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Depending on what's serving PHP it can also get complicated. Everybody can't stop talking how easy it was to cobble up something in shared hosting days, but don

Depending on what's serving PHP it can also get complicated. Everybody can't stop talking how easy it was to cobble up something in shared hosting days, but don't forget that back then only option was pretty much Apache and even that was enough to give you headaches because of different modules being activated, your htaccess file being incompatible and so on. Also: You are a kid, wanting to program something on your new (typically) windows pc you got for your birthday, is it easier to get started with PHP than other alternatives? What about html and js?

lhorie 7y ago
Sure, PHP deployment could run into some issues back in the day - remember magic quote configuration issues in rando hosts? But even that was something you could get around relatively easily (mostly thanks to the stupidly beginner friendly docs). These days, hosts can easily drop in a PHP hosting pre-packaged solution, so you'd be hard-pressed to find a PHP host without a reasonable configuration. As for pure beginners, if your goal is to get pretty things on screen, HTML + CSS is fine. But if you asked me to pick between PHP and Node.js (or any other language, for that matter) for teaching a kid about server-side web programming, I'd pick PHP in a heartbeat. You can't even get past posting a form in Node.js without having to reach for NPM :) In fact, PHP is how my brother (who went to business school) converted to a programming career.