At 14, is PHP Finally Growing Up?

http://phparch.com/c/news/view/4/At_14__is_PHP_Finally_Growing_Up_

by nreece • 17 years ago

22 21 17 years ago

jrockway6• 17 years ago

Some arbitrary "best practices" don't make up for the language's general inadequacies (nor do any existing libraries). You might be able to write slightly less bad code, but you still aren't writing expressive code.

abyssknight2• 17 years ago

I would like to argue the C language argument here. If I want to shoot myself in the foot, the language should let me. If I want to paint the Mona Lisa, the language should let me.

PHP does that.

mahmud• 17 years ago

PHP will let you paint the Mona Lisa at favicon resolution.

jrockway6• 17 years ago

Features that PHP is missing and would be very difficult to implement in use code include continuations, lexical closures, macros, a sane type system, multimethods, a metaobject protocol, and many others. Why confine yourself to the tools of a 1950s-era programmer when it's 2009?

(PHP isn't even very good at "web stuff", although the frameworks try to improve this situation.)

rbanffy• 17 years ago

If you want to paint using crayons, that would be correct.

CalmQuiet• 17 years ago

No content in this article. And even phparch voters only rate this article 2.5 out of 5 stars.

—PHP user

BerislavLopac3• 17 years ago

PHP is not a language. It's a template engine gone berserk.

spoiledtechie• 17 years ago

Couldn't agree more... But it does still do a good job...

BerislavLopac3• 17 years ago

Never said it didn't. ;)

ssharp• 17 years ago

Your comment isn't relevant.

randallsquared2• 17 years ago

It's better as a language than as a templating system, sad to say.

jrockway6• 17 years ago

This is the amusing irony of PHP. It's a programming language designed to make generating HTML and interfacing with the web easy, but it's actually very hard (compared to other languages) to do either of these things.

neovive• 17 years ago

Although the article didn't cover any specifics of the language, I think PHP has definitely improved. For what it lacks in elegance, it makes up in ease of deployment and scalability. Overall, the improvements made to PHP over the past few years and the upcoming changes in PHP 5.3/6.0 and the variety of excellent frameworks to choose from, make it a very good language to keep in your web development toolkit. It doesn't do everything extremely well, but it does many things well enough.

jrockway6• 17 years ago

It is amazing that people are willing to sink thousands of hours into programming around PHP's problems (probably without noticing) because they are afraid to run "cpan -i Some::Modules" and cut-n-paste a FastCGI configuration into their web server's config file.

Ease of deployment is nice, but deploying other languages is not much harder, and it's significantly easier to actually write a reliable application.

X0nic• 17 years ago

I wouldnt say its growing up, more like jumping the shark.

At 14, is PHP Finally Growing Up?

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