Required reading: http://terrychay.com/blog/article/php-ruby-evil-good.shtml

I understand that at this point there will be a pile of old school, die-hard PHP geeks shaking their heads and saying “Hasn’t he heard of Cake or …”

Die-hard PHP geeks don’t have time for your rants.

I’ve been programming for just about 30 years and I’ve learned more languages than I care to remember. I know some Python but I would still never choose it for a front end. Most languages suck and there’s almost nothing that improved my skills by half of them. All I care about is what’s going to make me the most money and be fun. Python isn’t fun for me.

We all get out of the business eventually, gotta think diversification of income. I got out of being an employee for about 6 years then I got bored and threw a resume out there asking for a ridiculous sum and darned if they didn’t beat it. So, right now PHP makes me money and I made a commitment so I can’t leave just yet.

See at some point in your career, if you’re diligent and follow a plan, you’ll have broad experience and be a master at one or just a few skills. I’ve been in management at a fortune 500 company, 6 different kind of engineers (h/w and s/w), worked with customers, production and engineering and also run a couple side businesses. My only point is that this broad experience has helped me more than being good at PERL, PHP, (definitely VB), C++ or anything else.

You know how it goes. When you’re just starting out people tell you to learn it all. You buy into the job postings that want you to be a master at 10 different languages, 3 different databases, you can fly and work 80 hour weeks and they’ll pay you a measly 5 figure salary. That’s total B.S. Many of us have been there done that. It will take time to understand that’s not how you get ahead and be seen by the industry as a highly valued scarce resource. Supply and demand rules and patience is rewarded. Maybe telling you will help you understand but most likely you’ll just have to figure it out yourself 10-20 years from now.

We should be proud if we don’t just focus on learning as many languages or functions as we can because it lets us focus more on business, marketing and distribution. You know, the rest of the skills a successful company needs other than just Engineering. Engineers are everywhere. People who understand niche skills and broader skills are much harder to find.

Not sure why someone would think Python isn’t dominated by PHP but I suppose they would have the numbers to back up that suggestion. So I still agree with the author.

Good luck in all that you do. Cheers.

From my side, a MVC PHP framework, like CodeIgniter, it’s way more simple and a natural approach to develop a web application.

And, just like a detail, having identation instead of curly braces it maked difficult to see “for” loops or “if” conditions, especially when they contain a long code.

The essential problem is that web applications are no longer simple. There was a time when the height of web app complexity was having a pile of includes and finding yourself needing memcached. Today even mid-range sites demand vastly smarter methods of dealing with data.

Web user expectations have risen dramatically as well. Forms must validate and pre-fill intelligently - to do otherwise is basically an unforgivable crime. Long sequences of Click->load->edit->load->response are no longer acceptable, rapid out of band responses, ajax and comet communication, the requirement for effective ORM and a dizzying array of support libraries for everything from RSS consumption to elegant charting has flipped the balance from a need to do primarily HTML, with some application logic, to a complete and dramatic reverse - it is not possible to deliver a modern web app in any kind of competitive timeframe if you’re spending all your time fiddling with HTML, there’s just way too much other stuff to do.

Ruby and Python stepped up to this challenge to a degree that PHP simply never has - and probably never will. There are no PHP frameworks that can hold a torch to Rails or Turbogears - they are a fundamental expression of their respective language platforms with the web as the interface, not a method for generating HTML with a variety of support libraries.

I understand that at this point there will be a pile of old school, die-hard PHP geeks shaking their heads and saying “Hasn’t he heard of Cake or …”. If you haven’t already seen the writing on the wall, there’s probably nothing I can say to convince you. I did PHP commercially for years, but I stopped two years ago when it became clear that times have moved on - just as they did for perl when PHP arrived on the scene.

Change is good, I’m delighted with Turbogears, it takes a clean language and grants it an unparalleled ability to bring a task to the web with a fraction of the code - and a hundred times the readability and manageability - of its nearest competitors on other platforms. I have successfully turned this into a major advantage for my company, and we have been cheerfully stealing contracts out from other firms to the point where we had to boost our price and we still have a month and a half wait time for anyone who wants new work done.

I cannot bring myself to work with PHP code anymore. It feels like going backwards - from a spreadsheet to a calculator, from the ball point pen to the hammer and chisel. Those who sit there cherrypicking features and saying “PHP 6 will have this too!” have no idea how insane they sound. You could write a book with a hammer and chisel too, but the time it would take! and who would even want it? Get moving now people, and shift to a modern platform. Change comes fast and it’s far better to be leading the wave than lost in the wash.

Hell, it’s more fun as well, I can spend my time on the fun, challenging parts of the work rather than mucking around with crap.

And I think coding in PHP won’t be that dirty in future since the rise of the ‘frameworks’ (mainly MVC). There a quite a few of them out there (May be a lot more than needed. But then in open source choice is good. :-) ) And with the use of these frameworks along with some good coding guidelines, I really think that clean code can be written in PHP. But yes Python makes it mandatory (at least on the surface, if one intentionally wants to write clumsy code no language can prevent it).

Pritam Barhate
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WebDesignStudent.net

Last Word, good post!

As for Python I picked it up in a matter of minutes, although I cant say that im an expert yet.

I think PHP is probably the best of the scripting bunch but at some point technologies such as .net and java will come back to the fore.