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When I first learned to program on the web, Perl + CGI was the dominant platform. But by the time I was building my first websites for commercial use, PHP had taken over. Since then, PHP (as part of the LAMP stack) has really been the dominant development platform, at least in the free software and startup worlds. Through my platform choices, I have forced many people to learn PHP and to work with it on a regular basis. Some of them are probably still cursing my name, because - let's face it - PHP can be pretty painful. As a language, it's inelegant. Its object-orientation support is "much improved" - which is another way of saying it's been horrendous for a long time. Writing unit tests or mock objects in PHP is an exercise in constant frustration.