A slow realisation has been dawning that I should be using PHP for development. Having spent a long time working in corporate IT services I worked through VB, ASP and onto ASP.Net. I my early impressions of PHP were that it was a beginners language which always seemed to be so tied into the HTML markup that it made manageable coding very difficult.

Over the past year, I’ve seen more and more interesting projects built in PHP and masses of code for integrating external APIs through PHP whilst the equivalent C# code or .Net libraries are much less abundant, often appearing much later and in incomplete or limited forms. It’s been normal for me to spend considerable amounts of time writing code to implement functionality which is easily done using pre-built PHP modules.

My general working duty to provide software solutions, there was a time when I would used any platform which seemed appropriate but I became entrenched in Microsoft’s platform. I think this is something which programmers can become quite prone to, I’ve seen the beardy, sandal-wearing guys who still churn out COBOL for ancient mainframe systems in large organisations and I don’t want to become like that.

Having looked at some of the structured coding techniques now being implemented in PHP, I’ve realised that it’s no longer a language for hobbyists, It’s like meeting a distant cousin for the first time in years and realising that the child you remember is now married with kids of their own.

I’m going to bite the bullet and start learning PHP. I’ve already been pointed in the direction of some clever looking frameworks and my former colleague Paul Smith has been singing the praises of Expression Engine for quite some time.

I have a lot of catching up to do but I have a feeling it’s going to be interesting.