PHP, for Some Reason

I have been looking at PHP for the first time in years. I don't know why.

Posted
Categories
post
Tags
php programming

Let’s blame Ed Finkler. I started following him online because of his Open Sourcing Mental Illness work and talks. He also talks about programming languages, and this exposed me to interesting things happening in the PHP world.

  • PHP practice guidelines exist now! Josh Lockhart’s PHP: The Right Way project and Modern PHP book give better tips than the quick and dirty sites I recall from years past.
  • Composer became the preferred PHP dependency management tool.
  • Laravel looks like an interesting Web framework.
  • For visual learning, there are the laracasts a series of video lessons about Laravel, PHP, and other tools.

Topping off the strange PHP interest: I registered for Pacific Northwest PHP, which will be held here in Seattle next month. Of course I’m looking forward to Ed Finkler’s talk, but several of the talks interest me.

So I’ll be going to that. And best of all, at the end of the day I’ll just go home rather than to a hotel.

My last serious PHP code-writing project was six years ago. Even then it had been a long time since PHP was my primary development language. I’m curious to play with versions 5.6 and 7.

I put together a Homestead instance in Vagrant. The next step for me is probably the laracast series on PHP objects. It’s been long enough that I don’t remember what a PHP object looks like anymore.

And yes, I’m familiar with the PHP: a fractal of bad design piece. I agreed with every point made in it. Some little bits have changed, but PHP is not Python. It never will be. But I’ve given up on hating PHP. PHP is a cockroach. The last Web servers will be running PHP. May as well poke at it a little bit. That’s the sort of thing I do.