However, I have decided to use PHP.

This is a somewhat surprising choice (even surprising to myself), as I don’t like PHP. It’s a hacky language, which is horrendous. But recently I have done some work in it for the sailing club, where our results are calculated with it, and I got used to it. For all its faults, it has a good library, and is fairly flexible. You can even write programs in a kind of functional style. And it’s ubiquitous on the web, so if I ever want to run my system (or parts of it) on the web, I should have no problems doing so.

You can run it pretty easily (just with php YOUR-FILE), so you don’t need to worry about build files or class paths or other complicated stuff. And it’s portable.

In a way it’s a very simple and straightforward language, so I can pretty much focus on what I want to do, and don’t need to worry about the how. I’ll see how it goes, but so far I’m quite happy with it. Especially since I realised how to call any function based on its name, which means I re-invented some kind of object system… if an object (a plain array) has a key “fn_print”, then that is used to print itself. Very easy and nifty. Similarly I can compose function names from some other values, and then call a function. I can even check if it exists, and fall back to a default if not.

Yes, with other languages you get that kind of thing for free, but sometimes it is easiest to take what’s in front of you. I have railed against PHP in the past, and it’s not a good language, but it’s there, it’s everywhere, and it’s easy to use. So let’s see how I get on with a larger project!