Yet

I’d forgotten about the PHP Advent until Matthew tweeted earlier with a link to “Yet” by Marco Tabini. This is the magnum opus of PHP descriptions — so far, it’s detailed everything I love, hate, and love to hate about the language.

A few choice quotes:

If there were a product statement for PHP, it’d probably be something like “only a drunken Martian could come up with this.”

The elegance of PHP, therefore, is in its inelegance. The cost of admission to this most wonderful of development platforms is the fact that the language feeds you as much rope as you want and, therefore, the threshold for writing bad code is as low as what’s required to write any code.

The flip-side of frameworks is, of course, that they force the programmer into adopting a specific pattern for software development and, therefore, the learning curve is much steeper than “plain old PHP.” Invariably, PHP developers who try to settle into a framework have the (often irresistible) urge to simply drop it and write their own, because, you see, there is no framework that does things the way he or she wants—yet.