Question Detail

Beginner Friend lines

Easy to Get Started With

PHP was designed to make web development easier, and many beginners find it effortless to pick up and get started with. In fact, PHP code was so easy to pick up, many non-programmers end up being able to hack PHP code together without truly understanding the code. While good programmers will never copy and paste code they don't understand, this speaks volumes about how easy it is to pick up PHP.

The latest version of PHP (PHP7) has fixed a lot of inconsistencies and fatal errors as well. PHP has a wealth of learning resources, but you should make sure to avoid outdated tutorials.

Flexible

PHP is a dynamically typed language. This means there are no hard rules on how to build features, and you'll have more flexibility solving problems using different methods. Furthermore, PHP is also more forgiving of errors, so you'll still be able to compile and run your program until you hit the problematic part.

Scalability

Not easy to Maintain

PHP is a dynamically typed language, which means the same thing can easily mean something different depending on the context. As a PHP app grows larger and more complex, this may get difficult to maintain as errors will become difficult to track down and fix, so it will take experience and insight to know how to design your code or write unit tests to ease maintainability. However, you can learn how to design code better by working with an experienced PHP mentor.

Not Fast

As a dynamically typed language, PHP is too flexible and the machine would need to do a lot of referencing to make sure what the definition of something is, and this slows PHP performance down. Nonetheless, PHP7 has made changes to improve PHP's speed.

What's more, Facebook has made some serious investment into PHP and it is possible to improve your PHP app's speed by compiling your code through Facebook's HipHop Virtual Machine. It's not going to be as fast as statically typed languages such as Java, for example, but it's still a great improvement.

Community

First of all, community size is important, because the larger a programming language community is, the more support you'd be likely to get. As you step into the programming world, you'll soon understand how vital support is, as the developer community is all about giving and receiving help. Moreover, the larger a community, the more people will be building useful tools to ease the process of development in that particular language. As of now, there are over 600 notable programming languages worldwide.

So, with that context in mind, let's get into the details of the PHP community size.

3rd Largest StackOverflow Community

StackOverflow is a programming Q&A site you will no doubt become intimate with as a coding beginner.

5th Largest Meetup Community

At meetups, you can generally network and learn from fellow developers. Meetups often offer mentorship to those who want it as well. There are 1500+ PHP groups at Meetup.com, totaling over 541k members - in terms of programming languages, PHP has the 5th largest Meetup community.

5th Most Popular language at GitHub

The more useful projects there are, the more likely someone has already built a function you need and built it well, which will greatly speed up your development process. There are over 500 PHP projects that have over 500 stars on GitHub.

PHP became popular after Mark Zukerberg built facebook using it and has since seen an upward graph in its usage. But for past couple of years, it has been on decline and Python and ROR(ruby on rails) are on the rise.

This doesn't mean that it is not good for future. Every language evolves with time. PHP is purely a web based server side language used to build web applications but other languages have the ability to build programs for almost any platform.