Several industry experts in the field of web programming have expressed their thoughts, opinions and insights on PHP programming. Leading the list of experts is Elizabeth Naramore who works for SourceForge and is the founder of PHPWomen.org. She says that one of PHP’s biggest advantages should also be viewed as its limitation. While PHP is very flexible, it takes no fewer than 30 steps in order to complete a certain code. This characteristic of PHP makes it difficult for other programmers to pick up where the original programmer left off. This also makes debugging efforts and refactoring very difficult under similar conditions of multi programmers working on any single project.
Next on the list of PHP gurus is Keith Casey, who says that one of the biggest advantages is the ubiquity and relative ease with which programmers work with PHP. It can be applied onto almost any source code, thus its widespread use on all kinds of operating systems currently available. Online services such as Drupal, Joomla, WordPress and others take full advantage of these characteristics, thus feeding its popularity. Casey also believes that the ease with which it takes to learn PHP. Non-development individuals attempt learning and applying PHP without much consideration for security issues, thus the misconception of it being insecure.
Finally, Lorna Jane Mitchell says that PHP’s biggest advantage while at the same time its worst weakness is the fact the almost anyone can learn how to use it. The end result is the omnipresence of a lot of bad PHP codes spread in the Internet.