I’ll never understand why two open source programmers would choose to needlessly criticise each other’s choice of programming language. I guess there’s always competition between the languages which leads to us-and-them camps, especially when you’re at a Ruby On Rails demo, but the speaker should have known better. It seems like Ruby has made efforts to improve on PHP which is great, but when you stand on the shoulders of those that went before you don’t do yourself any favours by trying to dig a ditch under what you’re standing on.

I wonder Rachel, have you ever considered writting a book on PHP like your HTML Utopia or even CSS Anthology? I would buy that in a heartbeat The first thing I looked for when I wanted to buy a PHP book to start with is if you had doen one.

I think the title of my post says it all: “Stop Hating On PHP And Learn To Code Better”

Ugly, mangled code can be written in any language.

Of course part of PHP’s current unpopularity (or is “uncoolness” a better term?) is that a lot of people simply code PHP badly and there’s so much bad PHP out there on the web. The fact PHP just lets you get on with it quickly is both powerful and dangerous. It puts the onus on the developer to do things properly.

As Philip notes there is little best practise direction on the PHP.net website and it’s only recently with web frameworks like Zend Framework (http://framework.zend.com/) that “doing things properly” has been shouted about.

PHP is likely to get a better reputation once PHP 6 is out, with full unicode support and the ditching of a lot of unhelpful features like register_globals.

Conferences are great places to learn and meet people, but the trend is often on “cool” stuff which can be completely at odds with the reality of the “real” business world of the web. It would be nice for a bit more grounding in reality sometimes..

I agree with both Rachel and Philip here. It is a perception problem. As a PHP developer myself, I started to look around at other languages about a year ago. One to broaden horizons and two, people where asking for RoR a lot.

Ruby does have some sytax advantages over PHP, as everything is an object. However since PHP5, everything I do as OO in PHP feels cleaner and closer to the RoR examples always given. Now PHP has most of the tools required to exist in an OO world. PHP6 will add the rest it seems.

I personally think that frameworks like RoR and Django are just enjoying a lot of buzz because they’re new and some-how got that awful ‘Web 2.0′ label associated with them. I have had clients asking for a site in RoR and when asking them why they simply say “because it’s new and web 2.0″ – yuk! If the clients are asking for RoR without knowing why, we’re all in trouble.

But I think PHP is still going to be used for many years to come. A particular framework that I use, Kohana PHP (http://www.kohanaphp.com), has helped re-invigorate my confidence in PHP and is enjoying some popularity.

That slide annoyed me, too. I decided that we had been trolled. I am sure that if anyone had complained of its unfairness he’d have countered with something edgy about PHP’s inherent suck and lack of true OO purity.
Python and Ruby will always win purity battles with PHP, but those battles won’t do anything constructive for either party. Maybe the speaker realised this and picked a slide that was unfair and ridiculous to drive home the point that he’s really about solving problems quickly and transparently with something that works and the patterns used by Rails can help a lot with that.
PHP’s homepage isn’t limited to lacking pointers to clever time-saving frameworks. It lacks pointers to any sort of best practice, which is a bigger problem. It’s own manual doesn’t even hint at it, in fact the online manual can’t even decide if PHP is OO, with respect to its examples.
Again, I think this is deliberate. PHP is a very broad church, there are still plenty of PHP developers who won’t use OO, plenty who scatter mysql_query() into some HTML and PHP works for them because it works for their boss. Those people do not want to be reading about exception handlers or extending classes because they know PHP is already meeting their needs. The sad part is that these people are the ones who go all starry-eyed when they see Rails “not repeating itself” and they probably blame PHP for being PHP when they were the problem all along.