Ask HN: I'm starting a new job as a PHP developer tomorrow

Changing from Linux to Windows is indeed rather painful. As others have mentioned, depending on deployment/process etc -- you might still be better off trying to live on the windows side.

I'm not a windows dev, but from what I've seen mentioned by others -- running php on windows w/IIS and SQL server works fine -- but you'll want to have a test/dev environment that matches prod -- or you'll just constantly run in to pain points -- especially if the team isn't on board/interested in investing in a full heterogeneous environment.

For a small example with node, see eg:

https://github.com/keithamus/npm-scripts-example/issues/5

Hopefully your new team has some automation in place -- it's unlikely it'll work out of the box under linux if it's never been tested/linux has never been a requirement.

On the bright side, vim works fine under windows, and with some mingw32/64[2], things aren't entirely painful. If you're used to script things with ruby, that should be even easier. Having to work with cmd.exe and it's nasty find.exe rather than grep, feels like running with one leg tied behind your back.

Lack of proper tabbed/keyboard-friendly window manager is probably the biggest productivity drain -- thought there are some alternatives for that too[3].

[1] http://www.hanselman.com/blog/SwitchEasilyBetweenVirtualBoxA...

[2] http://msys2.github.io/

[3] https://github.com/fuhsjr00/bug.n

It wasn't OOP at the start and had weird warts.

As PHP mature it's much better than its past and have fixed some complaints but unfortunately the bad rep still stuck. Plus there are some fundamental warts that you can't just fix.

In general, I'm happy that PHP is thriving and continue to improve. It looked bleak for a while and I regretted choosing PHP over Python or Ruby for web dev.

I find that it doesn't matter much if you're using MVC frameworks such as Laravel. You hardly need to memorize or use crazy stuff with PHP and most of the time you're just googling framework stuff how to grab param from route, etc...

I've done Scala Play framework that that language get in the way a lot on top of googling how to do stuff with play framework.

But I suspect that this observation is because more of dynamic language vs type language more than PHP vs Scala.

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I think in general it's just language evolve and got better.

Perl started web dev and then PHP was better then Python came along and after that Ruby. With each subsequent programming languages the languages got prettier and had more thoughts into the design.

> Once you're aware of the gotchas (and keep your head stuffed with this useless info the whole time you are working with PHP) its not as bad as everyone makes it out to be..

First, you need to be aware of the gotchas. But this is not possible because,

1. We are still counting (take a look at /r/lolphp).

2. Even experienced (8+ years) php programmers know a very small percentage of the php gotchas. See this http://www.reddit.com/r/PHP/comments/2zhg6z/how_true_is_this.... You can see one commenter. who is an experienced php programmer who was not aware of that at the time. I myself had 8 years of experience when I was bitten by this bug..ahem..feature. So unless you haven't gone through all of /r/lolphp and commited the relavent ones to your memory and check them for every single line of code you write, you are bound to be bitten by one of those.

3. And documentation does not help. Even php core develpers agree that some of the important parts of documentation is incorrect but NO ONE CARES about things like that. Every one is out to implement flashy new stuff that fanboy can brag about. Even the existing documentation is does not go much deep into details. eg this is the php.net page regarding exception handling

http://php.net/manual/en/language.exceptions.php

compare this to Pythons documentation

https://docs.python.org/3/tutorial/errors.html

https://docs.python.org/3/reference/compound_stmts.html#try

If you want to find how a return statement behaves inside of a finally block, the info simple isn't present in the php's documentation. Because "who cares because we copy stuff from java, so we probably does not not what is important to document anyway."..

I mean, it is very subtle and the recent 'facelift' that php received makes it hard to see its truly shitty nature for newcomers. When they look, they see all the shinny new features (often half assed) and think that php is on the same level as Python or whatever....