Me ha gustado la respuesta dada a la pregunta Everybody is saying don’t learn PHP. Learn JS frameworks but I find them too tough. I like PHP and its easy for me. I am understanding its concepts. Should I ignore them and learn PHP?:
PHP is an awesome tool. Like others. It has its strong and its weak points, like others.
I mainly develop in PHP, Java, Python, C/C++, C# (and Javascript, only when expressly requested)… and I have to say when I want something actionable and done fast, it’s either PHP or Python and that’s it.
PHP is best for web backends, Python is more general, comes with some awesome A.I. and analysis libraries.
I tell you why “everybody” tells you something wrong:
- half of them are “language activists” (usually for Python or Javascript), most of them are not even professionals, otherwise they would just deal with the fact we are talking about tools, not ideologies.
- several are “opportunity hoppers”, only looking websites that tell what language earns the highest income. I would never hire such guys, because they are unreliable. Developing is serious business, you don’t want a guy that after 6 months switches job because language XYZ, in year ABCD, potentiallyearns him $2k a year more.
- the remaining ones, are ignorant. Ignorant in the literal sense. They read some polemics on some blogs (usually “language purist” blogs) in 2011 and never cared to read updated information.
Now, 2011 knowledge is stale by any standard. PHP did a drastic change starting from version 5.5, that is since about 2013 (4 years ago) and implemented tons and tons of “cool developer guy” syntax facilities and structures.Since version 7, PHP is twice as fast and implemented so many new features, that Java itself got behind in some niche constructs.
Nowadays you can develop PHP backends that really “taste like Java”.
From lambda / closures / anon functions to iterators, from nice interfaces to factories, from classic patterns to unit tests, profilingand code coverage statistics, mock ups, traits, continuous integration (still rough), from depenencies packages to bigdata access, large (Symfony, Laravel, WordPress(!) (powering millions of websites)), medium (Yii and others) and small (Fat Free Framework and more) MVC / REST frameworks. Just name a feature, it’s very possible today’s PHP got it.
PHP even gets decent (NetBeans, Eclipse, CodeLobster) to awesome development environments (PHPStorm – payware).Plus – and no other language beats PHP at this, since the beginning PHP got blazing fast, ultra-extra-mega-flexible key-value arrays (technically: ordered maps) and tons and tons of arrays management functions.
So… beware, check PHP out and make yourself an idea. It’s actually very quick to check PHP out and see if it’s the tool for you. Just download one of zillions free “LAMP” or “WAMP” or “MAMP” (Linux / Windows / Mac) distributions, that is pre-configured packages including web server, database server and PHP. Some of those are terrific and include debuggers, control panels, additional services and much more.
