Why PHP is great (and all other languages suck)

Paul Waring (paul@xk7.net, @pwaring)

March 16, 2016

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!
Smash the stack for fun and profit
Necessary evil for kernel level

Go

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

Java

C++ for dummies
Omnomnom your memory is delicious
Write once, run nowhere

C#

Microsoft's "Not Invented Here" solution to Java
For people who haven't heard of Linux
Disadvantages of Java, plus less cross platform support

Python

WTF whitespace?
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
Shameless plug: hire me ;-)