PHP At 20: From Pet Project To Powerhouse

snydeq writes: Ben Ramsey provides a look at the rise of PHP, the one-time 'silly little project' that has transformed into a Web powerhouse, thanks to flexibility, pragmatism, and a vibrant community of Web devs. "Those early days speak volumes about PHP's impact on Web development. Back then, our options were limited when it came to server-side processing for Web apps. PHP stepped in to fill our need for a tool that would enable us to do dynamic things on the Web. That practical flexibility captured our imaginations, and PHP has since grown up with the Web. Now powering more than 80 percent of the Web, PHP has matured into a scripting language that is especially suited to solve the Web problem. Its unique pedigree tells a story of pragmatism over theory and problem solving over purity."

Comments

PHP is great

[binarylarry]

The great thing about PHP is that it's the one language that native, Java, .NET, python and ruby guys can all make fun of together.

Here's to another 20 years (or maybe 19, depends)!

Re:PHP is great

[phantomfive]

Yes, the PHP code is harder to maintain long term,

Do you understand that the vast majority of time spent on a software project is maintenance? If you optimize for the initial development, you are wasting your time.

The only real weakness I've seen is that PHP-GTK is not very well maintained.

ok, now you're just trolling.

Re: PHP is great

[zieroh]

No it really is a pile of garbage.

The very best programmers that I've encountered in my long career were the ones that could make the code sing (figuratively speaking) regardless of the environment. Any language, any OS, any hardware -- none of these things ultimately matter. All those things will be replaced by something better (or maybe worse) at some point in the future. Being able to put aside juvenile biases and petty preferences is a hallmark of the truly great programmer.

The very worst programmers that I've encountered were the ones that bitched and whined endlessly about minute details, or those who let their pure philosophical ideals get in the way of the task at hand. They adopt stupid star-belly-sneetches attitudes for the sake of appearing smart among their peers, slagging that which they do not approve of.

Guess which one you are.

A poor workman...

[helixcode123]

... blames his tools. Crap code an be written in any language. Good code can be written in PHP. While not my first choice of languages, I have found myself on PHP projects and been fairly comfortable using it although during moments of frustration put in comments such as "These following 10 lines could be written in the following one line of Perl...".

Re:When does the powerhouse part start?

[amicusNYCL]

PHP does nothing to help programmers write sane, maintainable code.

PHP does nothing to force programmers to write good code. It also doesn't force you to write bad code. It doesn't do anything, actually, other than waiting for you to use it however you want to. That means that the fact that you produce good or bad code is a reflection of your abilities instead of the language.

Re:Cue non-programmers linking "A fractal of bad d

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

Actually, you're mistaken. I understand exactly what I need to do to get the results I want, and doing it in PHP earned me a nice living. Using PHP (the LAMP stack, really) has allowed me to work for myself, create businesses, earn money, and live pretty well. I have a hard time understanding what you don't like about that, unless it's based in jealousy. If you don't like PHP, don't use it. You're welcome to use whatever programming language you like without fear of me telling you why you're "wrong".