One thing I like about PHP is the attitude of the people who use it. PHP has always
been a pragmatic solution to real problems. It’s only natural that PHP programmers
tend to be pragmatic rather than dogmatic, humble and open rather than conceited
and pretentious. They like PHP, but they know that there is no perfect technology, no
perfect programming language. Everything has its pros and cons, its advantages and
disadvantages. PHP programmers tend not to start language wars. That’s fortunate;
often arrogance on behalf of a programming language—or any other software—is
based in ignorance. You know all the things your favorite language can do, and you
don’t know how to do the same things in other languages. It’s easy to assume that
these things can’t be done. But that’s rather like assuming that your car is the only one
in the universe that has air conditioning.
Finding faults with a programming language is easy. If it lacks a feature you desperately
feel you need, you can use that as a reason to put it down. If it has a feature
you think is totally unnecessary, you can frown upon that. PHP 4 had no visibility constraints
such as private methods; this of course was a Bad Thing to programmers who
were used to languages such as C++ and Java. PHP 5 has visibility constraints, and I'm
sure there are others—who are accustomed to other languages that lack these features—
who find this appalling.
The fact is you don’t know how a feature or the lack of it works in real life until
you’ve used it for a while. PHP has been criticized for having too many functions, in
contrast to Perl, which has fewer. I’ve used both languages extensively, and I happen
to prefer the way lots of functions are easily available in PHP. Someone else may feel
differently, but the most important point is that the difference is much less dramatic
than some people think. Language wars are too often fought over differences that may
have a marginal impact on overall productivity.
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