Reply To: How did you learn PHP?

[nixnerd]

Great question for @traq or @chrisburton. I personally HATE PHP. I “learned it” if you can even say that by messing around with WordPress. However… that’s precisely the problem. A lot of people come to PHP through WordPress. Therefore, they are in now way qualified to put out “real” tuts on PHP, because their knowledge is confined to a specific eco-system.

For me… it’s the syntax and the way the language looks. I need my code to look at least somewhat sexy and PHP does not have the sex appeal. Beyond that, it does nothing that other languages can’t… so it’s not like I really NEED it.

I use it for simple includes… and that’s about it.

On another note… try Python. I think Traq can attest to the fact that it’s really clean and fun. However… some of the web friendly frameworks like Django apparently have a fairly large learning curve.

If you like JS… learn Node. Then, you can just write JS all through your dev stack!