Comment Re:Perl still works, and PHP is fine (Score 3, Insightful) 536
PHP is the boring, reliable choice. It's popular enough that it's probably still going to be mainstream in twenty years. The ease of entry means a steady stream of neophytes who end up checking out PHP at their first web language.
It's not a pretty language but you can be reasonably certain that for the forseeable future it's going to stay. It's nowhere near as nice as Ruby on Rails or Python/Django but it does have a huge market share so there's both relatively many people who speak it and a lot of ready-to-use code, from snippets to frameworks.
The huge amount of available code is a bit of a mixed bag, though - PHP attracts a lot of entry-level coders and in many cases it shows. On the one hand you have things like Twig (a clone of Django's template engine) that are a delight to work with; on the other hand you have things like most WordPress plugins, which consist of barely-working code written by someone who thinks that "model-view-controller" involves Kate Moss staring at a gamepad. The fact that PHP makes it easy to write code that is wrong but still runs doesn't help here.
PHP has flaws. A lot of them. It's a pretty annoying language to work with. But it's not going to fade away anytime soon and that is its strength. If that makes it desirable to you then PHP is a reasonable choice. If it doesn't you might want to stay with Perl or take a look at trendier languages like Ruby, Python or JavaScript.
It's not a pretty language but you can be reasonably certain that for the forseeable future it's going to stay. It's nowhere near as nice as Ruby on Rails or Python/Django but it does have a huge market share so there's both relatively many people who speak it and a lot of ready-to-use code, from snippets to frameworks.
The huge amount of available code is a bit of a mixed bag, though - PHP attracts a lot of entry-level coders and in many cases it shows. On the one hand you have things like Twig (a clone of Django's template engine) that are a delight to work with; on the other hand you have things like most WordPress plugins, which consist of barely-working code written by someone who thinks that "model-view-controller" involves Kate Moss staring at a gamepad. The fact that PHP makes it easy to write code that is wrong but still runs doesn't help here.
PHP has flaws. A lot of them. It's a pretty annoying language to work with. But it's not going to fade away anytime soon and that is its strength. If that makes it desirable to you then PHP is a reasonable choice. If it doesn't you might want to stay with Perl or take a look at trendier languages like Ruby, Python or JavaScript.