What is cool about PHP programming?
It’s a serious question.
Leaving aside the fact that version 7 is blindingly fast, and the fact that the new strict mode offers some pretty reliable protection from inane bugs and opens the door to superior compilation and thus further performance gains, and even ignoring the fact that there are thousands of well made packages for almost every purpose, the coolest thing about PHP programming for me has to be the fact that you can have a finished web app in a matter of hours.
From bootstrapping a new virtual environment in minutes with tools like Homestead Improved, to deploying on anything from DigitalOcean to Heroku, and even shared hosts like Hostgator and similar, one can go from start to (proof of concept) finish in a day, flat. Use one of the amazing frameworks we have at our disposal, and cut that time in half. “But then the app is not well designed” and “But it’s coupled to the framework”, some would argue. To that I say: “go forth and whiteboard your architecture further while my app grows its userbase and I use that momentum to iterate on the progress already made”. Or in the form of Woody Harrelson:
I come from an enterprise-level ActionScript3 background (yes, such a thing existed), do pet projects in Python 3 sometimes, love experimenting in Unreal Engine and C++, dabbled in Dart when it still lived, and do my data mining in R, and I even tried to use the nuclear clusterbomb that is NodeJS, but none of these offered the ease of use that PHP does. It’s easy to get started with, easy to get something out the door with, and, perhaps most importantly for me in this stage of my career, easy to teach to others.
What do you consider to be cool about PHP programming?