PHP

Through accidents of history, I’ve spent a good portion of the Web development career using PHP.

Like many, I maligned PHP for being unpredictable (library function argument order) and having way too many early mistakes (magic quotes, mysql_real_escape_string).

But I’ve come to see PHP as a flawed-yet-comfortable tool. It’s like a beat up old couch or favorite sweatshirt with holes in it. Or more aptly, like a messy workshop with a bunch of broken tools, but you know it so well, you are unreasonably effective with it.

I might hesitate to recommend someone start a new big project with PHP these days. But I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it for hobby stuff. The language has come a long way since the 4.0 days.

In particular, I’m a huge fan of using PHP for its original purpose as an extremely powerful template language: php-text-generation.

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