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by insulanus 2762 days ago
Well, my guess is that PHP offers a lot more to the beginner.

When you've been doing this a while, you can appreciate what e.g. Python gives you in structure, maintainability, and lack of foot-guns.

But when you're still in the "how does this work? Why won't this work? It worked!" phase, having less boilerplate, and fewer non-problem domain concerns (types? modules? tuples? Say what you mean, Old Man!) might be really valuable.

I think the best thing I remember about PHP is probably its online manual. Each library function had a few full use cases underneath.

2 comments

> But when you're still in the "how does this work? Why won't this work? It worked!" phase, having less boilerplate, and fewer non-problem domain concerns (types? modules? tuples? Say what you mean, Old Man!) might be really valuable

However, modern php isnt being sold as index.php and a mysql connection. It's Doctrine, composer and laravel/symphony. Which have their fair share of boilerplate.

>I think the best thing I remember about PHP is probably its online manual. Each library function had a few full use cases underneath

The problem with PHP is that you need the online manual everytime you want to use a function because the argument order is so inconsistent.

best documentation in my opinion