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PHP Becoming More Popular

Posted by michael on from the jack-of-all-trades dept.

IO ERROR pastes "'PHP has earned the title "Programming Language of the Year 2004" with a positive delta of more than 3 percent within 1 year. The launch of PHP version 5 is generally regarded as a further step to maturity. It is expected that PHP will be capable to maintain its top 4 position for a long time,' according to the TIOBE Programming Community Index. 'The index is updated once a month. The ratings are based on the world-wide availability of skilled engineers, courses and third party vendors.'"

1 of 44 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Follow-up by bobbyjack · · Score: 3, Interesting

    What's with this perception that PHP is 'easy' somehow? Can somebody explain in what way it is 'easy'? The syntax (as has already been pointed out) is very similar to C, the concept of functional (or OO) programming still needs to be learnt, a web programmer still needs to understand http, sessions, cookies, etc. when using it.
    Are you talking about ease of installation? Why argue about /that/?
    Are you talking about the fact that it's weakly-typed and variables do not need to be declared before use? Plenty of other languages follow suit.
    Is there a problem with the fact that you can't do everything in 18 different ways and, thus, end up with a complex (i.e. not 'easy') mess that no-one else can maintain?
    Or is it just that PHP provides a very simple way of developing a huge range of medium-scale applications with built-in features to manage http, cookies, sessions, etc.? Sure, people can do damage if they don't understand the language, but that's nothing new. I suppose some huge percentage of PHP 'programmers' lack knowledge of some key concepts of the language, but I'll warrant that percentage is not much greater than the corresponding ratio of c, java, perl programmers.
    Seriously, have any of you who claim PHP is 'easy' every done any serious programming with it? And can you just explain what you mean?
    For the record, the way PHP handles certain array-based structures and, especially, the way it handles pointers/references is, IMHO, far more complicated than equivalents in Java/C.