Comment yeah yeah yeah (Score 1, Redundant) 122
yeah, PHP is sloppy, insecure by nature, and full of bugs - but there's a lot to be said for good programming practices as well, which when used can remedy many of these flaws. it's unfortunate that PHP is so easy to learn, as it has attracted hordes of people who couldn't or wouldn't learn another programming language, and of course, failed to learn (or have no desire to learn, hey it works just fine) anything about security, program efficiency, or how someone could take advantage of their sloppy coding. companies need web apps to be done yesterday, and they'll hire just about anyone based on a resume half the time, or find someone on one of those god awful freelancer sites. a lot of the time, "anyone" turns out to be some jackass who discovered PHP a few months ago, figured out how to connect to a database, and suddenly decided they were a programmer.
that said, PHP is useful and a good performer when the right hands and brain are doing the work. i would be reluctant to hire anyone who learned PHP as a first language and hasn't moved on to something else by now, regardless of their experience level. nearly any language used for developing web apps can be dangerous in the wrong hands, it's usually PHP these days because those people can't manage to learn another language (unless it's coldfusion, and that's a completely different disaster).
where i work, we use PHP. it's just everywhere; things are so easy to write that a lot of things have been written, and now someone has to either a) rewrite it all in another language, or b) just maintain and try to improve the existing codebase. guess what - "b" is the choice right now, and that's the way it is. i'll bet this is the case in a lot of places. i spend time trying to convince my superiors of PHP's shortcomings and the sensibilty of retiring some of this old junk in favor of something more robust and secure (like python), and they listen to me, but don't think that now is the time. i like where i work, and they do listen to me, so when it's time, i'll be there to do the work, the right way. if i wanted to leave, i'd definitely go somewhere where PHP wasn't used.
and don't say PHP isn't getting any better. 5 is much better than 4, at least for OOP, and from what i can tell 6 will be even better, getting rid of register_globals altogether will be a dream come true for me (even if it breaks tons of code - not mine though, that's for sure), possibly namespaces finally, and E_STRICT errors will be the norm.
that said, PHP is useful and a good performer when the right hands and brain are doing the work. i would be reluctant to hire anyone who learned PHP as a first language and hasn't moved on to something else by now, regardless of their experience level. nearly any language used for developing web apps can be dangerous in the wrong hands, it's usually PHP these days because those people can't manage to learn another language (unless it's coldfusion, and that's a completely different disaster).
where i work, we use PHP. it's just everywhere; things are so easy to write that a lot of things have been written, and now someone has to either a) rewrite it all in another language, or b) just maintain and try to improve the existing codebase. guess what - "b" is the choice right now, and that's the way it is. i'll bet this is the case in a lot of places. i spend time trying to convince my superiors of PHP's shortcomings and the sensibilty of retiring some of this old junk in favor of something more robust and secure (like python), and they listen to me, but don't think that now is the time. i like where i work, and they do listen to me, so when it's time, i'll be there to do the work, the right way. if i wanted to leave, i'd definitely go somewhere where PHP wasn't used.
and don't say PHP isn't getting any better. 5 is much better than 4, at least for OOP, and from what i can tell 6 will be even better, getting rid of register_globals altogether will be a dream come true for me (even if it breaks tons of code - not mine though, that's for sure), possibly namespaces finally, and E_STRICT errors will be the norm.
