this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2023
96 points (97.1% liked)
Asklemmy
43945 readers
600 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
PHP.
It picked a niche and fits exactly into it. It's a language for server side web pages. It's not a general purpose language shoehorned into the task, so it wisely sets boundaries. PHP could avoid a lot of async/await/promise hell because you can work in the mindset of HTTP requests-- terms of short lived requests that are compiled elsewhere. You don't have fragile runtime environments (see: server-side JS), since it just plugs into Apache or Nginx, which are at least battle tested and known quantities to operate.
It's batteries included. Hell, it's the entire Duracell company included. The standard library is rich and centrally documented, including decades of community nitpicks, even before you go into composer repos.
It's non judgmental. You can write procedural code, or object-oriented code, based on preference and fit to task.
It makes ad-hoc easy and formal possible-- If I need an array of [227, "Steve" => "meow", 953 => new FreightLocomotive()] I can get it, or I can enforce types where it's relevant and mitigates risk.
PHP really is such a forgiving language and easy to understand and get in to. My favorite part is that every time I have a seemingly very niche and specific use-case, there is a function that just does that thing perfectly and is already included in the base library.
You said it and I'll reaffirm: the documentation and online library of SO questions/answers is absolutely priceless. Most of the older versions are still compatible with the latest version, so upgrading is simple and usually just means there are more features you can use now.