PHP is not so black as he is painted

I had interesting chat with some other programmer the other day. We exchanged some experiences but when I told him about PHP5 gig I did several months ago he started squinting at me strangely. ‘That must have been madness’ his grin seemed to say.

Well… how then PHP appeal to people who never tried it? I guess the perception of this popular and powerful language is still as it was few years ago… A library to quickly hack html and make it ‘dynamic’. Sql statements flying around html markup, etc. Perhaps quite a number of production web pages are still like that but… truth is PHP5 gives enough OO and flexibility to be a decent tool in good hands: we did rapid TDD on every layer of application, from HTML to database. It was moments to set up continuous integration server – cron-driven PHP script. Application had massive performance requirements and we met them. My observation was that PHP5 had much better productivity than any .NET or java project I was in…

To end this PHP commercial I have to admit that I’m a ruby boy. But even if RoR family leads the trends nowdays PHP is also productive and fun.