PHP Ain't so bad

Who would have thought it. Last night I booted up my computer, opened up notepad and got to work on a quick fix for a PHP website. For the people out there who have no idea what PHP is, it's just another Web development Language that rivals my main language Asp.Net.

I've hardly ever used PHP because it's always felt like a step back in time, it's structured very much like an old language I used before called ASP, and the headaches I used to have managing large site, with lots of source and includes wasn't something I fancied subjecting myself to again.

As I was ploughing through the code I started thinking, this is so easy, this is like webdevelopment used to be, you don't need any complex software, and there are no complicated page lifecycle patterns that you have to get your head round. All you need is a copy of notepad, a cup of coffee and at least 4 hours.

I may very well start using PHP on all small sites I develop because it's simple. However I don't think I could deal with the headache of all those include files on larger sites. I'd be interested to take a look at the Facebook source code and see what it looks like as I've never saw the back end of a serious PHP development.