I {heart} PHP
Reasons why I love PHP:
- It’s quick.
- You can build your own framework. (Or use someone elses.)
- The whole PHP distribution can be compiled into one single, distributable binary.
- It’s got a rather sweet mix of raw power, raw utilities, caches, add-ons, and dangerous things you can do with it. If you know what you’re doing. Kind of like C, but without the hassle.
- If you’re careful enough, you can actually develop new features directly in the production system.
- A nice mix of classes, reflection, and syntactic sugar.
- The same source files can be deployed anywhere – Windows, Linux, Web hotel A, Web hotel B, localhost… no additional configuration necessary. Painless distribution through xcopy.
- Small footprint.
- No System.Web.Utilities.Page.PageHelper.Random.Help.ImLost.RandomAccessAttribute.VeryImportantSetting.
- It doesn’t use Xml and helper classes to configure a website. Just make an include file. Or use parse_ini_file.
- …and you can edit the darn thing in notepad. (No big Visual Studio to install. No dependencies. No dlls. Nuff said.)
Sure, there’s no strict typechecking, it’s not binary, and you need one or two tricks to make it really fast. But the easiness with which you set projects up, the power behind it, and the fact that you can pretty much beat it into doing anything you want – while at the same time being able to distribute it anywhere and it just works right out of the box… Yep, PHP won my heart.

