An excellent article by Eric Reis over on his blog in which he talks about “why PHP won” in his web application development over other (web scripting) languages:
As a language, it’s inelegant. Its object-orientation support is “much improved” – which is another way of saying it’s been horrendous for a long time. Writing unit tests or mock objects in PHP is an exercise in constant frustration. And yet I keep returning to PHP as a development platform, as have most of my fellow startup CTOs. This post is about why.
Its an interesting piece in which Eric chooses to describe PHP’s success in terms of what a new language might have to do better in order to challenge PHP’s popularity/success, in short he suggests the following:
- Speed of iteration (a good write/test/debug cycle)
- Better mapping of outputs to inputs
- A similar standard library
- A better OOP implementation
I have to confess I found myself agreeing with Eric. His piece is well worth reading!