On Fri, Jul 25, 2008 at 1:47 PM, Leif B. Kristensen <leif@solumslekt.org> wrote:
> On Friday 25. July 2008, Christophe wrote:
>
>>Most developers don't make deep informed decisions about PHP vs other
>>languages. They use it because everyone else is, there is a huge
>>ecosystem of support around it, it's easy to get something flopping
>>around on the table quickly, and they know *for sure* that they can
>>host it anywhere. Which, really, are not terrible reasons to pick a
>>development environment.
>
> My 2 cents: The prime reason for the popularity of PHP is probably the
> very gentle learning curve. You can start with a static HTML page, and
> introduce a few PHP snippets to show dynamic content. For us
> self-taught people, that means that you get instant results with
> minimal work.
For me I came from a C background, with bits of Pascal, and old Line
numbered BASIC (Hey, it's all we had on our govt spec Burroughs
systems in 1985). the reason I picked php back in the day was that it
was a lot like C, a little like perl (the parts I like) and it had a
small enough memory footprint I could run a decent server with pgsql
6.5.3, apache 1.3.4 and php 3.0.5 on a 64 Meg RAM P-100 when
everything else I'd tried just crashed and burned or ground to a halt
on that poor little machine.
Years later and we build php servers with 8 Gigs ram, use memcached,
and other cool tricks to make them even faster. But for all the "bad
engineering" in php's code base, I've never had a problem building a
stable server with it. As long as I left out any mysql libs. :)