and miss out on all the awesome aspects of the language/environment?
If this was about JavaScript and Front-End I might've agreed with you (there are transpilers but interoperability with JS modules can be tricky), however in the realm of servers there's so much freedom.. so why choose PHP out of them all?
Depending on the type of project, I would choose PHP over at least some of the languages you mentioned; I guess "great" is not a significant quality when making architectural choices.
Just to be clear: I was thinking about factors like performance, choice of servers, how easy it is to hire good developers, library ecosystem etc.
EDIT: obviously the "awesome aspects" mentioned by GP are a similarly unsubstantiated claim ;-)
Java: keyboard wear
Scala: not enough programmers
Python: not bad
Ruby: too slow
Haskell: math grad required
The documentation is really good. A model for programming language documentation.
Process per request is really simple to understand and scale. Your servers almost never crash completely, you don't get threads silently dying or run out of memory or thrash the CPU doing garbage collection.
It runs like a tank. It will, for better or worse, just keep running when more fussy languages would have seg faulted or shut down
The tooling, framework and libraries are very advanced and in active development
It's easy to train a programmer in php
It's close to the c library
The combination of a very flexible array/map and functional programming tools like map and reduce let you write pretty declarative code and development can be very fast
Php storm
Facebooks replacement runtime
I work with Java and Scala now which I also love but development is much slower and more expensive, whilst deployment is cheaper (less hardware for same request throughout)
Not sure whether this is your real opinion or you are just making fun of people who say that.
http://php.net/manual/en/function.usort.php
It has everything I need to know about the function clearly laid out. The behaviour of sort when elements are the same. A list at the side of related functions that I may want to look at instead.
I also like documentation that includes user contributions as these often add useful caveats and usage examples that don't fit well in the general documentation.
1. They have exactly one set of documentation pages for all the php versions.
2. Another thing is that documentation can be quite wrong for even the fundamental stuff. I have seen a core developer blast out in reddit that "The documentation is wrong!", when the other party pointed them towards a piece of documentation.
3. Incomplete or shallow description. Go check out the documentation page for Exceptions in php and try to find information regarding the behavior of return statements in a 'finally' block. Now go an see the respective page in Python documentation and see how in depth the documentation is.
And having code samples is not exclusive to Php's documentation..
How easy is it to train a programmer to use PHP in a way that results in fairly secure, reliable, bug-free code? (Note my use of the word "fairly", knowing that there's no such thing as perfect security, reliability, or freedom from bugs.)
I do know that, for instance, TDD is possible with PHP. In my experience and observation, though, the available developer tooling does not even come close to that of (for instance) Ruby, so I figure I must be missing something if "the tooling, framwork[s,] and libraries" constitute a major advantage to PHP over other options.
Well firstly phpstorm is a very high quality. I can work with php code in various contexts such as running test suites, normal development and connecting to a live server. It definitely has good support for running and debugging test suites including unit, integration and functional. There is support for vagrant and docker as well.
The tooling is good because there are lot of users willing to pay for good tooling, but at the same time it can only exist if the underlying language supports the features needed.
I wouldn't say the libraries and tools give it a significant advantage over other languages actually, but it's a notable factor of php development that there is likely a framework and library for your needs.
Regarding training, once we had a reliable application and we'd figured out as a team some best practises regarding avoiding php's bad parts, how to avoid or detect and handle runtime errors and how to organize and layout code, it's a fairly simple matter to point a new programmer at these documents and code samples.
There's really not much to the language and a smart and/or experienced programmer can be productive in days. I'm not sure that's the case if you move someone from say c to Python or from Ruby to Scala.
In my earlier days I did quite a bit of developer tutoring, and I have trained developers in PHP codebases on quite a few occasions, so I can speak to the training aspect first hand. I actually find PHP is fine to train developers in - certainly to produce simple code that is reasonably bug free, if not particularly high performance. The 'everyday' use of the language is usually quite straightforward - most projects don't deal with concurrency primitives, long running code, or low level interop. Scoping is quite straightforward. The only real gotchas are type coersion (use === for primitives or write comparator functions) and superglobals (use a library).
To be honest, JavaScript causes just as much confusion in my experience with scoping. Heck, a scarily high number of developers I know would struggle to implement a bug-free equals() method in Java.
As for tooling - here are some examples of good tooling in PHP:
- Dependency management - Composer and it's centralised library, Packagist (npm/rubygems/maven analogue)
- TDD and testing: - PHPUnit (ubiquitous, fairly well featured - built in fakes, code coverage) - Behat (BDD-style testing a la Cucumber) - Codeception (DSL-based) - All three tools have decent integrations with IDEs, can be run easily through Composer's CLI, can be combined with stuff like Grunt/gulp easily for file watchers. - I haven't needed the really esoteric features in my Ruby projects so I'm probably not the best to judge, but I can't say that I find PHP testing tools all that lacking compared to rspec, cucumber etc. I don't feel like you need complex tools for good testing... - Frameworks such as Laravel provide bootstrapping on top of e.g. PHPUnit that provide integration test componentry
- PHPDoc - ubiquitous, well documented, well supported by IDEs, linters, docgens
- PhpStorm (on par with the best IDEs out there), Zend Studio (very good IDE in its own right, eclipse-based), and Eclipse PDT are definitely servicable IDEs with good integration, good code inspections, good support for refactoring (especially now with PHP7 and it's further push into gradual typing).
- PDO - something most other languages have to be fair, but a language-supported SQL database engine abstraction layer is a must for working with SQL databases these days
- Gearman for task queues
Libraries and frameworks available in PHP are much the same as other languages in my experience, when it comes to stuff for the web. Not really much point going through them, suffice to say that there are some poor choices (Wordpress), and some good choices (Flysystem).