> thinking nothing interesting could possibly be done with PHP<p>Sadly, a lot of incompetent developers email each other articles like this, as fodder for dev team language flamewars. This quoted sentence is likely hyperbole, but they take it seriously and strawman people.<p>(Naturally, language evaluation is multidimensional. You consider alternatives, foresee tradeoffs, etc. PHP can be right/wrong in your situation.)<p>I knew programmers (and their CTO) who trotted out such articles to defend the broken PHP framework which they used to run half the business. I'm sure the framework's own authors would be aghast they still used it. The team working on it had near-zero productivity; virtually all spent maintaining the beast. New hires were flabbergasted at how slow the webapp was, which harmed the productivity of most in the company. One maintainer had a private project to incrementally rewrite the shit in another (very popular) language; the CTO indulged him but refused to support it.<p>(Mercifully, the company got put out of its misery. People might counter that the PHP codebase didn't kill the company. But of course that's not how it works. Incompetence suffuses many such decisions; each of which is just a facet of the same incompetence. And each incompetent decision reinforces the others.)
PHP is the duct-tape of programming languages. It might not be pretty but it gets the job done, and getting the job done is all that really matters.<p>With the exception of JavaScript which is also "wrong" by many puritan developers opinion, PHP is the only language that is welcome to complete novice programmers. All other languages require a lot of setting up.<p>Furthermore the ease at which I can combine JavaScript with CSS with HTML with PHP is one of the major reasons it ever got so popular. No other language allow me to do that.
The article mischaracterizes the criticism agains PHP as boiling down to thinking that nothing interesting can be done with it. In doing so, it fails to respond to what criticism against PHP typically boils down to: PHP sucks.
Recently I worked on a PHP project for a month. And heard same "ewwww" reactions from people. And even though I was skeptical about PHP, I must say it was fun. It wasn't the same PHP I used 6 years back. PHP has come a long way since. Frameworks like Symfony (Rails equivalent) is just amazing to work with.<p>In total, I think people should give PHP another try. It's worth it.
A bad developer will produce bad code in whatever language he is using. If asked, I’d tell everyone “stick to your guns”. Use, whatever gets the job done most quickly and efficient.
Most large companies with well-oiled legacy systems actually are not that bad to work with. I've seen the guts of a large PHP system, and while it was still re-inventing the wheel all over the place, they had still solved all of their problems and had established practices that encouraged stable business. Not interesting, but neither are consolidate businesses to begin with.<p>PHP will cease to be gross when it's not just the large implementations that are very nicely done. This is not the PHP that exists in the vast seas between these islands. PHP is not something that a rotational employee or someone who is career-conscious will choose or accept for long. They want to work at your company for a while. This can be good. PHP is a career limiter in a way and I think the cringe reaction is a natural tendency to want to open up the conversation to see if what could be a good rotational job is also a toolchain dead end. Career conscious programmers don't want dead ends.<p>The gripe is and always will be that PHP encourages bad practices because it includes a bunch of "features" that are undeniably prone to bad habits. It's not personal. Really, we don't want companies using PHP well to die. We don't want the programmers using PHP to go away. We want PHP to stay put because better tools are out there, and anything that perpetuates the use of PHP in <i>new</i> products feels gross. It feels especially gross to the career-conscious young ones. Sorry.
As a recovering PHP dev (I haven't touched a line in over 2 years) I'm happy I no-longer use it. It's inconsistencies drove me insane and I hate the F'ing dollar sign!<p>However I seem to have swapped that inconsistent, badly designed language with Javascript.
<i>We’ve built a framework for developing applications in PHP specifically designed to allow for fast innovation in the high-load, high-performance environment we live in every day while still keeping the API extremely simple to deal with.</i><p>Why go with PHP and have to roll your own framework, when you can go with something else, and leverage all the great work that has been done by the Django/Rails/whatever folks? This post tells me all that they have accomplished, which is cool, but doesn't tell the most important thing: why did they choose PHP?<p>I have to take missions in PHP (Symfony2 and Zend Framework) from time to time, and it really makes me appreciate how much more advanced Rails is. And I don't mean advanced as giving me lots of options for doing obscure things. I mean advanced as doing for me all the repetitive stuff that I would have to do anyway, so that I have much less code to write, much less room to introduce bugs, and I can focus on what really matters. The PHP ecosystem is trying to replicate that, but so far, it's still quite far behind.
I can't help but notice how virtually every PHP "proponent" is arguing how PHP is "not completely terrible", rather than arguing how PHP is "good". That's rather telling.
I was lucky enough to meet the guys at Mailchimp a few years ago when my startup was working with them on a project.<p>It's a great company; super offices, wonderful people and a sustainable, profitable business. If I wasn't in England, I would consider pushing hard to try and become a part of what they're doing.
I think the key problem is more that PHP is easy for developers to pick up and there is a lot of misinformation, in particular very outdated PHP 'tutorials' out there that have the whole idea quite backwards.<p>As it's often the first web development language picked up by people, who may not necessarily know what they're doing, it gets a bad reputation. Used correctly, however, it can be just as powerful as any other web development language.
While this is an old article, I agree, and PHP has only gotten better these past years. Not to mention tools like Composer, Laravel and Yii – most popular CMS systems are built in PHP too: Drupal, WordPress, TYPO3. Being an expert PHP programmer opens you up to a lot of possibilities, and while it has some idiosyncrasies, it's not like JavaScript, ASP.NET or Python doesn't have their own share, too.
Not sure of this Ewww, much of the bigger sites like Facebook and Flickr, both use PHP..! This "Ewww..!" AFAIK is beginner coders perspective. Some company's are promoting this kind of things on language because they need different skill set people in the market. As an Architect, it is best to know as much languages as possible.
I get this all the time, started with C and Java back in university well over 10 years ago, but after doing a few projects with PHP and starting a few personal projects (one of which became rather infamous years later lol) i got hooked<p>In all this time there has been a huge change in the PHP world<p>TBH if a "developer" cringes their nose at a very capable tool, just because it is not the latest "cool" thing, It tells me a lot about them.
Well this article is over 4 years old, which is positively Paleozoic in language development terms. But I am sure that the discussion here will be equally out of date.<p>Can we have less of these sort of articles please, it was a waste of my time skimming it.