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A Decade of PHP

Ok so I’m a bit late… the actual anniversary date was June 8th. (Still catching up after the hospital stuff….)

Horay for PHP. I know that opinions differ, and to each their favourite web app language…. but I do like PHP. I think Rasmus got the fundamentals right, and with the many other active people in the PHP Group putting in countless hours of work, it’s grown up nicely.

PHP is so easy to pick up that complete noobs can use it. That of course is an asset as well as a curse. But no sense blaming PHP for being easy to learn 😉 People should realise that cutting & pasting or even scribbling some lines of PHP (or any other language, including SQL) does not equate to actual programming expertise. That takes time, and probably a structured approach so that all the fundamentals are understood and put into context.

Personally, I like PHP because I’m a C programmer, and PHP is like C but without the hassle. With the additional object oriented features in PHP 5, structuring application components has become even easier. And then of course there is the meriad of PHP extensions.

PHP has been pretty dominant on the net for some time now, but is now taken seriously by enterprise companies. That is a major milestone. In a way, I think PHP and MySQL have grown up together. Many users of one, also use the other, and it’s turned out to be an excellent match. Have you checked out Georg Richter’s new mysqli extension in PHP 5 ? (the ‘i’ stands for “improved”, and IMHO it certainly is! not that the old mysql extension was bad, but things develop – that’s good.)

Back to Rasmus and his (continuing) work on the foundations of PHP. He’s also managed to start a family at the same time, I remember meeting little Carl with his very own PHP shirt a few years ago at LinuxTag 😉
Congrats, Rasmus!

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