A few months ago I went to a university to interview for a job working on their website. Up until that day I had been programming in PHP with Laravel and Symfony. These MVC frameworks are object-oriented, and they make PHP seem like a "real" programming language. I love them for that. Everything is nicely organized and segmented and you can do almost all the programming in an object oriented fashion.

The university was using a CMS and they asked me to take a little test by looking at some of the code. The code was written in non-object-oriented PHP, which means that everything was done in the page. If you need data from the database you do the query right there in the page, do whatever manipulation you need, then loop through the results with everything embedded right in the HTML with <?php tags. 

I was shocked and dismayed looking at the code. It was about as elegant as the BASIC code I was writing when I was 10 years old, but with HTML mixed in for good measure. It was horrifying to realize that this was the language I was programming in, despite the fact that OOP frameworks make it into something that resembles nicely written code.

The other thing that happened that day was they asked me what my ideal job was. I said I would really like to be involved in some sort of research, but there was no need for PHP in that field. When I got home I thought about it for a few hours, then decided that if that was what I wanted to do I should learn whatever I needed to learn to do it. And that is what I did, and that is why I stopped programming in PHP.

Don't get me wrong - I'm not saying PHP is a horrible language, it can be used very well. But the majority of employers here in Switzerland looking for PHP programmers are not looking for people who do it very well, they are looking for people who have done a three month bootcamp and will work for very low pay. For me, it just wasn't worth the effort to do something I don't really even like that much.

Labels: coding, php
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