Ask HN: What are the benefits of using PHP today?

1) PHP is a great high-school job. Much better than a paper route, flipping burgers, or working at the car wash. If you freelance you can set your own schedule which can work well around your school schedule.

2) Hosting is cheap so your parents will probably let you use their credit card.

3) It's so approachable that it can help you get started with programming so that some day you can move on to better languages.

The combination of lighttpd, fastcgi, php has a very low memory footprint. This is a benefit on Xen servers.

PHP also offers a build in function for nearly everything.

The main drawback of PHP are the tutorials, using mysql without the i, and teach how to implement a website that is vulnerable to SQL injection.

The advantage of any programming language, framework, or library is that you know it already and it allows you to achieve things. I wouldn't personally advocate learning PHP today, but the idea that any language has intrinsic value divorced from its ability to achieve your purposes is mostly untrue.

It is widely used and sought after. Any average to decent PHP programmer can find work. Any average to decent Haskell programmer can't.

I'm a longtime database developer, starting my first web 2.0 app. After much research (including Python, node.js, Go, Perl, Ruby, etc.) I've all but locked on PHP. While I can see that it has idiosyncrasies, I can also see that it's a very mature product.

For example, when I search for "PHP function list", I not only get a function list as the first item, it's an amazingly comprehensive list. The hurdles I've had so far, I've been able to jump over them quickly (quicker than in any other language I've learned) if only because the community support is so good. Usually a simple web search finds the question and answer I'm looking for. I'm pretty blown away by the sheer volume of good info on PHP.

Python is my second choice. There's a lot that I prefer of it, over PHP, but I find that in general its hurdles are higher.

Having developed many industrial-strength apps using less-capable languages, I'm confident I can do the same in PHP.

I feel like it is pretty unusual these days to hear about a company moving to PHP from some other language. On the other hand, you often here about a company switching or adding one of the other languages you mentioned to their company's stack

Another benefit... it's fairly easy to find a php contractor for any portion of your project that you want to outsource. The cost for a php contractor is relatively inexpensive compared to contractors for other languages.

Requisite link to http://appwithphp.com/ - some basic minimal knowledge and stuff to make sure what you write is written as right as possible :)

<?php include("header.php"); ?>

Between the above and the huge range of existing PHP projects, I always install PHP regardless of what else I'm using.

In my opinion the great benefit of PHP especially for non-coder founders is the big offshore talent pool.

The tool does not define the problem. It goes the other way around.