Likeable? No. Useable? Yes. I tried to get into PHP some and was constantly being amazed at the odd namespaces people chose, the fact that object oriented programming is deprecated in PHP(!), the difficulty in initial setup, the difficulty in adding libraries, the difficulty in doing secure programming, no parameter binding for database statement handles, the useless variable sigil ( why have it at all if you're going to use the same sigil for everything?).

While the PHP language was supposedly designed to incorporate the best ideas from C and Perl, I get the impression that in fact, many of the lesser ideas also made it through and not enough bright ones. Obviously I'm biased but I'm also tring to be practical. The things I know that save me time and trouble as a programmer are either missing or difficult to work with in PHP. The only reason it's even an issue is that for ISP webhosting PHP supposedly works better. While I like mod_perl it's a bitch to get an ISP to run it and then it costs extra. PHP tends to be built in with the default packages (everyplace I looked at anyway) and it becomes an economic question: do I ask for mod_perl and pay extra or use PHP for no extra cost. I suppose I'll eventually buckle down and figure it out so I'm competent in PHP but it's so hard to justify leaving my perl toolbox at home. I'm really anticipating a mod_parrot (no, not the one that exists now, something real that's meant for production) that can be an ISP friendly $Language hosting container. Yeah, gimme some more of that.

__SIG__
printf "You are here %08x\n", unpack "L!", unpack "P4", pack "L!", B::svref_2object(sub{})->OUTSIDE