8. Maggie Nelson: Community and Perception
Nelson is a PHP developer currently employed by Flickr.
She says, “The great strength of PHP is not that it is easy, but why it is so. The best part about PHP is the healthy (friendly, active, productive) PHP community. If you’re just starting with PHP, you immediately have… well-maintained and easy-to-access documentation of the language through docs on php.net.”
Nelson also says the PHP community is full of “great people who are always willing to explain and help understand. Just check out the #phpc (which stands for ‘PHP community’) channel on irc.freenode.net. Even though this channel explicitly claims not to be a help channel, you will always be pointed in the right direction for whatever PHP-related problem you’re facing.” She points to PHP Planet as a great resource for and from PHP community members.
And when it comes to the language’s drawbacks, Nelson thinks it’s mostly a matter of perspective.
“These days, PHP’s biggest limitation seems to be how it’s perceived among developers. Over the years, PHP has lacked features that other languages offered out of the box. In a way, PHP is a language that’s easy to complain about. There’s the now popular complaint about the choice of the namespace separator as well as the classic annoyance with the inconsistent order of parameters in built-in functions.
“These are small things, but things that developers seem to enjoy making fun of. In reality, many of the original complaints about the language have been addressed, mitigated or outright fixed. For example, PHP now features way nicer OOP support and the wonderful Standard Public Library.”
And for those who complain about PHP’s limitations, Nelson concludes pithily, “PHP is open source for a reason — stop QQ’ing, get involved and fix it!”
PHP - NO FEAR! Lots of help available.
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