Earlier tonight, while talking to my father about the C++ class I’m taking he said something like ‘now you’ll learn a real programming language’ and it bothered me, as such comments always do. I understand where this comes from – C and C++ are what most programs are written in, with many newer programs also being written in Java. However, PHP is, by all appearances, the fourth most popular language out there and it surprises me that it gets so little respect. (The third shall remain unnamed.)
I think part of this attitude comes from the fact that PHP was designed as an online language. I started using PHP around 1999, when it was largely a templating language, and I probably wouldn’t have considered it a ‘real’ programming language then, either. It was not meant for traditional programming. It was aimed at website creation, and it did a good job. PHP has grown tremendously and can now be used for just about anything, including native desktop applications. PHP5 has full OO support, and the syntax is much like C. In short – it’s a ‘real’ programming language.
I think part of this attitude also comes from the fact that it’s so easy to use, and that encourages ‘misuse’ (or ‘learning’) by people who don’t know programming and millions of tiny snippets that aren’t very impressive. You don’t have to have functions, or typing, or include libraries, or have classes, or much of anything. PHP will let people write terrible code, and make it easy to do. That’s one of the reasons I started using it – it worked more often than not, even though I didn’t know the language.
But you don’t have to write sub-par code in PHP. Many PHP applications are extremely well written and used by businesses worldwide, even if they don’t know it. Use WordPress? You use PHP. Use facebook? You use PHP. Use a forum? It’s probably written in PHP. Even Yahoo! and Google use some PHP (along with many other things, of course). I’m simply saying that things written in PHP can be every bit as good as…well, as the programmers writing it, and I’ll bet they write things faster in PHP than in Java or C++ – though I’d say the same thing of Ruby, Python, Lisp, and a number of other interpreted languages. They, though, get some respect.
Filed under: Uncategorized, PHP
