[GRLUG] sysadmin job opening

[L. V. Lammert]

At 10:43 AM 2/1/2010 -0500, you wrote:

>Etc.  Leading to the question,  if PHP is so bad, why is it so prominently 
>used?  Why are so many willingly using garbage?  Or,why is it that some 
>think it's good?
>
>So why PHP?  Is there something unique that only it does?  Or is it maybe 
>that finding  people that know something about it is easier than finding 
>people who know something about a better approach?

Many reasons:

1) It runs on all web platforms, even, gasp, Windoze;

2) It requires no overhead (i.e. no compiler like C or assembly, no module 
files like CPAN, no external library modules for the base install, ..).

3) The syntax is fairly simple, and close enough to C for a newbie to use 
previous programming knowledge.

4) You can get anything you want as a project already - projects such as 
Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla, Silverstripe, & phpMyAdmin make thousands of 
hours of functionality readily available.

et al

PHP is not bad in itself, *some* projects or implementations are just known 
to be poorly maintained or badly designed; if there IS a problem with PHP, 
it's that there is no structure to force good programming practices.

         Lee