My rant on PHP

Learning PHP is easy anyone can do it over a few hours on a Sunday afternoon. That was one of the primary goal of creating PHP and has been very successfully achieved. Today everyone and their cousin twice removed can write PHP. Combine that with sites like sourceforge and freshmeat and you have got phenomenal amount of code which is very poorly written.

Now set these coders in a poor job scenario and you have a crowded fish market with PHP projects being bid at less than $1 an hour without any understanding of what they are in for!

Contrary to what most readers will expect the client is the last person to understand the difference. Another disturbing factor which came to light was a popular notion among neo DotCommers that if you get your technology cheap your success is assured!

However as expected this situation could not last forever, the dynamics of market forces had to take over. Cracks are showing up in software designed 6 month ago as the site becomes popular. Increasing numbers of projects are never being delivered and then there is a category of programmers and clients who are sensible and re-outsourcing to more experienced PHP programmers before too late.

My condolences to the gurus who could not survive this shake out, planning your cash flow would have helped. As for the stupid a** h**** who perished – good riddance

  • Yes, PHP is not only simple to pick up it is also fun (why am I telling this to a PHP guru??). I did a small project on PHP long time back and found it much more powerful than any other scripting language. A friend shifted from tiring job that required her to work on MS technologies to freelance thanks to PHP. Man, she is minting money.

    • Man, she is minting money.
      Alas – you are telling it to a married man 😉

      BTW – what is your quantification of minting money – If I may ask

  • Now set these coders in a poor job scenario and you have a crowded fish market with PHP projects being bid at less than $1 an hour without any understanding of what they are in for!

    Isn’t this true for a lot of other technologies too? People used to be proud of being vb/oracle coders and you could spit anywhere and find a vb coder. 😉

    Same situation is with java, every TD&H knows java. What most of them do on the job is nothing but coding bloat because the people employing them are themselves bloat coders most of the time.

    But yeah, its much easier for people to get through with PHP.

    • What most of them do on the job is nothing but coding bloat

      Oh! I really thought that this was indeed the job specification 😉