Why PHP?

Here are reasons why I elect PHP as my favorite language for back-end and server-side software:

• It's free and open source

• The source code you write is the output document

  • The controlling logic is where you define it to be. The php binary behaves much like the Linux cat (concatenate) command, but with the addition of the language's logic & execution interpreted between <?php and ?> tags read from the input. The output isn't required to be text/html, it can be anything UTF-8.

• It's old — it has been out long enough to be supported & well understood

• Apache is suggested but not required

  • PHP has a built-in web server. While one running instance not recommended for production and high volume traffic, it's perfect for microservice architecture and desktop applications.

• It's trusted and vetted

  • Installing PHP (and its plugins) from the official Debian repository is safe. You are never blindly installing a large list of dependencies like you would be in the world of Node.js or Python.