
What is cool about PHP programming? - iofur
We all know about PHP Sadness, fractal of bad design, etc. but what is good about PHP nowadays? No sarcasm please.
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Dachande663
Stateless, request-lifetime model works well for web, big library of packages,
huge hosting market, simple to pick up. At the end of the day it's a language
and like English it has it's faults (i before e, array before key) but you
know you can go to any server and speak it and get something done.

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ttctciyf
Some informed opinions at: [http://www.infoq.com/presentations/php-
history](http://www.infoq.com/presentations/php-history) and its HN
discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7054294](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7054294)

(I remembered seeing some other fb engineering talk on youtube around the
release of hhvm on similar themes, a lot of extolling the edit/save/shift-
ctl-r workflow and so on, and tried to find that one, but this is what came
up.)

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mooreds
You can get stuff done, asap. There are a lot of higher level rails inspired
frameworks like laravel or cakephp which let you get going quickly on any no
name hosting site (all the UNIX ones support php). These tend to have drop in
plugins with lots of functionality. Testing is supported.

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iofur
More comments here:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/PHP/comments/44qmao/what_is_cool_ab...](https://www.reddit.com/r/PHP/comments/44qmao/what_is_cool_about_php_programming/)

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nunobrito
PHP makes it very easy to run web pages that need some server backend. Back in
the days, everyone was using it.

Same with Ruby, was fun when there was a lot of people using the
language/tooling but nowadays the action is moving to other languages that are
"cool" (go, rust, haskell, ...)

As others commented here, PHP becomes a serious bottleneck as a project
becomes more complex. In fact, to deal with complexity you will see PHP
tackling the problems in a manner very similar to Java, but without being
Java. So in the end you'd likely be better off with Java to begin with.

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jardaroh
As mentioned before if you want a quick way to some minor things with you site
like displaying a simple visitor counter, PHP was made for it. But quick also
often means dirty. There are frameworks now that will counter the dirtiness
though.

As for what is actually "cool" about PHP, I would say nothing, however, I have
to admit it is easy to find people willing to work with PHP. So PHP is maybe
"cool" like 'Friday' was cool with so many people, I don't know, never been
part of the "cool" crowd.

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huzoorbux
For me, the ability to get from zero to a business-worthy MVP in a matter of
hours if you know what you're doing.

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kyriakos
pays the bills. there's a lot of demand for good PHP developers - but there's
a lot of bad fish in the pond.

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n17r4m
At the "low" level, if you need to get some quick and dirty database queries
up onto the web, PHP is probably the best way to do it. Big and bloated PHP
web apps are the worst, but if you are looking for a way to add and remove a
few entries here and there, then it is a good solution for a targeted problem.

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colinodell
It supports procedural, functional, and object-oriented programming. You could
even mix-and-match styles if needed.

Sure, it might not do them all 100% perfectly, but it does them well enough to
get things done.

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meigwilym
It quickly enables first time programmers to experience that amazing feeling
of omnipotency that comes when creating something.

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suneel2you
PHP coding is easy to understand literate human.

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suneel2you
PHP very fast compare to the other languages like .net or java etc..

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x0
You can read and write .xls files with it.

