PHP seems to have a bad reputation.<\/p>\n
If you search the web, you’ll find tons of rants on how PHP is terrible, flawed by design, and some even less flattering stuff. But I don’t share the sentiment. I think that PHP’s main crime was being attractive to too many crappy developers.<\/p>\n
I learned Java back in the mid-to-late 90s. Beans was still considered new and Swing was expected to be the next big thing.<\/p>\n
I loved it. It was simple, elegant and worry-free. Write once and let JVM worry about the rest. What could possible go wrong?<\/p>\n
IMO: it was overused (and a bit bloated).<\/p>\n
Take the Eclipse IDE<\/a>, for example. Sure, nowadays it works fast enough on any decent computer. But 10+ years ago, it was more resource hungry than what most affordable PCs could deliver. Would I choose to write an IDE in Java? Maybe today I’d consider it, but it wouldn’t be my first choice.<\/p>\n Around that time, lots of stuff was being written in Java. Everybody had<\/em> to know Java if they wanted to have a job, and we’d get freshly-minted programmers insisting that they could do device driver development in Java.<\/p>\n So I learned to hate Java.<\/p>\n I was convinced to learn PHP mainly because of the expected speed of development. I wouldn’t have thought to program in anything other than Perl at the time, but a friend talked me into it for a small side project. I loved how fast and easy it was to do something useful with MySQL.<\/p>\n Yes, this was one big design mistake. I’ll even admit it: at one time I did rely on register_globals. Guilty as charged. Maybe we didn’t know any better. But even if the PHP group changed this more than 15 years ago, it seems like the detractors haven’t forgotten.<\/p>\n Yes I have written crappy bits of code (other than the register_globals). Many of those crappy bits are still in the current codebase. And yes, I feel kind of ashamed.<\/p>\n In the same way we can’t (and shouldn’t) use Java to write low-level software, we shouldn’t use Assembly language to write a cross-platform word processor.<\/p>\n Lots of people have a “favorite” language and will defend it fiercely. But languages are tools and some may be better that others given a specific purpose<\/em>.<\/p>\n Whether due to laziness, ignorance, or just for fun<\/a>: you can write crappy software in any language. You may want to complain about that weird way PHP handles dynamic typing, or comparison operators… and you may be right.<\/p>\n I might even agree with you if you decide to choose another language for your next project.<\/p>\n And if it’s not your choice to make, best I can do is recommend that you use version control, stick to a coding standard, and test early.<\/p>\n Every language sucks. And every language is beautiful.<\/p>\n Seriously.<\/p>\n The way I see it, PHP is great for rapid development of (non-critical) websites.<\/p>\n I don’t allocate a lot of time to this site’s development, so I need to be able to get a complete function or block<\/em> of code done in a very small amount of time. PHP is good for this.<\/p>\n It’s about moving forward.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" PHP seems to have a bad reputation. If you search the web, you’ll find tons of rants on how PHP is terrible, flawed by design, and some even less flattering stuff. But I don’t share the sentiment. I think that PHP’s main crime was being attractive to too many crappy developers. My Love\/Hate affair with … Continue reading “Why PHP?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":4,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-development"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rpg20.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rpg20.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rpg20.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rpg20.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rpg20.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/rpg20.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21,"href":"https:\/\/rpg20.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17\/revisions\/21"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rpg20.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rpg20.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rpg20.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Enter PHP<\/h2>\n
The “register globals” incident<\/h3>\n
There is no absolute “best” language<\/h2>\n
So… why PHP?<\/h2>\n