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Bash On Php! (Not Really)


Antonio Conte
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Hey, folks.

 

Kind of curios here. Most of the people here work with PHP, some daily. We all know the language is not perfect by any stretch of the imagination. We still kind of love it regarding all it flaws and quirks. The topic here is to provide your stories about bad encounters you've had with PHP. Weird bugs you have experienced, weird checks you've had to perform, problems with type casting, etc.

 

This is friendly bashing

As we love PHP, the point here is not to hate to hard on PHP. It's meant as a fun and informational topic. Keep in mind, though; If your love for PHP is really strong, something said here might hurt a little. The goal is not to get people to switch to other languages or start a flame war. It's all fun and games.

 

To provide some context, there are tons of articles bashing PHP. Some of them are totally missing the point, some are written by fanboys of other languages, but you'll find some traces of truth in these articles. As much as PHP might be the perfect tool for web development, it obviously has its share of flaws.

 

Why PHP is good

It gets the job done. It's possible to find good and affordable hosting. It has a large and helpful community. There's a ton of books and tutorials for the language. The learning curve is not to steep. It's possible to create great application if you know the language. PHP has lots of frameworks that helps remove the quirks. There's ton of reasons why Python (Django), Ruby (Rails), ASP(.net) or Java (Play!) is not the most widespread languages used on the web, and most of them stem from this reason: PHP does what it's created for rather brilliantly. (At least recent versions)

 

Things are moving in the right direction for the language, though. It's important to know about PHPs weak spots to be able to work with the language. Providing such information is important to help the language grow and inform people about the quirks.

 

So. Tell us your stories. Tell us why you like PHP. Tell us why is sometimes s*****. :)

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When i comes to PHP for me i don't really have a choice with it but to learn it along with Javascript and MySQL database software. What isn't run by PHP today? I have only used Pascal, C, Assembly language in the past and was really surprised by how easy PHP was to learn. PHP is loosely type so like in C where you had to state what type of variable you were declaring, integer, string, float etc and had to do manipulations with the same type of variable otherwise errors would be thrown.

 

I am new to PHP as you know so i haven't really had my fair share of real system errors so can't comment on that.

 

But i guess i like PHP because like you say it can get the job done, and that's what you get money for. I don't mean to say its all about money as i do enjoy working on code its quite satisfying when things work out. PHP for me is like waving a magic wand.

 

Sorry i am unable to comment on those other language's i am just sticking to the point in getting this one wrapped up for my project.

 

Another point is that all the main frameworks are written for use with PHP, Zend, CakePHP, Codeignitor, Yii, Symphony etc. Then you have Drupal and Joomla. There are just more resources available for it and it makes PHP more approachable.

 

As with regards to bashers there will always be people on the opposite sides, so it doesn't really matter, it just depends which one works out for you. Well its time for me to get back to my Wand!

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