PHP: the quiet powerhouse

"Dozens of new language-specific communities have now entered the fray and brought along their legions of devotees with them, and many of those devotees see PHP as being passé. I even had the following happen to me, and this is absolutely a true story and can be verified by our VP of Operations, Richard Kotulski: I was in an elevator with O’Reilly’s very good “PHP Cookbook” in hand and an older gentleman scoffed at me and said, “PHP? What is this, 1920?” This really, actually happened. I doubt it would’ve have happened if I had had a Python or Ruby book in my hand."

Which... is even odder because some evangelists like to point out that python and ruby are older than PHP, as if that means much.

While I generally agree with the points, many PHP strengths are also weaknesses. For example - "Direct HTML embedding." It's nice and easy, but because it's so easy, it leads to unescaped output, and xss exploits and such.

PHP does let you as productive as you want to be on the web, either with raw PHP or with one of the myriad frameworks. The author's point that no other language gives you that is, I think, another one of PHP's strengths (but yes, is essentially a weakness in the wrong hands as well).

EDIT - have been using PHP since early 1996 - almost since its inception, and have watched the criticism (and occasional hate) ebb and flow over the years. That seems to be the only constant to PHP. :)

You're quite right that the analogy isn't perfect. The point I was trying to make, though, is precisely that PHP development can proceed without any recourse whatsoever to a framework. Jumping straight into web dev without an accompanying framework like Rails or Sinatra is a complete non-starter if you're a Rubyist.

So you're quite right, but I hope you would agree that the Rails/PHP comparison, in spite of its imperfections, is compatible with the point I was trying to make.

I enjoyed PHP. I enjoyed Ruby. If I was to do a complex project that would require a lot of integration with external services, I would want a good OOP language like python or ruby.

There are something PHP does nicely than Ruby does. Visa versa. However in all the PHP apps I have made / used, their structures started out with good intentions and then descended into pure chaos. There isn't a unified package manager for Python and PHP that is widely accepted. Ruby has rubygems and bundler.

Maybe next time when I start building another PHP app with namespacing, I'll behave better and make my designs more decoupled so that components can be removed and added, provided their interfaces match.

I would say that pip is regarded as the standard, unified package manager for Python.

http://www.pip-installer.org/en/latest/index.html

I'm just mad about the title. The post was about how PHP is quick and dirty for simple stuff. The reason all of the other web frameworks exist is because once you get past the learning curve, you can accomplish a lot in a very short span of time. If anything, they are the powerhouses, not PHP.