The elephant in the room.. Personal Home Page
When I first stumbled into the world of dynamic websites in the late 1990s, the landscape was a wild frontier. Perl scripts and server-side binaries ruled the World Wide Web. It was clunky, it was manual, and it was glorious.
At the time, a buddy of mine was hosting my site. I remember asking him a simple question: “How can I add a counter to my page?”
He didn’t give me a complex tutorial. He just said: “Use PHP.”
(Interestingly, that same server hosted a few infamous 90s websites that helped shape the early internet, but that’s a story for another blog post.)
The Snickers in the Breakroom Fast forward twenty-six years, and I have built an entire career largely on the back of PHP. Over those two-plus decades, the language has developed quite a reputation.
In almost every office I’ve worked in, PHP has been the proverbial “elephant in the room.” I’ve watched Rubyists and Pythonistas alike snicker at it; I’ve worked with developers who straight-up despised it. Personally, I’ve always found that a bit funny.
I understand why developers look down on it. PHP is often considered the duct tape of computer programming. It wasn’t born out of a desire for academic purity; it was born out of a need to get things done.
The Cost of Success If you want to truly understand the concept of real tech debt, you don’t need a textbook—you just need to study WordPress.
PHP’s greatest strength has always been its greatest weakness: its refusal to break the past. It’s a language that prioritizes “running right now” over “looking perfect.” While other languages move fast and break their ecosystems, PHP carries the weight of the entire internet on its back, scars and all.
Style Points vs. Results At the end of the day, PHP is interpreted just like all those other “prestige” languages. Whether the syntax looks like a work of art or a cluttered workshop, the server doesn’t care—it just executes the instructions.
It makes me wonder: At some point, are we just coding for style points? Because while the critics are busy polishing their “elegant” code, the elephant is still in the room, quietly running half the internet