PHP was designed with the reverse in mind. In its first release, it could have been considered to be a DSL for web-based applications. It was written to specifically address the needs to writing web applications, and is now building toward a more general purpose language. In all likelihood, this is the wrong way around. It certainly does not fall into the bottom-up design Shangri-La of which Paul Graham is such a proponent.

In reality, though, web-based applications are driving the industry. PHP is still very relevant in that domain. From very early on, PHP was centered on functionality that is considered basic to any web-based framework. Functionality without which each library is simply a thin wrapper over CGI. Features like easy access to GET and POST variables, session handling, header control, and database access have been built into PHP from, if not the beginning, then close enough that dinosaurs like myself don’t remember it ever being otherwise.

PHP has its own share of frameworks, too, which allow the programmer to painstakingly map SQL schema to XML or vice versa. They carefully abstract the logic out of the view and force the programmer to jump through hoops to write a simple application (although, for complex applications, this often makes the programmer’s life *much* easier.)

PHP does not need any of this. In fact, the most pragmatic framework I have used to date for PHP is the Simple PHP Framework, which is just a set of useful classes to automate some of the more tedious areas of web development. What it does not do is get in the programmer’s way. It is Occam’s razor at work in the world of web development. From the SPF website, quoting a non-existent link:

“All the web frameworks in the world won’t turn a shitty programmer into a good one.”

What PHP is not is elegant. It does not have beauty of prose, nor those features that make languages like ML and Lisp so exciting, such as closures, functions-as-objects, or lazy evaluation. Instead, PHP is, above all, a practical language. Instead, it has less sexy features, such as built-in support for XML, XSLT, and Xpath, support most databases, and the built-in ability to serialize to and from JSON and cookie strings.

It is easy to overlook how simple PHP makes many tasks that are complex in other frameworks. For example, Django’s form library is large and complex. I’ve no doubt that most other frameworks have equally Byzantine systems for developing reusable forms. In PHP, one might just write:

function input($type, $name, $display, $value)
{
    < ?
        <label>< ?= $display ?>
        <input type="<?= $type ?/>" value="< ?= $value ?>" />
    ?>
}

The function could be refined to separate the template and the code by putting the HTML into a separate include:

function input($type, $name, $dispaly, $value)
{
    include 'templates/input.inc.php';
}

Simple, right? Which is not to say that PHP’s faults are not legion. That said, I think that PHP sometimes does a better job of building toward general purpose programming than many other languages do of building toward web development.

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