I’ve already posted an article about choosing a platform for your development. I missed a very important point, when choosing a language to develop in you also buy into the platform available to you, in this context, this means the third party libraries and supporting frameworks available to you. And as Jeff Atwood points out:

When you choose a language, like it or not, you’ve chosen a platform. And as Steve so patiently and calmly explained to all the Lisp enthusiasts, the platform around the language, more than the language itself, sets the tone for your development experience. The availability of common, popular libraries and the maturity of the development environment end up trumping any particular significance the language holds.

This was something I was planning to move on to talk about in more detail later. When you pick a language, you do need to look around at the choices of libraries available to you. PHP is lucky. It’s mature. There are a lot of libraries out there.

But, you must be very careful when confronted by such choice. Take a look at the options available for templating. Pear (a major source of libraries) have several implementations. There’s Smarty, and numerous other “just templating” libraries. The new Zend Framework also has a templating implementation.

There is a lot to choose from. Making the choice to go Pear::Flexy because that fits in with your use of Pear::DB, or to make use of the entire Zend Framework might be completely the wrong thing to do. You might want to create your own lightweight abstraction. Or go for something like SimpleT.

Picking a language with a small platform footprint can actually be better than picking a language with a large platform footprint.

But I’ll be talking about the costs associated with blindly using a library from the “PHP platform” for every project. When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. If you only have one type of hammer, that’s not worse than having a whole basket of different hammers.

Popularity: 59% [?]