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Thanks for the thoughtful comment. I indeed haven't fully articulated what is driving me to write this piece (besides a desire to give PHP a bit of love as it i

by larve 4y ago

Thanks for the thoughtful comment. I indeed haven't fully articulated what is driving me to write this piece (besides a desire to give PHP a bit of love as it is so harshly criticized for reasons I don't entirely understand). I find "problematic PHP" much easier to untangle than say, "problematic node.js" or "problematic python". Because PHP is often older codebases that have survived the test of time, this is actually a big feature of the language. The world and web development has much progressed since PHP3/4/5, and pretty much all of that progress can be leveraged with PHP as well. If I were to green field a new project, get to pick every developer on my team and a budget to match, I would probably not chose PHP. But, if the problem were "we want to try out an ecommerce SEO idea and don't want to sell our soul to shopify if it is successful", wordpress/woocommerce + a few janky plugins and templates + a custom plugin with 1k LOC is totally something I would consider. And I absolutely loathe wordpress database legacy sludge. If I have a team of experienced PHP and wordpress developers, a set of internal plugins that can be repurposed, and I can pay a freelancer to build custom react CMS components, using PHP and even wordpress for a new project is a no brainer.

xupybd 4y ago
I had a bit of a laugh as I read this. I realized that PHP is my go to language for very simple side projects. I have one that is left alive. It runs the scheduling of greeters for a group I'm part of. Every week we have two people stand at the door to greet new people and help them find their way in. We used to have a spreadsheet that managed it but I kept forgetting to update it and send it out. There were also some rules that made it tricky. Like you don't want people to repeat too often, you want spouses to be on the door together and a few other boring details that made the spreadsheet a chore. One weekend I got sick of that and threw together a tiny website that automates the entire process. My tool of choice was PHP because it takes no effort to get started. TBH it was a great choice for such a simple tool. It's been running for five years and has easily paid off the time it took to build. I guess I agree with you more than I realized.

by larve 4y ago

xupybd 4y ago

I had a bit of a laugh as I read this. I realized that PHP is my go to language for very simple side projects. I have one that is left alive. It runs the scheduling of greeters for a group I'm part of. Every week we have two people stand at the door to greet new people and help them find their way in. We used to have a spreadsheet that managed it but I kept forgetting to update it and send it out. There were also some rules that made it tricky. Like you don't want people to repeat too often, you want spouses to be on the door together and a few other boring details that made the spreadsheet a chore. One weekend I got sick of that and threw together a tiny website that automates the entire process. My tool of choice was PHP because it takes no effort to get started. TBH it was a great choice for such a simple tool. It's been running for five years and has easily paid off the time it took to build. I guess I agree with you more than I realized.