Success and quality are only tangentially corrected. See Worse is Better for a classic essay on this theme.

As I've commented many times, PHP is good for beginning programmers. It is easy to get simple things done. It is cheap to find hosting. It is easy to get started. So people do. They build useful stuff. People build on it. The language is successful.

But the language itself is bad. It is very large, and disorganized. There are a ton of security holes in PHP. Even more in the popular applications. I've long commented that Larry Wall is better at hacking communities than languages. But for all the faults that Perl has - and it has quite a few in my opinion - PHP makes Perl look well designed.

All of that notwithstanding, PHP is a very popular language. It is easy to find work in it. Much of said work is solving the same problems (albeit more efficiently) that were being solved by Perl CGI programs 15 years ago. So someone who is used to the Perl CGI space may well find PHP to be a good fit in terms of problems. I was giving it an honest recommend as a job option for the original questioner. I was just being clear that it isn't a language for language snobs.

In reply to Re^3: CGI Replacement Recommendations? by tilly
in thread CGI Replacement Recommendations? by Anonymous Monk

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