PHP developer life

Introduction from translator: I have been working on PHP for a very long time. Although I am familiar with a number of other technologies and see some of the flaws in PHP, in general, I am pleased with it, and it seems to me unfair that this programming language is being attacked more often. Recently I found an article just on this topic, I think the author’s position is close to many php programmers, so I publish the translation. I tried especially for the corporate blog of our project on payment services Web-payment.ru . By the way, if you need to connect the payment on the site - please contact . Well, then transfer:

The subjective perception of programming languages ​​not only gives rise to discussions among bored programmers. It also influences important decisions - recruitment and funding.

This phrase made me seriously think about how the community perceives PHP.

In a recent issue of JavaScript, Jabber made a couple of great comments about how reprehensible people are in the choice of technologies, and how the pursuit of trends distracts from working on cool and necessary pieces.

Although Javascript is actively occupying a niche in PHP, especially for novice developers, there are several reasons why new developers choose PHP:

• You want to make a website or application on a shared hosting.
• In all the books and videos that you buy, one way or another work with the LAMP stack.
• All jobs for beginners - for PHP-developers.

See how negative PHP is in the programmer community:

• PHP Sadness : a whole site dedicated to finding "dullness" in PHP.
• PHP: a Fractal of Bad Design : another article about how PHP is a curve.
• Why Does PHP Suck? : Another similar article.

Quotes like this everywhere: "Those who teach PHP should be isolated from society."
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Translator's note: and Habr is no exception .

After this, you ask yourself a question - have I chosen a bad language?

Everything is written in PHP

Maybe you will even begin to doubt yourself because you have put on the wrong horse. After all, everyone seems to like Clojure, Haskell and JavaScript, but no one is PHP.

Let's look on the Internet, what projects still use PHP:

• Facebook
• Wordpress
• Yahoo
• Wikipedia
• 4chan

A large proportion of the largest sites in the world are written in PHP. It seems certain that PHP is a worthy and practical language for creating web applications, but we are distracted.

Now is not 2004

A lot of criticism of PHP is based on things that were not in the language when the critic was last looking at him - at the beginning of zero.

Today in PHP there are classes and normal OOP. There are great frameworks, such as Laravel and Symfony .

PHP has a package manager that works with a huge archive of open source packages.

PHP has great testing frameworks: for example, PHPUnit for unit testing, Behat and Codeception for BDD.

Some complaints in the aforementioned articles are well founded. There are inconsistencies in the language, and, of course, there are languages ​​in which there are fewer problems, but PHP looks like nothing, if you take into account its age, flexibility, and why it was created .

How does this affect developers

It's a shame when you are not taken seriously as a developer, despite working in serious projects. Such an attitude seriously harms the community.

It often seems that PHP developers are locked in closed micro-communities. Due to the fact that in larger communities they are not welcomed, they often organize their own meetings, user groups and conferences.

Funny story

Sometimes this constant conviction really exhausts me. Even though I know that PHP is a great language, I often think about quitting writing on it, if only I don’t have to deal with prejudices anymore.

When I was younger, I looked weird: with painted dreadlocks, with piercings on my face and in patched clothes. I really liked that look, but it was terribly tiring.

Everywhere — during college classes, at the intern interview, when I started my own company — my appearance was a constant distraction. At best, they told me that for someone who “looks like this,” I am “surprisingly professional.”

10 years have passed, but the problem is the same - it only distracts the other. "You are surprisingly well aware of computer science for a PHP developer." Fu

Unfortunately, I see no progress in solving this problem. Often people complain about PHP simply because it is fashionable. But, unfortunately, there is no end in sight.

It is very sad. We found ourselves in a chicken-egg situation: if PHP developers are constantly humiliated, they will leave the community, and there will be fewer and fewer good PHP programmers in it.

The article was translated specifically for the corporate blog Web-payment.ru - a project that will help you connect to the site accepting payments or mass payments. Contact us!