Surprise! Oracle's Technology Network features an incisive interview with PHP founder Rasmus Lerdorf. So the Java community is finally waking up to the fact that the dominant application serving language on the planet is PHP (when Netcraft recently pinged 47,173,415 domains, it found that 15,205,474 had PHP installed). He has some beautiful comments for those who would demean PHP.
About the lack of enforced structure, all I can say is that I absolutely hate programming frameworks that lock me into a certain way of approaching a problem. That doesn't mean I don't believe in structure and frameworks, but I do believe in people having the power to come up with their own to match their environment...
...One of the big strengths of PHP over many other tools aimed at solving the Web problem is that other tools tend to associate such very specific targeted problem solving with the need to control how users approach the problem structurally. PHP doesn't impose any such structure, choosing instead to focus on making each individual functionality aspect of the problem as easy as possible to use... For example, PHP provides very targeted functions for communicating with a back-end database. These are specific to each database and do not sacrifice any performance to gain uniformity or consistency with other back-end databases. There is also no set way to structure a PHP application in terms of file layout and what goes where...
...Despite what the future may hold for PHP, one thing will remain constant. We will continue to fight the complexity to which so many people seem to be addicted. The most complex solution is rarely the right one. Our single-minded direct approach to solving the Web problem is what has set PHP apart from the start, and while other solutions around us seem to get bigger and more complex, we are striving to simplify and streamline PHP and its approach to solving the Web problem...
What it all boils down to is that PHP was never meant to win any beauty contests. It wasn't designed to introduce any new revolutionary programming paradigms. It was designed to solve a single problem: the Web problem.
Do You PHP? by Rasmus Lerdorf
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