Why I dropped JavaScript for PHP.


Flying JavaScript

Being a junior programmer you tend to want to learn all, at once. This is the biggest mistake to do and I fall to it. But I managed to recover.

Hi, I am Luc, a junior developer in his early 40’s. I write an article per week that’s related to my journey into web development, if you’d like to accompany me, and don’t miss the week article, you can subscribe to my newsletter down below. You’ll get the story right into your email without the need of opening the browser. Nevertheless, I post the link to my article on Twitter and LinkedIn too.

PHP was saved by Laravel, it’s what they say at least.

Back in 2019 when I started my journey, I was reading that PHP was about to go… even so, I gave it a try, and it was very difficult for me to understand it. “Wait, what?. You just said in the title that you dropped JavaScript for PHP”. Exactly! Be a bit patient and let me tell you the whole story… briefly.

Coding for me it’s hard. I got a memory problem, I have to take Magnesium to remember things, I am adding notes, use Siri, Reminders, I use written notes everywhere on my desk and I still forget things. Hopefully, as long as technology is around, I am in luck. 

PHP had (and still have) multiple issues but the most important one is security. I know that in time they have been fixed, but some issues are still present. Even so, Laravel saved PHP back in 2011, and I’m saved by Siri.

JavaScript is Everywhere on the internet.

if you go to your Chrome console (that is if you use Chrome) you’ll see that it runs on JavaScript, if you’ll disable it you’ll improve (or not) your experience on browsing, as the majority of Chrome behavior is based on JavaScript.

You wouldn’t find Browsers to supports PHP since it is server-side programming that runs and execute on the servers. Browsers don’t have a PHP interpreter to read your source code and execute instructions then give you output.

I would love to give you good advice, unfortunately, I cannot since we have each of our journeys. I encourage you to learn having in mind that you shouldn’t go simultaneously with JavaScript and PHP as it’s possible to get confused. It is what I did, and I ended up not understanding neither of them, until a point…

I dropped JavaScript for PHP.

It was frustrating that anything I was learning from JavaScript, my brain was refusing to cope with it and give it a sense. Copying and pasting the codes from the tutorial were so easy, but when I had to implement, understand the concepts, and explain them to myself, it was hard. So, after a few months, I gave up on learning JavaScript and stuck with PHP. Things in PHP like variables, booleans, arrays, and strings began to make more sense and I was more comfortable with the terms. After practicing for a few months, I thought it was time for me to get back to JavaScript.

Back to JavaScript

Now, that I began to grasp the concepts of computing and logics, I believed it was the time to continue the journey with JavaScript. And it was marvelous just to look at a function and understand what it does and why. JavaScript was finally making some sense, so, I felt encouraged to go deep and I (re)started freeCodeCamp where I left it. This time with the help of Florin Pop’s challenge that you can find here.

Plans for future

Continuing to learn and go with a framework is what I want to do. I am thinking of giving VUE.Js a try. I was between REACT and VUE but finally decided to go with VUE as I find it simpler at this time than REACT. I believe that getting deeply with VUE and continue to revisit basics in Vanilla.js will give me a boost on going to REACT soon.

I hope you’ll find the article helpful and you can be inspired to continue your programming journey. Until next time I wish you health, inspiration, motivation, and a wonderful week ahead.


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