I have standardized on using PHP for all of our server projects.  My criteria for choosing a language were:

• It must be used by a large number of programmers.  If I hire someone, they need to hit the ground running instead of going through a learning curve.
• There must be a large number of open source and paid software packages available in the language.
• It must work on both Linux and on Windows Server.
• It must be straightforward to deploy onto new servers.
• Sample code must be widely available on the Internet.

There are lots of server programming languages, so let me go through several of them so I can share my thinking related to my criteria above.

C# is an excellent language, and I’ve used it a lot for code that runs on Windows.  However, on servers, it’s pretty much tied to ASP.NET, which is tied to Windows Server.  Most of our servers are Linux, so C# doesn’t really work.

Ruby has been hot for a couple of years now.  But there just seems to be a little too much “magic” associated with Ruby for my tastes, whether it’s the naming conventions in Rails or the things you need to do to deploy it in a scalable way.  There are some software packages written in Ruby, but nowhere near as many as PHP.  And fewer programmers know Ruby.

Java would probably be my second choice.  But I’ve always disliked how “heavy” Java feels to me.  There are lots of software packages available, though, and lots of programmers know Java.

And there are many other choices such as Perl, Python, C++, etc.  There just aren’t enough people that know them, and there aren’t enough software packages available.

PHP, on the other hand, meets all of my criteria.  Lots of programmers know it.  There are lots of software packages.  And there is tons of sample code on the Internet, so just about every conceivable issue has been covered.  On top of that, I’ve been impressed by how rich the language is.  Although it’s not perfect, it has served our needs very well so far.

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 18th, 2011 at 10:22 am and is filed under Software Development . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.