[techvibe]

I know HN ist not place to prais php... PHP ist easy to learn and it easy to code in php, but if your a professional software developer you can also write professional software for php.

You can develop faster, because of large amount of built-in functions and classes. The "shared nothing" philosophy makes it almost unbeatable in terms of performance. Thats why a majority of large sites like Facebook, Wikipedia, Yahoo and Flickr is powered by PHP.

Well php is not as structured as ruby or python. Sometimes it is not structured at all. :-(

Other HN users would certainly talk about disadvantages of PHPafter my comment. ;-)

[bmelton]

Please explain how you consider it 'less structured'. I admittedly don't work with much PHP any more, but it has namespaces, classes and objects.

I can write linear Python just as ugly as anything a PHP developer could come up with (probably). And I could write MUCH more destructive C code than anybody in PHP could (probably).

If you mean it's less structured because of Rails or Django, I'd submit that PHP has CodeIgniter, Zend, and a bevy of other frameworks that all seem to be pretty solid to an outsider looking in.

[jnankin]

I think part of this is the fact that there are a myriad of functions that are just "baked in" to the language, making it a little chaotic. Sometimes it seems like some PHP contributer needed some function and just decided to add it to the language. (Examples: rsort, sort, http_build_query, rawurldecode, urldecode, etc.)

There should be Util or Helper libraries that do that, and in a much more organized way. On the flip side, these commonly used functions are written in C, so they're most likely faster than if you were to write your own in php or load a library.

Either way, I love PHP and use Symfony for all of my projects. PHP/Symfony is pretty much like rails but without the cracked out ruby syntax.