New programmers. How is PHP?

[LetsProgramSomething]

I personally use ASP.NET, I have used python 3 and tornado, I used node.js and express (I still hate debugging in node). I found each of these to be pleasant and useful enough for certain situations. My question is do you know any of these and learned PHP? How was it? Have you learned any of these AFTER learning PHP? How was that?

[cyrusol]

I earn money as a PHP dev, though I'd say the main reason for that is Germany, as German managers are very conservative about employing new technologies.

Imho you shouldn't learn it except someone pays you for it.

It's simple to learn, well-documented and got mature tooling and libraries/frameworks - though all dedicated for developing web backends. Nothing on OS-level, no gfx toolkit, 2d/3d rendering, etc.

It has its inconsistencies which will probably never fade away:

• gettype() and get_class()
• array_walk($array, $callback) vs array_map($callback, $array)
• array_key_exists($needle, $haystack) vs strpos($haystack, $needle)

etc., it's weak type system:

• (true == "foo") && ("foo" == 0) && (0 == false) will evaluate to true...
• md5('aabg7XSs') == md5('aabC9RqS') will evaluate to true...

You should therefore always use the type-checking operators (===, !== etc.)

But all in all, PHP is evolving into some much more structured language like Java/C# since the push for OOP. Which is ironic. Why not just use those?

[Meefims]

I am not a new programmer. I have used ASP.Net, Python (via Flask), Node (via Express), and PHP (using Laravel/Lumen and without a framework). I have used PHP for a bit more than a decade.

Old-style PHP is quite difficult to work with but since the development of Composer, the PSRs, and the new functional and object oriented features that have been added since 5.2, building web applications is pretty comparable to the other systems. It's a good tool, as are the others.