Sharing What You Love Or Hate About PHP

Written by Michael Larabel in Programming on 13 December 2014 at 08:29 AM EST. 53 Comments
PROGRAMMING
Much like the views on Phoronix or GCC vs. Clang, computer enthusiasts tend to have polarizing views over PHP -- whether PHP is a great language or work of the devil.

In a new blog post by New Zealand developer Simon Welsh has written a popular post this week about "What I like about PHP." In the post his benefits come down to the language's simplicity, it's powerful, well documented, fast, doesn't enforce certain programmng paradigms, and the future is very exciting. Of course, many out there feel PHP is insecure, enforces bad habits, its built-in functions lack standardization, etc.

On a semi-related note, this post comes not too long after ownCloud founder Frank Karlitschek wrote about PHP as a next-generation programming language.

I largely agree with both aforementioned articles about the PHP. Many of those reasons are why Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org are written in PHP and those together amount to well over one hundred thousand lines of code. I've also written many other projects in PHP from PHXCMS that powers Phoronix.com to Reside@HOME. Other things I like about PHP is the easy deployment across platforms, PHP being widely packaged by many distributions/OSes, the built-in web server, it easily allows for sharing code for CLI programs and web processes, etc. Facebook's HHVM also makes things even more exciting with improvements to the language itself while being delivered at faster speeds, etc.

What are your views on PHP as a programming language? Share with us via commenting on this article in the forums.
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About The Author
Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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