Over the past few years a lot of people like to talk about which programming language to learn. Often you can see python on the list and more recently more and more Go. Usually the reasons are that it’s easy to learn and it is widely used. Also a lot of people like to mention that the so called “Web dinosaur” is terrible and you should not learn it. Yes, you are right, I’m talking about PHP.
Actually, personally, I like PHP, a lot. Because there is no real reason to dislike it. Most of developers will just say it is terrible just because they read somewhere that someone said it’s bad without much insight.
But let me burst that bubble, PHP is quite good actually. If I lean on to one of my previous posts where I talked about JavaScript, some of the reasons are quite similar why I think so.
It is quite easy and affordable to get hosting for it, so that is already a big solid reason to think about it. Like let’s be honest, what are the odds your application is going to blow up and gets huge amounts of traffic? -I think we both know the answer. Lets look at the popular apps, a there are dozen of apps out there but only a small fraction gets really huge amounts of attention. So just pick PHP and build the app you always wanted and host it much cheaper than most other tech. To sum it up, it is very cost and time efficient.
One of the aspects I really like is easy to read syntax. When you get to the more experienced stage in you career syntax starts to become less and less important since the most important are the core concepts. But anyway, PHP, to me has a very well readable syntax, some even say it reads like an essay, except it’s code.
A huge percentage of web is using PHP, even some popular and huge applications are built on PHP. So just saying performance is bad, because you read that somewhere is kinda rendered invalid. If I’m a little bit harsh, most people who will blame performance on the picked stack are usually the ones who ship garbage code on daily basis. PHP has everything you need, it’s built for the web, so just use it. I will always say, pick the tools you need and/or have to build what you want.
And while you are building your app, a huge PHP community is there to help you out if you get stuck somewhere. I mean there is a lot of documentation and working examples that you can find to get you started and follow along while you work on your projects.
A little bit off topic, but one of the reason why I took some time off from posting is because I was working on something behind the scenes. It’s a whole series I will start that will cover web development from ground up. I’ve decided that during my series I will use Laravel as my framework. The series will be posted here in written form and in a more demonstrational form on youtube. The whole series will be a mix of sharing thoughts on different web development topics and actual tutorial video.
But more about it in my upcoming posts. See you there!
