Everyone is certainly entitled to their opinions, but I'm puzzled as to whether some of the people claiming that PHP's greatest strength is its deployment model have had significant PHP experience?
As with most things, it's both good and bad. It IS fantastic that you can so easily toss a .php file into a directory, make a few minor Apache config adjustments, and BAM - dynamic website behavior.
...that's also a glaring weakness, though, when a complex application is developed without the structure imposed by other tools. I have to maintain an event registration system written in PHP, and I'm having incredible difficulty with it. The logic to store form data, look for errors, display the current form, and prepare the form for submission are all in a single, 1000+ lines spaghetti-code file.
I think the author's point (and certainly the one I'm making) is not that this is the only possible outcome of writing in PHP, or that other languages do not have this problem. Rather, the point is that the lack of cohesive structure removes barriers to writing bad code; in fact, it makes it (initially) easier than writing good code.
As with most things, it's both good and bad. It IS fantastic that you can so easily toss a .php file into a directory, make a few minor Apache config adjustments, and BAM - dynamic website behavior.
...that's also a glaring weakness, though, when a complex application is developed without the structure imposed by other tools. I have to maintain an event registration system written in PHP, and I'm having incredible difficulty with it. The logic to store form data, look for errors, display the current form, and prepare the form for submission are all in a single, 1000+ lines spaghetti-code file.
I think the author's point (and certainly the one I'm making) is not that this is the only possible outcome of writing in PHP, or that other languages do not have this problem. Rather, the point is that the lack of cohesive structure removes barriers to writing bad code; in fact, it makes it (initially) easier than writing good code.