Why I love/hate PHP
I’ve been slinging PHP code since the late 90s (PHP3 era). My name’s in a half-dozen Wrox Press books as a technical reviewer, covering Linux, MySQL, PHP4. (I’m even on the cover of one, as an author.) As a quick, dirty way to get a website up and running, it’s ... well, quick and dirty. But it was kind of obviously hacked together, and there’s a lot of inconsistency. For example, in the strpos() call, the arguments are in the order haystack, needle, while in in_array() it’s needle, haystack. If you’re not using PhpStorm (and I’m usually not ‡ ), with API autocompletion, that may not be that big of a deal, but if you’re logged in remotely using vim or otherwise not wrapped in an IDE, the mental task switch of flipping over to the API reference to see which order a particular call requires is, for me, less than ideal. But for all its foibles, it’s still, in my opinion, one of the best ways to rapidly get a web application up and running. Historically, it has been loosely ...