PHP: coding horrors & poor excuses

http://www.theroadtosiliconvalley.com/technology/php-coding-horrors-poor-excuses/

by mbschneider • 14 years ago

2 1 14 years ago

jfaucett• 14 years ago

good article it brings up some interesting points. Here's my perspective on the issue. I think I (and most PHP developers) would agree that other languages are leaps and bounds better. I'm a software developer, I program in java, c, c++, and PHP, and here's the odd thing about PHP - its completely worthless for everything EXCEPT web development, and even for webdev its really only optimal for solutions that are not enterprise or at a massive-scale (i.e. twitter,facebook). But for everything else its great (for reasons below) and the thing is for most web development the "everything else" is the umbrella under which most clients come for the majority of developers. Here's why I think its great and its my default language for most web development contracts I get, in short its the tools you get, but here's the long of it:

1. Top notch CMS solutions (Drupal, Typo3) that allow you to develop and deploy and be done extremely fast. Throw a proxy cache like varnish in, and the site also rolls out raging fast, for most news,magazines,etc with a couple hundred thousands visitors daily, you're up and ready in no-time.

2. Frameworks galor when you need it, and honestly speed again here is my biggest plus, take Symfony plus Doctrine for ORM, and you can knock out midsized projects that require applike stuff in a fraction of the time you'd need with java.

3. The ease with which anyone can edit/maintain/update the project. I know, clients know that if a project is programmed in PHP its gonna be cheap and easy to find a dev, so you build it deliver it and basta. With something like Java its gonna be more difficult.

I realize none of these points have anything to do with PHP as a language in and of itself, but honestly, the tools are all that matters unless you just want to spend time programming - which I don't, I want to get paid, be done, have produced a clean, maintable project, etc. And PHP as is in 5.3/4 has namespaces (finally), and is well designed enough that if you know software design you can dev fast.

PHP: coding horrors & poor excuses

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