php is now PHP, all grown up
When I stopped programming with PHP, 5.0 was just out the door. Back in 2004 most of the object oriented support was brand new and the developer ecosystem behind it was still in its infancy.
In direct contract when I started programming with .NET there was a really mature community behind the 99 level tutorials I was reading. You couldn’t step outside beginner land without stumbling upon modern and fresh ( to me anyway ) ideas like TDD, MVC frameworks, and dependency injection/mocking/stubbing.
Mix in some LINQ and the newest language features in c# 3.0 and an old procedural style PHP guy was pretty blown away by the power of the .NET stack.
It sure was a suprise to me today when I stumbled upon some new PHP 5.3 features coming down the pipeline. Closures, Namespaces, nice!
Further investigation revealed there are unit testing, mvc, and dependency injection frameworks already out there ready to. Since I already installed a pretty decent php add-in for visual studio its really apparent that PHP is not the same infant language I left four years ago.
So I have almost all the same language features available to me in C#, can program it using my favorite IDE, have the freedom to run my code on any platform, and could eventually take advantage thousands of more job and freelance opportunities that PHP offers over C#…
Looks like I have something new to learn…