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There's a lot of encouraging things such as the list I just mentioned and the subject of this article HHVM. If you want to bury your head in the sand and contin
by jcroll 13y ago
There's a lot of encouraging things such as the list I just mentioned and the subject of this article HHVM. If you want to bury your head in the sand and continue to hum the tired "PHP is a fractal of bad design" chorus go ahead but please excuse those of us doing modern PHP development for really enjoying it, and being quite excited about it.
- astrodust 13y agoWhat I don't understand is what there is to enjoy. Nobody ever communicates this effectively. PHP is a greasy pig at the best of times. You can kit it out all you want and it still isn't a first-class scripting language, it's only a web-site scripting system, and the way it's designed it will only ever be a web-site scripting system. The only advantage to PHP has been, in historical terms, its ubiquity. Most if not all hosts support it. However, this is a blessing in disguise. Most of these hosts only support PHP 5.2 or maybe PHP 5.3, usually trailing two or three releases behind what's current. For those who write WordPress-like "download, install on server" packages, sure, PHP is an effective delivery platform, but I'd hardly call it a great programming language. Maybe I'm missing something, though, but I've never seen anything about PHP that's made me go "Yeah, I wish I had that in X language", but it's often the case in reverse. I've done a lot of Python, Ruby, Perl, C++, Objective-C, and JavaScript and each of these has something interesting about them, a style that meshes well with their design philosophy. What does PHP bring to the table that means choosing PHP is a good idea as opposed to just doing PHP by default?