I know this sounds like a point-whoring question but let me explain where I m coming from.
Out of college I got a job at a PHP shop. I worked there for a year and a half and thought that I had learned all there was to learn about programming.
Then I got a job as a one-man internal development shop at a sizable corporation where all the work was in C#. In my commitment to the position I started reading a ton of blogs and books and quickly realized how wrong I was to think I knew everything. I learned about unit testing, dependency injection and decorator patterns, the design principle of loose coupling, the composition over inheritance debate, and so on and on and on - I am still very much absorbing it all. Needless to say my programming style has changed entirely in the last year.
Now I find myself picking up a php project doing some coding for a friend s start-up and I feel completely constrained as opposed to programming in C#. It really bothers me that all variables at a class scope have to be referred to by appending $this-> . It annoys me that none of the IDEs that I ve tried have very good intellisense and that my SimpleTest unit tests methods have to start with the word test . It drives me crazy that dynamic typing keeps me from specifying implicitly which parameter type a method expects, and that you have to write a switch statement to do method overloads. I can t stand that you can t have nested namespaces and have to use the :: operator to call the base class s constructor.
Now I have no intention of starting a PHP vs C# debate, rather what I mean to say is that I m sure there are some PHP features that I either don t know about or know about yet fail to use properly. I am set in my C# universe and having trouble seeing outside the glass bowl.
So I m asking, what are your favorite features of PHP? What are things you can do in it that you can t or are more difficult in the .Net languages?
