Notes from porting C# code to PHP

After years of hearing negative things about PHP, I had been led to believe that touching it would rot my brain. Ok, maybe that’s a bit much, but its reputation had me believe it was full of bad problems. Even the cool kids had issues with PHP. But I thought that it couldn’t be too bad because there was that one website that gets a few hits using a dialect of it. When Kaggle offered to sponsor a port of my TrueSkill C# code to PHP, I thought I’d finally have my first real encounter with PHP.

<?php echo "Disclaimer:"; ?>

To make the port quick, I kept most of the design and class structure from my C# implementation. This led to a less-than-optimal result since PHP really isn’t object-oriented. I didn’t do a deep dive on redesigning it in the native PHP way. I stuck with the philosophy that you can write quasi-C# in any language. Also, I didn’t use any of the web and database features that motivate most people to choose PHP in the first place. In other words, I didn’t cater to PHP’s specialty, so my reflections are probably an unfair and biased comparison as I was not using PHP the way it was intended. I expect that I missed tons of great things about PHP.

Personal disclaimers aside, even PHP book authors don’t claim that it’s the nicest language. Instead, they highlight the language’s popularity. I sort of got the feeling that people mainly choose PHP in lieu of languages like C# because of its current popularity and its perception of having a lower upfront cost, especially among cash-strapped startups. Matt Doyle, author of Beginning PHP 5.3, wrote the following while comparing PHP to other languages:

“Many would argue that C# is a nicer, better-organized language to program in than PHP, although C# is arguably harder to learn. Another advantage of ASP.NET is that C# is a compiled language, which generally means it runs faster than PHP’s interpreted scripts (although PHP compilers are available).” - p.5

He continued:

“ASP and ASP.NET have a couple of other disadvantages compared to PHP. First of all, they have a commercial license, which can mean spending additional money on server software, and hosting is often more expensive as a result. Secondly, ASP and ASP.NET are fairly heavily tied to the Windows platform, whereas the other technologies in this list are much more cross-platform.” - p.5

Read more: MOSERWARE

Posted via email from .NET Info