💻 PHP Language Review

First Published: 2024-07-18

For quite a while now I have wanted to develop a dynamic website.¹ In that pursuit I looked at Python Django, even going through the whole tutorial. I was almost certain that this would be the best way to do things, but frustrations with the deployment process made me hesitant to go any deeper.

Luckily, a hacker news post about mildly dynamic websites gave me the impulse to at least give PHP a quick try since the author claimed its ease of deployment to be unparalleled and its usefulness for especially smaller applications to far exceed that of the heavyweight full-stack frameworks like Python Django or Ruby on Rails.

So, on a fateful evening, I thought to myself: "What's the worst that can happen? Let's just spend an hour or two trying to make a PHP website on a platform as a service provider."

My expectations were that within about two hours I would get something up and running, but those were far exceeded. Within less than an hour, including the time spent relearning SQL basics and creating my account at nearlyfreespeech.net, I had a dynamic website up and running. I took note of the "speedrun checkpoints", if you want to check exactly how much time I spent on what.

This experiment made me very optimistic about PHP and so on the next evening I implemented fizzbuzz and about a week later I re-implemented an old project of mine, a Clash Royale kicklist generator that at the time of writing is still online.

In the weeks since, I have bought myself used copies of Programming PHP and the SQL Pocket Guide and have made a monorepo for future PHP projects.

If the positive sentiment of this little review surprises you, keep in mind that I'm talking about the old-school PHP as in throw everything into a single file and use a small SQLite DB PHP. I'm not talking about the modern object-oriented Laravel Symphony PHP that requires a team of agile™ web developers to build things with.

It's PHP the wrong way, and I love it.