[ Thanks to Tim
Perdue for this link. ]
“One of PHP’s greatest strengths can also be a great weakness in
the wrong hands. I’m talking about its forgiving nature. One of the
reasons why PHP has become so wildly popular is because it lets
very inexperienced web developers build powerful applications
without much planning, consistency, or documentation.”
“Unfortunately, that means an awful lot of PHP code out there is
sloppy, hard to read and impossible to maintain. I know because
I’ve written a lot of it ;-).”
“To address this and a lot of other issues, a number of the core
PHP developers and community members got together and started the
PEAR Project, which stands for PHP Extension and Add-on Repository.
To date, the docs and other fruit from the PEAR project have been
pretty sparse and difficult to follow, so this article is an
attempt to shed some light on what they’re doing.”