Its namespace and globals are uninitialized, except for the standard globals, functions and classes that provide primitive functionality and life support. Every web request starts from a completely blank slate. PHP gets several things very deeply, and uniquely, right.įirst, state. If you last touched PHP in the early ‘aughts, a contemporary PHP codebase might surprise you with traits, closures, and generators. Today, in 2016, it is a feature-rich member of the Mixed-Paradigm Developer Productivity Language ( MPDPL) family, which includes JavaScript, Python, Ruby, and Lua. It has been through several major revisions, each of which brought new mechanisms for wrangling these more complex applications.
PHP originally stood for “ Personal Home Page.” It was first released in 1995 by Rasmus Lerdorf, with an aim of supporting small, simple dynamic web applications, like the guestbooks and hit counters that were popular in the web’s early days.įrom PHP’s inception, it has been used for far more complicated projects than its creators anticipated. Its strengths are tightly coupled to the context of request-oriented, server-side execution. Uniquely among modern languages, PHP was born in a web server.
I would start a new project in PHP today, with a reservation or two, but zero apologies. On the balance, PHP provides better support for building, changing, and operating a successful project than competing environments. And the options for improving on PHP’s language-level flaws are pretty impressive. PHP-the-language has many flaws, which undoubtedly have slowed these efforts down, but PHP-the-environment has virtues which more than compensate for those flaws. Did Facebook, Wikipedia, WordPress, Etsy, Baidu, Box, and more recently Slack all succeed in spite of using PHP? Would they all have been better off expressing their application in Ruby? Erlang? Haskell? This is not quite a contradiction, but it should make us curious. Most programmers who have only casually used PHP know two things about it: that it is a bad language, which they would never use if given the choice and that some of the most extraordinarily successful projects in history use it.
Why did we choose to build a new project in this language? Should you? Slack uses PHP for most of its server-side application logic, which is an unusual choice these days.
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