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I'm a junior web developer in the first steps of my professional career. I'm starting off by maintaining projects written in PHP. Wherever I looked, I see people saying that PHP is a bad language and it's broken in so many ways but it's so widely used now and we can't just make everyone switch to something else. So, why people doesn't seem to try fixing it? Is it because of PHP? The dev core team? People just fed-up and went trying using something else?

Please don't get me wrong. I'm not trying to be rude here, I just want to find some answers. :-)

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Perhaps "fixing" it to be more "correct" would break backwards compatibility? Not that they haven't done that before with PHP, but how much do you really want that to happen? – FrustratedWithFormsDesigner Apr 16 '12 at 18:15
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Because Haters gonne hate. More a language is popular, more people will hate it / say that is bad. – Nettogrof Apr 16 '12 at 18:24
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@Nettogrof: I really don't think that accounts for most of the negativity directed at PHP. – FrustratedWithFormsDesigner Apr 16 '12 at 18:30
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PHP is not broken, on the other hand, I would say ASP.NET should be banned because it is so broke. But then it might be just personnel choice. – Noname Apr 16 '12 at 18:38
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"There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses." - Bjarne Stroustrup – Yannis Rizos♦ Apr 16 '12 at 19:17
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closed as not constructive by dasblinkenlight, FrustratedWithFormsDesigner, A----------------------- -----, Oded♦, Adam Crossland Apr 16 '12 at 18:20

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For the same reason that no one has fixed C: because there's a ton of code written in it, and a lot of it relies on the bad language features, and so a "fixed version" of the language would no longer be the same language because it wouldn't run the same code anymore.

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