25 Years of PHP
I wrote <i>a lot</i> of PHP from 1999-2008. First as a hobby, then professionally. From 20 LOC guestbooks to payment gateways used to process millions in payments. It wasn&#x27;t until recently that I was sure I&#x27;d written more code in any other language than PHP. These days I&#x27;ll occasionally poke around with it or patch a bug, but that&#x27;s about it.<p>Is it a perfect language? No. But which language is? (I can hear the Lisp crowd grumbling.) It&#x27;s fast. The only ceremony you need to write executable code is the &lt;?php tag. It has a very rich standard library -- even if some of the function names make me want to stab people.<p>My only real gripe with PHP is the annotation syntax. Yikes. Stuff that&#x27;s in comments <i>SHOULD NOT AFFECT RUNNING CODE</i>. Who came up with that?<p>PHP has taken a lot of flack over the years. Mostly from people who never really worked with it. A lot of the criticism really should have been aimed at certain PHP developers, rather than the language or the community at large. PHP&#x27;s low entry barrier is a blessing, it&#x27;s how a lot of developers were introduced to programming. It&#x27;s also a curse, because a lot of very inexperienced programmers managed to become prolific at getting code out there, code which was ugly, bug infested and a security nightmare. But it&#x27;s not fair to attack a language over its inexperienced users.