James Carr

Recently I’ve gotten back into PHP development with some personal projects and I came to a realization… php is not as bad as people consistently make it out to be.

Whenever I mention php with other developers, the responses are mixed but fall regularly along the following lines:

“I hate PHP… it’s awful!!!”

“PHP Sucks.”

“PHP is so difficult to work with, and there’s no concept of object orientation.”

“PHP is okay for small apps, but no one would seriously consider it for a large enterprise application”

Granted, there’s a lot I don’t like about php. I hate the fact that extensions are mostly implemented as functions in the global namespace. Functional programming is neigh impossible almost (and lets face it…. eval and create_function are kinda nasty). The OO cababilities do feel like much synthetic sugar.

But, despite it’s shortcomings, php is dead simple… I feel like even ruby has a bit more of a learning curve than php has… php is something anyone and their non-programmer cousin can pick up. And for those of us who are serious developers, there are plenty of good MVC and ORM frameworks out there to choose from. And despite the myths, it is pretty solid (although I’ve had to utilize caching systems in the past).

Maybe this is why a plenty of popular sites (Flickr, facebook, etc) use php rather than java or ruby on rails. I even noticed today that cnn.com uses wordpress (which is the blogging software I use) for it’s blogs.

I guess my general statement is, I’m tired of people hating so much on php. Sure, it’s easy to write spaghetti code with it, but the same is true with other languages (I have a 500 line jsp full of java code in CVS history at work to prove it), it’s just php probably gets more exposure due to wide use. Don’t hate it until you try it…. in all honesty, give me a choice between developing a site with PHP or Rubyit’d be a tough choice that would boil down to using PHP since the client probably already has it installed or has in house developers with PHP experience. Ruby on Rails is no magic bullet you know (flame on).

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This entry was posted on Thursday, September 4th, 2008 at 3:51 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.