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> Sole outlier? Hardly. Half of the web is powered by PHP, including tons of websites with huge traffic and usage. Quality > quantity (just because a language

> Sole outlier? Hardly. Half of the web is powered by PHP, including tons of websites with huge traffic and usage. Quality > quantity (just because a language is widely used doesn't mean it's well designed), a huge amount of this quantity are WordPress blogs, MediaWiki sites, or relatively low traffic e-commerce sites. It is not the dominant language of "tons of websites with huge traffic and usage."[1] [Facebook and Wikipedia are the notable outliers...so I'll admit I shouldn't have said sole outlier]. The "quantity" argument is also weakened by the fact that websites are not the only things programming languages are used for, and in terms of overall popularity it's use is a fraction of that of C or Java.[2] PHP also has far less job openings than Java or C# and only slightly more than Python[3] (I imagine Python will eclipse PHP fairly soon). If you're interested in why so many developers consider PHP a poorly designed language I'd suggest reading PHP: a fractal of bad design[4] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_languages_used_in_most_popular_websites https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_languages_used_in_... [2] http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.... [3] https://gooroo.io/GoorooTHINK/Article/16191/Which-language-wins-in-terms-of-salarydemand-July-2014/14105#.VJ7jEAAID https://gooroo.io/GoorooTHINK/Article/16191/Which-language-w... [4] http://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/ http://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/

wwweston 12y ago
> Quality > quantity (just because a language is widely used doesn't mean it's well designed) I'm friendly to the argument that there are often better things than the popular things (and specifically things than notable advantages over PHP for developing software), but not to any pretense that PHP isn't "well-designed." As far as I can tell, it's well-designed as a tool for moving in small conceptual steps from static web documents to dynamic documents to (nowadays, for those who want it) well-organized apps on easily available commodity hosting. There's little that competes with it here in terms of the deployment story and ease of the first part of the learning curve. Moreover, despite the collection of warts and WTFs, it offers more or less the same commonly-used abstractions in its celebrated scripting siblings. Yes, yes, I know, there's all these differences -- you miss the syntax or Tennent correspondent blocks or monkeypatching or whatever is important to you. Rock on with that. Just don't be surprised when choosing PHP over Ruby or Python doesn't seem to turn out to make a difference between success and failure of a product/project. > I'd suggest reading PHP: a fractal of bad design[4] Like most good hit pieces, there's some truth, but it suffers from the focus illusion among other things.

wwweston 12y ago

> Quality > quantity (just because a language is widely used doesn't mean it's well designed) I'm friendly to the argument that there are often better things than the popular things (and specifically things than notable advantages over PHP for developing software), but not to any pretense that PHP isn't "well-designed." As far as I can tell, it's well-designed as a tool for moving in small conceptual steps from static web documents to dynamic documents to (nowadays, for those who want it) well-organized apps on easily available commodity hosting. There's little that competes with it here in terms of the deployment story and ease of the first part of the learning curve. Moreover, despite the collection of warts and WTFs, it offers more or less the same commonly-used abstractions in its celebrated scripting siblings. Yes, yes, I know, there's all these differences -- you miss the syntax or Tennent correspondent blocks or monkeypatching or whatever is important to you. Rock on with that. Just don't be surprised when choosing PHP over Ruby or Python doesn't seem to turn out to make a difference between success and failure of a product/project. > I'd suggest reading PHP: a fractal of bad design[4] Like most good hit pieces, there's some truth, but it suffers from the focus illusion among other things.