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Comment by ljoshua | Hacker News Reader

The accessibility is a huge selling point, but also (and often overlooked) is the non-prescriptivist nature of PHP. For so many jobs (and yes, even in enterprise) you just need to get the project done and out there. It doesn't have to conform to perfect OO standards and doesn't have to follow certain architectural specifications. PHP is great for that.

When you need to take it to the next level and establish a really good and efficient standard, there are extremely well-done frameworks to assist you. But when you just need to get something done, sometimes PHP's "do it anyway you can" nature is it's biggest feature.

It will be interesting to see what mobile play Gutmans et. al. have. If they can bring that same "let's just get it done" mentality it may have a chance. Interested to see how it goes down.

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It's hard to write "do it any way you can" code when you're dealing with a GUI object model. PHP works because all you're doing is writing to stdout.

Your junior-level knowledge of web development is coming out in your overly negative and anti-PHP ranting today. The end result of any backend web service is quite simply "writing to stdout". That's how HTTP works. How exactly does the transport mechanism have any bearing on the platform?

Let's not forget web development today consists of a substantial amount of both back-end and front-code, the latter of which operates in a fashion much like GUI object model.

> Your junior-level knowledge of web development

Lets not make personal attacks here, okay?

Your top-level comment's last statement was, in a way, a personal attack on every PHP developer on here.

You mean like this one?

> PHP is the core web language because PHP devs (for the most part) are cheap, replaceable parts.

But the "just writing to stdout" aspect is much closer to the surface in PHP than in, say, Django/Python, where your code's last interaction with a web request is returning an object from a view. IMHO, that's one of the cool things about PHP.

But that aspect of PHP probably won't translate to GUI programming. I don't know if it has any other features that will make GUIs similarly easy. The fact that web front ends operate like OO GUIs doesn't really help your point (if you're arguing that PHP is well-suited for GUIs), since those aren't written in PHP now.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PHP-GTK , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WxPHP , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PHP-Qt , http://winbinder.org/

I've used PHP-GTK, and it's not bad, and I don't want to rain on your parade, but there's a reason this list is empty:

http://gtk.php.net/apps/

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