I’m Quitting PHP

I’m excited. Really excited.

But, First The Ugly…

I’m a self taught PHP developer. I’ve been programming PHP for 7 years and in that time have started some really cool projects and even started a few profitable businesses. It was all in good fun until a couple of years ago I decided to build my own framework (Madeam). The goal was to develop a tool that I really enjoyed creating all of my applications with. At first this makes a lot of sense because as you’re developing your applications you are constantly improving your tool and every time you use it, it gets better and your applications get better. Wrong!

What happened is I completely lost focus on building great applications and instead focused all my energy on creating a great tool. Don’t think it will ever happen to you? Time may be infinite but your time is finite. By exerting so much time on improving the tool there is no way you can give the final product the attention it deserves. Already roll your own framework? Look at all the time you just wasted figuring out the optimal way of handling HTTP requests.

I’d recommend using one of the hundreds of existing PHP Frameworks but, unfortunately they all suck. Perhaps this isn’t their fault though and the real problem is the PHP community in general that can’t agree on naming conventions or coding standards? No. The PHP community has always had PEAR. The problem is that everyone decided to completely ignore the PEAR coding standards and invent their own. Even worst most of the time they don’t even namespace their classes so you end up with classes called “Cache” but then you try to use a third party library by the same name and everything explodes.

There are literally thousands of PHP classes and libraries out there but you can’t use them because they clash with each other. Why does it need to be this hard to use other people’s code? Shouldn’t the framework developers be focused on creating interoperable platforms so we can all share in the wealth? Instead they’ve decided to re-write their own libraries for everything and made it impossible to plugin third party code. Everyone has taken the “It’s my way or the highway approach”.

So why am I excited? Because this is the internet and there are plenty of other programming languages to use.

Happy New Years!

This year I’m quitting PHP and MySQL for all of my personal projects, and kicking things off with a new technology stack; Python, Django, Postgresql and Nginx. I’m not going to sing their praises just yet (although, I do thoroughly enjoy them so far). I understand that all technologies have their problems and its possible I’ll become even more frustrated than before but at least now I’m not wasting my time trying to create the perfect framework. Instead I’m working with the tools I’m given to create some really exciting products. I can finally focus on the end product’s experience instead of my own.

As I continue to play with these new toys I’ll be sure to document my experiences on this blog. All of this excitement gives me the urge to blog blog blog. Looks like 2010 is going to be a great year!