I wrote a lot of PHP from 1999-2008. First as a hobby, then professionally. From 20 LOC guestbooks to payment gateways used to process millions in payments. It wasn't until recently that I was sure I'd written more code in any other language than PHP. These days I'll occasionally poke around with it or patch a bug, but that's about it.
Is it a perfect language? No. But which language is? (I can hear the Lisp crowd grumbling.) It's fast. The only ceremony you need to write executable code is the <?php tag. It has a very rich standard library -- even if some of the function names make me want to stab people.
My only real gripe with PHP is the annotation syntax. Yikes. Stuff that's in comments SHOULD NOT AFFECT RUNNING CODE. Who came up with that?
PHP has taken a lot of flack over the years. Mostly from people who never really worked with it. A lot of the criticism really should have been aimed at certain PHP developers, rather than the language or the community at large. PHP's low entry barrier is a blessing, it's how a lot of developers were introduced to programming. It's also a curse, because a lot of very inexperienced programmers managed to become prolific at getting code out there, code which was ugly, bug infested and a security nightmare. But it's not fair to attack a language over its inexperienced users.
Is it a perfect language? No. But which language is? (I can hear the Lisp crowd grumbling.) It's fast. The only ceremony you need to write executable code is the <?php tag. It has a very rich standard library -- even if some of the function names make me want to stab people.
My only real gripe with PHP is the annotation syntax. Yikes. Stuff that's in comments SHOULD NOT AFFECT RUNNING CODE. Who came up with that?
PHP has taken a lot of flack over the years. Mostly from people who never really worked with it. A lot of the criticism really should have been aimed at certain PHP developers, rather than the language or the community at large. PHP's low entry barrier is a blessing, it's how a lot of developers were introduced to programming. It's also a curse, because a lot of very inexperienced programmers managed to become prolific at getting code out there, code which was ugly, bug infested and a security nightmare. But it's not fair to attack a language over its inexperienced users.