I have been working with PHP for many years, mostly as a side language.

Once upon a time in, on an island far, far away, I did try to get a SaaS business going based on a PHP stack but alas it suffered from a lack of customers and we eventually bowed out.

It did not diminish my enjoyment of working with PHP and several years ago when a new opportunity presented itself, I again chose PHP for the stack because:

1. I was familiar with it
2. I was confident of hiring people
3. It is easy to stand up a server
4. It is easy to test and deploy

In order to add to the joy of the ’24 Days in December’ I decided upon an idea, a little out of the ordinary that popped into my head. An Ode to PHP.

This was mostly, as I said on phpc.social, because I was thinking of Vogon poetry. I trust that this effort does not rate on the Universes Worst Poem league table.

Ode to PHP

Two thirds of the world
Two in three
Have come to rely
On PHP

WordPress or Symfony
Or Laravel
These are the tools
That work so well

People all day
working so hard
Creating code so eloquent
It rivals "The Bard"

Code is poetry
Someone did say
If then, foreach
While 200 ok

So little by little
We refine and release
Git clone, add, commit
Git push and rebase

Patterns and algorithms
Classes, reflection
We are taking this code
In a brand new direction

So at the end of the year
We say "Hip, Hip Hooray!"
8.2 is released
8.3 's on the way

Finally, Big thanks to all the companies that support the PHP foundation, all the people that contribute PRs, release managers, testers, technical writers, and everyone else contributing to the wonderful community that is PHP.

Happy holidays and a Happy New Year.