[SGVLUG] PHP question

[Dustin Laurence]

On 02/22/2016 02:44 PM, Dan Kegel wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 3, 2016 at 9:40 AM, Dustin Laurence
> <dllaurence at dslextreme.com> wrote:
>> Please let this be an addition to an existing PHP website, as it sounds.
>>  Making a new website in PHP without the excuse that you already know
>> PHP better than a good language makes baby Jesus cry.
> 
> I did that once, but in my defense, it was 13 years ago... and a friend
> needed a photo gallery site...

Yeah, PHP was like free crack cocaine, and youthful indiscretions have
to be forgiven because of the webserver programming landscape way back
when.  PHP had two advantages that unfortunately gave it use cases in
spite of being a contender for worst widely deployed language: no-hassle
web and mysql integration, and the cheapest and most universal host
support.  Ruby wasn't well known, pythonistas were off in the wilderness
talking about Zope and Plone, and Perl--well, I'd certainly use it over
PHP, but it wasn't as brain-dead easy to get started with and its
treatment of new programmers is a bit rough.  If you just needed to get
stuff done quickly and hosted cheaply, sadly there weren't good
alternatives to PHP.  That doesn't apply now with universal support for
decent, beginner-friendly languages like ruby and python.

The sad thing is that it hung PHP and MySQL around our collective necks
for a long time.  I managed to dodge being responsible for any PHP being
released into the wild by dint of sheer cussedness, and because the one
time I looked at PHP out of curiosity I hated it so much that I avoided
anything to do with web programming if at all possible.  However, I'm
responsible for some MySQL usage that should have been postgres.  Mea
Culpa.  I've already paid the price in trying to force MySQL to respect
basic data integrity in spite of itself.

The most damning thing to say about PHP is that it's virtually alone
among widely deployed languages in not seeming to have any positive
lessons that it teaches better than other languages about programming
itself that you make part of yourself and take with you to other
languages.  I can name some unique excellence about most languages I'm
acquainted with, even bad ones, but not PHP, and every time I say that
nobody else is able to either.

I say that as someone who learned a lot about programming with 8-bit
basic, so I'm something of an expert in very, very "special" languages.

Dustin