Web Interactivity and Engagement

PHP – Why learn it?

While going through some of Web Interactivity and Engagement’s PHP lessons, I found myself discussing with a friend (who is a senior-level Python developer )what I was learning this semester. He was astonished that I was learning PHP, which got me wondering – what’s so wrong with learning PHP? So I decided a bit of research was in order to see if this was merely his personal opinion or if there was some truth behind it.

After a handful of blog and reddit posts asking ‘Should I learn PHP’ or ‘Why do so many say PHP is bad?’, I came across an article titled ‘Why Learn PHP?’ that was published in January of this year. From this brief post, I learned a bit of insight in the language and why my friend was so off put by it.

First off, it seems that PHP is very easy to pick up for beginners, which I can agree with based on the first 6 weeks of this class. While I may not fully understand why certain things work with in PHP, I can still follow how the pieces of code work, with ease. The article also pointed out that PHP is a dynamic language – meaning there are no strict rules to follow, and it’s quite flexible compared to other languages.

Next, the article points out how large the community is for the PHP language. Apparently, PHP has the 3rd largest StackOverflow community as well as claiming to be the 5th most popular language at GitHub. Neither of which are small tasks, considering the huge variety of programming languages that currently exist.

‘Why Learn PHP’ also mentions that PHP has declined in popularity “due to several issues with the language’s design as well as the rise of Ruby on Rails as well as Node.js frameworks, though PHP 7 was recently released to fix most of the problems it has been accused of (inconsistency, slowness, etc).” I believe this may be a large part of why my friend was so put off by my learning this language – even if it is very popular among freelancers. If a language was designed more as a ‘pet project’ as it seems PHP was, as opposed to being developed with more thought, future adaptations and growth, I can understand why many developers may prefer other languages.

While neither my friend’s opinion nor the articles I came across when delving deeper into why learning PHP is a good or bad decision, I’m glad to be exposed to various languages on my path to learning web design. There will always be languages that will rise in popularity and those that will fade off and be forgotten when the next best thing comes along. At the very least, learning PHP gives me another aspect to coding I didn’t have before, and while I may not fully understand every piece of it yet, it’s a step in the right direction to becoming a better coder and developer, regardless of how I utilize this language in the future.