A magazine about programmers, code, and society. Written by and for humans since 2018.
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August 4th, 2025
Welcome to the 83rd issue of De Programmatica Ipsum, about PHP. In this edition, we solemnly declare that PHP deserves a second chance; in the Library section, we review "PHP: The Right Way" by Phil Sturgeon & Josh Lockhart; and in our Vidéothèque section, we watch Kévin Dunglas tell us everything we need to know about FrankenPHP.
by Adrian Kosmaczewski
In 1995, an otherwise unknown software developer released the first version of a new scripting language whose explicit aim was to make applications for this new platform called "The World Wide Web". After starting as a small project, and thanks to the crazy dot-com years, it grew dramatically to become one of the most widely used programming languages of all time. After some stumbling first steps, it eventually got some sort of standardization in 1997, even reluctantly including some OOP features to please community and pundits alike.
PHP is the effective lingua franca of cheap web hosting. You know, that thing costing 5 bucks a month, where your uncle hosts a WordPress blog about fishing and his personal email. You know, that crappy service that comes with some gigabytes on a shared server, a nice LAMP stack on top, a shitty cPanel and WHM combo to manage things... and SFTP access to upload pictures from Jamie and Larry's wedding in Chattanooga. Woop woop!
The infinite flexibility of software is not without some major disadvantages. That is the main reason why we, software practitioners, crave so much any kind of information about "the best" or "the right" way to build, test, deploy, and maintain our systems. Yes, our craft is already complicated enough, and we are not even talking about the human complexities like office layouts, employment shenanigans, dress codes, and whatnot. In this occasion we are going to talk about a resource that fights, with facts and examples, the battle of excellency in the world of PHP.