Why PHP is great (and all other languages suck)

Paul Waring (@pwaring)

October 20, 2019

Assembly

Have a soft spot for this
Forces you to think about implications
No one writes it anymore (even many CS students)

C/C++

No garbage collection
Overflow all the things!
Necessary evil for kernel level

Go

C with garbage collection and syntax sugar
Google wrote it so must be cool

Java

Omnomnom your memory is delicious
Write once, run nowhere
Part of ~~the Borg~~ Oracle

C#

Microsoft’s “Not Invented Here” alternative to Java

Python

Whitespace should not be syntax (fight me)
2 to 3 breaks everything, including print

Perl (5)

No boolean data type
1;

Ruby

Don’t get me started on Gems
Run everything as root, call it DevOps

Bash

Great for 5 line scripts
More than 20 LoC, unreadable mess
Has arrays, scoping, functions that no one uses

Lisp

()((((())(())(()))(())))))))))((((((())

JavaScript

Current choice for hipsters
Good buzzword if you want recruiter spam
Bonus points for node, ember, angular etc.

PHP is awesome

Support for every database
One framework per developer
Sysadmin, Web dev, GUI apps
Cross platform

PHP is awesome

Exceptions, OO but not forced
Namespaces, closures
Dependency management
Easy deployment (c.f. Rails, NodeJS)

Conclusions

PHP is great, all other languages suck
Write everything in PHP
Or pay me to do it for you! (phpdev.uk)