Why PHP?

Reply to the query raised to me by many people:

The great thing about PHP is that you can do ANYTHING — really, anything, that can be done on the web by a website. You can do it very, very quickly, and usually with support from existing libraries. And it has been proven to scale horizontally, to the moon.

As for Ruby, it’s a cute language, I admit. I love the design of Rails (and have been using symfony PHP for a year now because of that.) I haven’t had a reason to try Python, but I certainly know Java and C# and ASP.NET pretty well. PHP is a much better choice for user-interface-oriented web programming. It simply reduces the amount of effort you need to accomplish your goal, and can still scale. Why is PHP just an easier way to get things done?

1.  useful, huge ecosystem with amazing sample code

2.  no-theory to get in the way of program logic. PRAGMATISM at it’s best.

3.  lightning fast edit-compile-test loop (edit-test)

4.  Easy to set up, scale, and migrate between infrastrucure

5.  it doesn’t put new and idiotic metaphors on top of the web — the web is it’s metaphor. (unlike, say, ASP.NET which is godawful)

6. Finding a server that runs PHP is very easy. Most shared hosts don’t support the other languages and you need to pay more to install it yourself.

6.  super-helpful associative arrays very closely mirror database-style data. I tend to recreate them in every language I use. There are things that PHP is not great at — systems administration, realtime services, embedded programming, whatever. But for plain old data-driven website, PHP never loses site of the simple fact — it’s just a freakin’ website. Get it done and move on!