PHP
I’m an unapologetic fan of PHP.
I’ve been using PHP since version 4, so I’ve known it since it had {$…}
variable interpolation and the superglobals $_REQUEST and $_POST. This
would have been around the year 2000 or 2001.
Since I first encountered it and continuing today, PHP has remained the most hassle-free all-in-one Web programming language available on every system I’ve ever used. From Apache module to PHP-FPM (FastCGI), PHP just works.
The language has improved by leaps and bounds since the days where everybody was (rightly) making fun of its warts.
An often overlooked feature of the documentation on https://www.php.net/ was inclusion of user-written examples. Those often made all the difference when I was a young noob starting out. I remain a firm believer that having a large number of working examples is the absolute number one feature of language or API documentation.
It’s not perfect, but it’s very, very comfortable. As with all other languages, you can simply ignore the parts you don’t want to use. See my notes on Ruby for "shell scripting".
Back to Programming or The Web.
Original intro
I originally wrote the following words on a card with an all-caps filename 'PHP'. Oops!
Through accidents of history, I’ve spent a good portion of the Web development career using PHP.
Like many, I maligned PHP for being unpredictable (library function argument order) and having way too many early mistakes (magic quotes, mysql_real_escape_string).
But I’ve come to see PHP as a flawed-yet-comfortable tool. It’s like a beat up old couch or favorite sweatshirt with holes in it. Or more aptly, like a messy workshop with a bunch of broken tools, but you know it so well, you are unreasonably effective with it.
I might hesitate to recommend someone start a new big project with PHP these days. But I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it for hobby stuff. The language has come a long way since the 4.0 days.
In particular, I’m a huge fan of using PHP for its original purpose as an extremely powerful template language: php-text-generation.