Ask HN: Why not PHP?

And, as a beginner, do you recommend going with PHP to start with, or straight into Ruby/Python?

When I studied English in college, I discovered that the English language is a very poor choice for writing poetry because it is a very rhyme-poor language. For that, look to French or Italian. English is such a mess of a language, with irregular forms and inconsistent pronunciation. But if you're not writing poetry, English is your best bet, because more people speak it than any other language. You're going to find more books written in English and people who read them, and more people who speak your language.

PHP is the English of the programming world. Python and Ruby have cleaner syntax and consistent programming conventions, but more people speak PHP. There are lots of resources for PHP and lots more developers who know PHP.

If you find yourself in a remote fishing village in China, you're more likely to find one person there who speaks English and knows PHP than one who speaks Italian and knows Ruby.

- PHP's syntax is very random. There are over 5000 builtins and no consistency among them.

- PHP lacks (or lacked until relatively recently) many programming niceties such as objects, types, closures, lambdas, and namespaces. To do anything interesting, PHP developers rely on globals or dubious innovations such as using a string as a function name.

- PHP relies on a web-serving model where the program invocation is done in milliseconds. Even if you can (with difficulty) use PHP libraries in command line programs, it's very inefficient for anything like a long-running daemon process.

- Although it is almost always built into a web server, PHP doesn't make it easy for you to do anything useful with web requests -- such as custom authentication in a separate phase from content generation.

- Since it's a web templating language at heart, PHP practically begs you to do the wrong thing and mix presentation and data. To solve this, many shops use a templating language on top of PHP, which does feel kind of silly.

- Due to its ubiquity, PHP is the choice of script kiddies who can't program. The comments on the PHP.net documentation site are mind-numbingly naive sometimes. So even experienced programmers feel dirty using PHP.

That said:

- Among comparable languages, and for typical web serving tasks, PHP is fast. Really fast.

- It's probably already installed on your platform of choice.

- Within the web-serving paradigm, it has almost everything you would ever want.

- Its model of programming is really brain-dead, but it also can keep you out of trouble since you're forced to do everything in a REST-compatible manner.

- It's also the choice of websites like Yahoo, Flickr, Facebook, and Wikipedia, so you know it is battle-tested.