PHP is the very different from development in C# or Java. Anyone from those backgrounds pretty much automatically hates it. PHP will punish you hard for designs

PHP is the very different from development in C# or Java. Anyone from those backgrounds pretty much automatically hates it. PHP will punish you hard for designs that would be fantastic in .NET or Java. It's also very different than Perl or Python. It tries to be specific to the web and that makes a lot of oddities that the more general languages do not have. OTOH you can make a fantastic design in PHP. It's just that there are very few people who know how to do that. Frankly, because it's not taught... anywhere. So, yeah, as much as I've learned how to use PHP (through 11 painful years), it's really hard to figure out how to use correctly. It's possible. The ideal PHP design (currently) is a hybrid between OOP and straight script that will look bizarre to anyone from, well, any other background. As others have mentioned you have to be very careful not to load too much into memory or you will come crashing down fast. I still use it, because now I know how, but, ironically, I wouldn't recommend it. It's so very different from anything else that I don't know that the skills transfer well to other languages (other than straight-up problem solving).