On Friday 25. July 2008, Christophe wrote:
>Most developers don't make deep informed decisions about PHP vs other
>languages. They use it because everyone else is, there is a huge
>ecosystem of support around it, it's easy to get something flopping
>around on the table quickly, and they know *for sure* that they can
>host it anywhere. Which, really, are not terrible reasons to pick a
>development environment.
My 2 cents: The prime reason for the popularity of PHP is probably the
very gentle learning curve. You can start with a static HTML page, and
introduce a few PHP snippets to show dynamic content. For us
self-taught people, that means that you get instant results with
minimal work.
If any language want to compete with PHP in popularity, I believe that
it must be just as easy to mingle with HTML. $DEITY, I would love to be
able to include Perl code in a HTML page inside a pair of <?pl and ?>
tags.
Now, I don't write PHP scripts like that anymore. I like to have every
single character served as HTML to be generated by a function. And I
realize that Perl would do that even better than PHP. But as I have
become quite proficient with PHP, I tend to keep using that. It surely
does the job.
--
Leif Biberg Kristensen | Registered Linux User #338009
Me And My Database: http://solumslekt.org/blog/
My Jazz Jukebox: http://www.last.fm/user/leifbk/
