robot_parade

Hi,

I'm interviewing with a company that is a php shop... I've always been pretty biased against php, however. I'm not a big fan of mixing code and content, and php seems to make it far to easy to do exactly that. I like this company other than the php thing, however, and I'm sure I can handle php just fine.

Anybody else had much experience moving from 'other' languages as their primary development languages (perl and Java in my case) to php?

Thoughts?

sharpnova

There's no reason to have anything against PHP. If you are familiar with C-like languages, there is no learning curve associated with migrating to PHP.

A lot of people shy away from PHP because it is so accessible. I guess they feel that if it's so easy to learn (like flash) then it must be not as useful for a professional-class developer. This is probably true for flash but in the case of PHP, it is not.

If you know your HTML and JS, then you'll be fine with PHP.

Cynthetiq

i'm trying to understand your perception of "mixing code and content" as this forum runs on PHP the content is held in a SQL backend. How is it mixed?

I'm curious because our company recently implemented a system for content distribution and they went all over the place from c# to PHP to ASP to finally .NET.

All I can say is that the app sucks donkey ball and would have been able to be done with a simple php off the shelf or even freeware solution.

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cyrnel

Something I used to have hanging on my wall to point to whenever discussions of tech turned religious:

Even though you find <blah> psychologically challenging, it's important to your business. Other people find it useful and you will keep running into it.

When personally challenged I'd buckle down and spend a few nights on little projects until things flowed more easily.

When you get older you can look back and jeer, much like I do with Pascal.

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captobvious

I wouldn't blame PHP for mixing code and content. It's easy to do that in other languages too. I'd say it's mostly due to the person designing the system in the first place. Regardless of the language, if you don't structure a system properly, then code and content will get mixed together.

I agree with the others who mentioned the accessibility of PHP. It has the smallest learning curve out of all the languages I have used, making it accessible to more people. A lot of these people probably don't have the background or the desire to separate code and content.

My opinion is that the language doesn't really matter. It may be easier to write messy code in PHP than other languages, but in the end it all comes down to the actual design of the software, not the language it's written in.

SirLance

I created a personal website using all PHP open source code. I am not very experienced with PHP yet, but find it easy to work with and I am happy with the results.

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lindalove

Bad coders are always going to produce sloppy, mixed, bad code no matter how you look at it. I personally don't see the point in blaming a language for the flaws of its coders.

It does have some peculiarities though - e.g. some function names are word-separated by an underscore, and some aren't (strip_tags vs. strtolower for example)

Rawb

I currently program in PHP professionally. So I'll chime in.

PHP is a fine language, other than the craziness that sometimes comes with the naming "scheme" of the functions. The code I am stuck in all day is object oriented and seperates code from display via a template engine. Even with that however, the initial design of the codebase has been completely over-extended so it's a bit of a hodge-podge to get coding in. So even with a fairly decent overall design, and a template engine, the codebase still got ugly.

I don't blame this on the language however because I have seen much worse atrocities in Perl, Java and C. So I would say that don't be afraid of the job because of PHP, it's just another language, and a simple one at that. You may find yourself getting bored at the standard day to day tasks ("we want this report", "we need this new form"), so you may want to start some hobby programming on the side.

noodles

php only blends code and content when you let it.

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