Some thoughts on PHP advocacy

Filed Under WebDev

These days, PHP is being taken more and more seriously as a professional web development platform instead of just a simple scripting language for quick & dirty web hacks. However, one of the main strenghts of PHP, the diversity of it’s community and it’s low barrier to entry, also leads to the kind of shallow, badly informed PHP advocacy we can do without.

Nate Abele’s talk on CakePHP at this weeks Kings of Code conference, with it’s baseless dissing of Rails and personal attacks on DHH, led me to think we could use some basic guidelines for

spreading the PHP gospel.

So here’s a start. Feel free to critize/contribute:

Thou shalt not dis Ruby on Rails. Rails is awesome. Repeat after me: “Rails is awesome”. So let’s learn and steal from it as much as possible.
Thou shalt not dis Microsoft. Microsoft sometimes does awesome stuff. Okay, I’m not gonna make you repeat that. I feel dirty enough typing it. And no cute Blue Monster is going to stop them from being evil either, but you can still be evil and do cool stuff. Think Tom Cruise.
Admit PHP is one of the most inelegant, inconsistent languages every invented by mankind. Or as Jeff Attwood put it recently “PHP isn’t so much a language as a random collection of arbitrary stuff, a virtual explosion at the keyword and function factory“. Don’t argue about PHP on the basis of elegance, structure and logic. You’re gonna loose. Besides, do you really want to waste your time on a “yo’ momma dresses you funny” argument with language design purists when you could be coding the next Facebook?
It’s not about making PHP ready for the “enterprise”. That’s just the sales pitch. It’s much more about making the enterprise ready for PHP, and the culture and values of the web that come with it.
PHP4 is dead. Bury it already. Don’t take it out on stage and show it to the world pretending nobody’s gonna notice the funky smell. (That even includes you, Matt Mullenweg…)
Native performance is irrelevant. Seriously. Screw the benchmarks. If you absolutely, positively have to squeeze every inch of processing power out of your servers, code in C. Otherwise, learn about architecture and how to cache the crap out of everything. The chance that native language performance is relevant for your web application is very, very small, so stop arguing about it.
PHP doesn’t begin and end with Zend. PHP is neither a language nor a product. PHP is a above all a community. PHP is you. That’s why PHP rawks. Because you do.