Aug 22 2007

Usability Problems with PHP

Published by Justin at 5:43 am under Usability

Your correspondent has developed web applications in a wide variety of platforms. However no platform is more disappointing than PHP.

The two most glaring usability flaws with the PHP language are:

  1. Inconsistent underlines, for example is_numeric() has an underscore but isset() does not; and,
  2. Inconsistent abbreviations, for example mysql_fetch_assoc() and mysql_errno() use abbreviations but mysql_error() does not.

Beyond usability problems, PHP fails as a web development language becuase the language fails to make the development of the most common programming tasks — like parsing incoming data, validating forms or pulling and manipulating data from a SQL database — any faster.

The language just completely ignores these facts, forcing the developer to spend loads of time writing things like wrapper SQL functions to make SQL interaction less painful.

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