I was reading someday on a blog that PHP sucks, today i read it on another blog. It doesn’t matter on what blogs. They don’t deserve to be mentioned here. People with no or very little programming skills tend to write these blog entries either to mask their incompetence either to promote another programming language. It is easy to blame PHP when you never wrote a line of code, just went through some wizards that generated some code for you. Yeah, there are these kind of “programmers” too.
The usual whining of these people consists of mentioning lack of OO in PHP, no support of namespaces, inconsistent naming, register globals, magic quotes, safe mode and so on. But as one of these detractors mention he last programmed in PHP some 7 years ago. In 2001! Today is 22 May 2008! PHP is changed alot in the last years and PHP5 is far from the PHP3 that was someday really a mess. And PHP6 is on the way.
I just want to express here my two cents about this matter. I do code in PHP and i earn a living from this. And i learned to write code in such a way that if i have to modify it later or someone else have to do it – it should be easy. PHP is a scripting language and someone who codes in it must have this in his mind all the time. PHP is not Java, not C#! It is used for other purposes then those languages. Every language has its pros and cons.
PHP can be used to solve almost any problem on the web and the process is faster and less expensive then using some other programming language. If you cannot write some app for the web with PHP in a manner that is elegant, fast and secure you are a poor programmer. You better go sale flowers because a poor programmer will do a poor job even with the so called “real” programming languages.
Another argument in PHP’s favor is that it is used in the most succesfull websites on the Internet: Yahoo, Facebook, Digg, Wikipedia and so on. The most succesfull and powerfull CMS platforms also use PHP: WordPress, Typo3, Drupal, Joomla …should i name more?
But the final argument is that these people theyselves use PHP when they write their blog entries. If you so much hate PHP, why don’t you build yourself your own blogging platform in the language of choice? Or use one already written in the language of your choice (other then PHP)? Why? I say why. Because they are practically inexistent or would take too much of your “precious” time.
Laszlo Bodor
2 comments
I totally agree with you. I work in a company where the majority of the programmers are .NET or Java programmers. I heard some radical and obscure opinions about PHP, from ignorants – I can say – which stated that PHP is about to fall down and it is far away from the other Programming Languages. But they where very surprised when my estimation to the same project to be made in PHP, Java or .NET, was half time. The project is about to be released and it is developed in PHP and it is far away from what should have been accomplished in .NET or Java in the time passed since I’ve started developing.
Very true… bad programmers or ignorant programmers is better to say than that PHP is a poor programming language !!!