I hate PHP, but I'm still using it
Before I start writing I want to clarify something... PHP is shit.
My first real experience with programming was with JAVA in college. I didn't know anything about programming back then. I didn't know what a class or a function was, I didn't even know what a data type was. I was learning to program from fresh.
My teacher first started us off by explaining conditional statements and giving us some JAVA code to play with so we could experiment with the logic. I found this quite easy. I understood the logic and felt confident that I could change bits of the code to get the output I wanted. I remember changing a friends code to display the number of nuts he has.
We moved on. We started learning about classes and objects and things started getting more confusing. I could change the logic of the sample code and I generally got the output I wanted but I didn't really understand all of it. 'What are these static things'? I want to point out that my teacher was great, OO programming is just a very tricky concept to teach.
This is where I fell in love with PHP.
Me and my friend decided to create a hosting website. I've known HTML since high school so that wasn't a problem, it was just the sites logic. We started playing with PHP a bit and I couldn't believe how easy it was to use. I didn't have to worry about creating a main method (public static main thing) or classes. It didn't even moan when I wanted to compare a String with an int.
Now I'm in university and I finally understand the costs of these shortcuts in PHP, however I still use it. I think in it's own way, it's perfect. Let me explain by using Facebook as an example. For Facebook to be successful it needed to be better than it's competition. By using PHP features could be roled out a lot quicker because all the thought could go into the core logic over the little things stricter languages want you to think about. This meant the developers could get features out quicker making them more competitive. Facebook might not be where they are now without PHP.
I think a developer should use the language he or she feels they can get the best results from. If that's PHP, like me, then use it! It's better to get 100 billion hits a day then start optimising than having everything perfect and only getting 100 hits a day.
Author
Hello, I'm Lee.I'm a developer from the UK who writes about technology and startups. Here you'll find articles and tutorials about things that interest me. If you want to hire me or know more about me head over to my about me page
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