Coding Horror: The PHP Singularity

Coding Horror: The PHP Singularity
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How much PHP do you use Jeff? Lets assume none. How is PHP hurting you? I mean seriously, how much contact do you even have with PHP?

PHP is easy to learn, easy to make websites with. There are a tonne of paying jobs which require PHP. PHP runs a lot of websites.

I am a PHP developer. I prefer Python but my PHP job pays me just fine. There are a lot of things about PHP that I don't like but it gets the job done just fine. You can write reasonable code with PHP. You can write secure code with PHP.

The main people who have problems with PHP are either ex-PHP developers who usually have gone on to Ruby and look back and fire a few shots at PHP. Or people like Jeff Atwood. Undeniably smart and talented programmers who for some reason are irked by the mere existence of PHP.

Please get over yourself.

The problem is that the developers of rails / grails / Wt / SproutCore / Flex / Struts / GWT / Django / Flask / Zope / Merb / Zotonic might be sure their framework is the greatest ever, and clearly worth a couple of days (or even a couple of hours) of someone's time to get it all configured and get started. However, I just see this giant list of options, each of which is in it's time the 'best thing ever'. How am I supposed to know which one to choose? Getting people started quickly and easily should be priority 1 if you want more users.

EDIT: Oh, one other strength of PHP. Many people when they start want to turn a static website they already have into a dynamic one. This is how I started on PHP, just including fixed headers and footers in a website. Then slightly customised headers which knew which page I was currently on. Then adding cookies to remember what users had already done. Then finally full user support.

In general, one thing PHP excels at adding the '1% dynamic' to an existing static website. However, I don't think this is as big a market as it once was, I don't think that many people learn a lot of HTML and make big static website anymore, then try to add dynamic elements later (or perhaps, I just associate with different people nowadays)

There's a lot of frameworks that make many types of web site or web app development easier than PHP. There aren't any languages that were created explicitly with the goal of being used to create web pages (and later, by extension, web sites). OK, there might be a few that have gone by the wayside (ihtml, htmlos, etc), but nothing mainstream.

PHP is "content-type: text/html" by default, which can be overridden for other tasks. Everything else needs to make some adaptation (however subtle) to 'play' with HTML. Potentially something like mod_ruby or mod_python could take off, but probably not even then, as you'd be worrying about including base library stuff or extra modules, the majority of which are already baked in to PHP (gd, etc).

You have a web page up and just want to add a dynamic copyright date to the bottom? Copyright and change extension to .php (or play with some mod_rewrite rules on apache). Want to capture the output of every HTML page and rewrite some links (while logging those changes to a db?)? automatically prepend a php ob_start() call then append an ob_get_clean() function in the footer, then process away.

Doing these sorts of things in any other tech stack requires a lot more configuration and meddling, or possibly rewriting core site code. PHP can scale down to be nice additional decoration in a site, or can power the whole thing soup to nuts (and can scale up much easier than some other platforms can scale down).

Related: I recently had a basic site and needed to rethink it in terms of mobile toolkit. It was much easier to take what I had an add in jquery Mobile stuff than it was to work with Sencha (as one example) because other tools like Sencha assumed I was starting greenfield, which I wasn't, and I didn't have time to learn enough of their stack to try to extract the bits I wanted. jQuery made it easy to add the bits I wanted, and PHP does that for HTML/serverside aspects of things as well.