Now anyone can be a s****y php programmer!
I hate this new ad for "UAcademy" I've been seeing on Facebook recently and how it states that PHP is so easy anyone could learn it. While I agree with that 100% unless you have a learning disability, the problem with 90% of both closed and open source PHP sites and projects I've ever had to work with is that the programmer thought he/she knew PHP when in reality, all they knew was the core syntax but had little to no real understanding of how to program with the language. That is a destructive problem with PHP is that, the language itself has massive potential for creating amazingly powerful websites and services, but due to it's extreme level of flexibility, programmers can get away with developing the most horrible, error prone, tangled up glop of spaghettified piece of crap imaginable...and yes, I do have a general disdain for lazy / ignorant programmers.
My good friend @sdwrage and I have the argument quite often on how Ruby / RoR is way better than PHP. The fact of the matter is, this simply is not true. PHP has many of the same extremely high level abilities as Ruby, but is has never been truly standardized as Ruby has been with Ruby on Rails. There are attempts such as the Zend Framework and Symphony, and while I haven't had much experience with Symphony, Zend Framework is in my humble opinion, a bloated mess. I had begun a framework of my own a while back which my goal was to create something as powerful as some of the advanced frameworks out there such as the Zend Framework, while avoiding the use of deep inheritance hierarchies and learning more toward a composition based design, which I have learned from first hand experience, makes life much easier, your code much less bloated and thus faster and more memory efficient, but at the cost of a slightly higher learning curve for future developers with a primary background in traditional OOP techniques.
Getting back to my original topic. Yes, anyone can go to school and learn to code up a blog in php/mysql with some jquery ajax calls, but there are not very many that will take that and actually learn the best practices and how to better write their code. There are far too many scripters and no where near enough engineers in the PHP world which is why the language has such a bad rep in the Ruby world. Without knowing what their curriculum looks like, I can not fully say they are doing the PHP world an injustice, but I would bet that they are not worrying about teaching standards and best practices, but simply how to get things working regardless of how it looks. In addition, without having some prior experience in programming, there are so many things a beginner will not ever have in their mind when developing their code. Will that school teach the students all about reference variables? What about event/data driven code? What about using interfaces rather than inheritance and why designing for an interface is often the better solution? I bet not.
