Comments on: What the Hell is Wrong With Me?

By: Ryan Mawby

Ryan Mawby — Mon, 11 May 2009 14:20:27 +0000

Snap! I'm primarily an ActionScript developer but have spent the past month or so up to my eyeballs in PHP and Zend – I have enjoyed the break!

By: Kay Smoljak

Kay Smoljak — Sun, 10 May 2009 01:10:17 +0000

Good post. We do a lot of PHP and a lot of WordPress at Clever Starfish – essentially, any project that calls for an off-the-shelf simple CMS or off-the-shelf shopping cart gets done in PHP, while anything different, custom, difficult or requiring cross-system integration gets done in CFML.

While I don't particularly like PHP's syntax, I often find myself defending it from CF developers who rag on ANYTHING that's not CFML, regardless of how good or bad it is.

At the end of the day, proficiency in multiple languages never hurt anyone. And you're right, WordPress kicks arse :)

By: Thomas Messier

Thomas Messier — Fri, 08 May 2009 11:28:56 +0000

I HATE the PHP syntax with a passion. The whole -> and => just annoys the hell out of me, as does the concatenation. Why did they have to cripple the language in such a way??? Beyond that, I agree with you, it has its pluses, speed being one that can't be neglected.

By: Gaspy

Gaspy — Fri, 08 May 2009 06:55:29 +0000

You summed up PHP's weaknesses pretty nicely. I do some PHP coding but (thank God) it's not my daily job. It's fast, it gets the job done, but man, it's the only language that I can't code in without having the reference book nearby. They can't even agree on the use of underscores, e.g. we have "isset($var) but is_numeric($var); don't even get me started on the whole ($needle, $haystack) vs ($haystack, $needle) nonsense. Add to that the fact that the language can do things differently depending on how php.ini is set or depending on platform, and you have a potential deployment nightmare. Working in PHP helps me appreciate actionscript/java/javascript.