .

PHP allows ugliness, and it’s OK as far as you know what’s ugly :)

As you already mention yourself, a lot of PHP’ers are new to programming, and for them it is just great that PHP allows some degree of ugliness :D Then again, not saying i’m a top-of-the-notch PHP programmer, i would be a fool not to check input which enters an API on DBmail for instance, and make sure that when i expect an integer I truly get an integer (or a string containing that – and only that – integer, its php we’re talking about :D ).

Namespaces are missed you say. I partly agree and luckily they will be introduced in PHP, but the other side of the coin is that you should name things for what they are. A class conflict should – theoretically – not occur based on name. Finally I agree the naming conventions seem to be totally non-existing, but i don’t think it damages the language PHP, its at most inconveniant.

I’m not saying ugly about code with no documentation, no indentation etc. These things are programmer’s concern and has nothing to do with language and criticizing PHP for this is stupidity.

I’ve written that MVC is overkill for most projects, not big projects. I love MVC, and I use it, but not with PHP, because with bigger projects I have bigger influence on things like server OS and configuration, so I can use there other solutions, like Python for instance, which I prefer for more complex solutions.

You’ve mentioned WordPress. I’ve been hacking it for a while for myself, and I would love to see it’s libraries in byte-compiled form, because it breaks my heard when I’m thinking that my server is parsing all those files on each request :)

Thank you for your comment. I hope that I’ve explained my way of thinking :)

I thought PHP was sloppy when I started learning, and I still think a lot of sloppy (but fantastic) code exists, such as the source for WordPress. But that has everything to do with coding style and nothing to do with PHP. If someone had the time to rewrite WordPress, for example, it could be done elegantly and effectively. I’m a big advocate of MVC, and I think the argument that it is “overkill for big projects” is hogwash. If you don’t use it for small projects, it’s going to perplex you when you go to use it on a big project.

I do use a couple of tools to keep my code clean. I use the Zend Framework simply because it’s easy to set up and makes separation of concerns a snap. I use PHPDocumenter to document all my libraries. I test with PHPUnit and use it combined with XDebug to find dead code in large projects. And finally, a run through the Pear package PHPCS helps you keep your code in conformity with some existing coding standards, like Pear or Zend.

Hopefully someone finds my criticisms useful. Fantastic article though, if I was overly critical I meant nothing by it.

Its like you try to understand N-Tier design, but failed (obviously, since your description is nothing like real 3-tier design), so you right it off as irrelevant.