I spend 8+ hours a day writing PHP code, debugging PHP code, and refactoring PHP code (is that possible?) Needless to say, sometimes I feel the weight of PHP's utter lack of design bearing down on my like your mom when you don't eat your vegetables. I often feel helpless at the fact that PHP has a significant amount of cruft that sometimes you just can't do anything about. I've been reading as much as I can on the topic, hoping to maybe one day learn to write Beautiful Code but I don't feel that day will be anytime in the next few months.

Recently, a few coworkers and I sat around discussing the possibility of creating a Drupal plugin for Turnplay as a supplement to the Turnplay Facebook app. We all had something to say about Drupal and its benefits and detriments. However, all of us came to one conclusion: There is very little need to use a third party framework in PHP.

Let me take a step back and explain myself. I like to write C code. It's fun. However, there's a lot of menial stuff I don't want to do over and over again. So we introduce libraries, and someone else's code. With open source libraries, if the documentation sucks, who cares? You've got the source to peruse (and maybe fix a bug or two...). Using someone else's library speeds up your development time, because they've already debugged their library API. Other developers have learned everything they need to know to write a library for X-protocol, so you don't have to read the X-protocol docs and then write and debug your own X-protocol generator/parser. The time saved by using someone else's library is orders of magnitude better than building your own.

Now, I use a framework for this very site (Django) and I'm an advocate of making life easier. However, with PHP, the design of the language (or lack thereof) is to make everything easy without needing more tools. I can't think of a single time I've needed to go to a site like PHPClasses to grab a module I couldn't write in the same amount of time. Sometimes, the learning curve of someone else's class or framework can cost you a PS3.

With PHP, most things you could possibly need are built in. Want to write an RSS feedparser? Use simplexml_load_file(). Want to interface with a mysql database? Check out mysql_connect(). Granted, support for Oracle database connections and other enterprise software packages take a little more coercion, but I've honestly never needed to use an outside library. The closest I can claim to doing so is using the PHP-Pear libraries (only Mail and Mail_Mime). So, while some languages spend time pulling in external libraries, linking in .o files, etc. I can write code. And I like writing code.