For over 3,5 years now I’ve been programming professionally in PHP. First in PHP4 and about half a year later we finally converted to PHP5. At first I was excited because I could use a lot of new features PHP5 offered such as proper OOP but also Zend Framework.
I started using Zend Framework from 1.5 (currently it’s at 1.10) and have very mixed feelings about it. Yes, it does have a lot of useful libraries such as MVC, basic ACL, Authorization, Input Validation & Filters, Views (with PHP as the templating language, which it essentially was designed for) and more. But ZF had a steep learning curve for me so far has been successfully used in about 5 big webapplications.
However, PHP’s inconsistent function naming, unpredictable order of expected arguments (needle and haystack anyone?), lack of closures/anonymous functions, namespacing, lexical scope and what not makes using PHP a true nightmare. Yes, PHP 5.3 finally supports closures and namespacing, but have you looked at the syntax for both? What a joke. On top of that, PEAR is even a bigger joke. Is someone using it at all?
Running into these issues day by day and knowing it can be easily solved in Perl is very, very depressing. It has totally taken away my desire to program, influencing my desire to program at all and has made my motivation disappear. I’ve truly been wondering if a programming job is really something I want.
The turnaround came when I had a talk with my boss about why we’d still use PHP for future projects. Yes, code reuse is one them but compared to Perl all the additional code I’ve written in PHP that is being reused already exists in Perl at CPAN. To my understanding the use of backslashes to define a namespace in PHP wasn’t really a design choice, but was forced upon because it was too hard to use the double colon or a dot, like many other languages do. On top of that, last time I checked, PHP6 development has been halted because they just can’t get Unicode to work.
Perl already supports Unicode, Perl doesn’t have a weird separation character for namespaces, Perl supports closures/anonymous subroutines, Perl supports lexical scoping, the core list of functions is small, easy to remember and the order of expected parameters is consistent. And it has CPAN.
I was able to convince my boss to start using Perl for future projects because of these given points for both Perl and PHP. What helped though was that he knew of Perl and we’ve also developed some applications in Perl already. One of them a Wx application, a newsletter mailer and some other small scripts. Difference now is that I can use it for webapplications as well.
Now that I’ve gotten the green light to go with Perl for future projects I’m much happier again at work. I’m more motivated to finish the current PHP projects so I can finally start doing some proper Perl work. Programming Perl makes me happy. Moving from PHP to Perl doesn’t mean we’ll be fully dropping PHP. That would be bad and ignorant. Existing stuff will still be supported, improved and extended with new features.
No matter how much you dislike one of the products you support, it’s part of the job. Having stuff you dislike is good actually, because it makes the fun stuff even more fun. For me, PHP makes Perl more fun :-).
I’m very afraid of getting a programming job, and all ways seem to lead to one. I always wonder what non-programming IT-jobs are available.
Lots I suppose. You can be in support, networks, server administration. Some positions do a little bit of everything, which is the case at the company where I’m working at.
If you do plan to get a programming job make sure you enjoy the kind of applications you develop and you like the language.
Aside from programming I like working with Linux servers as well and am trying to get the LPIC certifications so when required I can change my direction.