Why do people still insist on using PHP? Better question, why do hosting providers insist on only supporting PHP?
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Anonymous2012-02-05 17:14
Know the history that once on the eve of Passover Levi Yitzchak sent his disciples into the city - to gather the Jews as much silk as much as possible, and bread. It should be noted that in that year the king forbade the selling silk fabrics. A few hours later returned with several students cut silk: bread, we did not find, they said, all the houses have got rid of leavened bread.
Then the Levi-Yitzhak cried to God: "You see, Father, how righteous your people! The king forbade the trade in silk, he has the army and police, prison and hard labor - but people were not afraid of the black market still thrives. And you banned for eight days to keep the leavened bread in the house - and all obey, even though you do not have soldiers and policemen! "
>>2
Even if PHP is shit as a language (which you can't really dispute), the problem is that very popular software is written in it (Drupal, Wordpress, Joomla, Mediawiki, etc.) and that isn't going to change anytime soon...
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Anonymous2012-02-06 18:14
The PHP language is just another procedural with a silly quirk that variables start with $. But PHP as a web scripting language is not about the language, but the philosophy on how it handles certain issues that are specific to web based environments. Yes, you can develop a program in C and hook it into a CGI environment, but by doing so you need to plug about 100+ possible exploits and jail-break issues. PHP does a good job with that, and does even more. It also does a good job on simplifying, streamlining and hardening API's, most commonly database and image handling. And, in contrast to PERL, it all resides in the core and not a spaghetti stitched mess of user supplied scripts and modules that are too fucked up to even flame about except that core PERL depends on external modules which are not part (or supplied) by the core creating cyclic-dependencies.
So except that variables starting with dollars, PHP does a really good job for what it was designed to do. It might have some short comings and inconsistencies, but those are things I am willing to accept with what it gives in return.