How is Javascript and PHP used?

Programming. For some, it’s a distant concept that is somewhere in the same difficulty realm with rocket science. For others, it might be a hobby – an activity that you’d like to utilize in order to relax after a long day at work. And then there’s the third group – people who use programming on a daily basis for work purposes. Whichever group of people defines you the best, one thing is undeniable – programming is a great career path to follow. That being said, there are many different programming languages that you could learn and use – which is the best one? In order to find this out, it’s best that you take it two languages at a time, comparing and contrasting them. In this PHP VS JavaScript tutorial, we are going to do just that. We’ll start off by quickly outlining the main reasons why people choose to learn programming. After that, we’ll move on to speaking about what is PHP used for and what is JavaScript used for. Finally, after filtering out the main criteria of our comparison, we’ll use it to see which one of the two (PHP VS JavaScript) programming languages you should be learning.

Introduction

Even though we hear about programming all the time, it’s rare that an average person would stop and think “why should I learn programming?” and not come up with the immediate and only conclusion – salary. There are many, many reasons for why it’s worth studying programming and learning the differences of PHP VS JavaScript, and salary is just one of them. First of all, let’s assume that you’d like to learn programming purely out of personal interest, and you’re not looking to change your career. If nothing else, programming can be a great tool to jumpstart your brain. This is true for all similar hobbies that involve a lot of thinking, but doing a little programming can really work wonders of getting you “in the mood”. If, however, you’ve decided to turn to programming in search of a new career path, there are multiple benefits that you’re likely to encounter. To begin with, career stability is probably something that is very important to everyone who wants to plan out their future. Well, programming is infamous for providing just that. Since there are new start-ups and up-and-coming companies that deal with programming every single day, the job market is yet to experience a shortage of a need for programmers. This is an amazing feature since there are very few jobs in the world which could boast an almost guaranteed career path. And, finally, we have the obvious reason to learn programming and find out which one of the two languages (JavaScript VS PHP) is better to learn – the programmer’s salary.

Programming is widely known and seen to be a great-paying career path to follow. You would think that this should change given the popularity of the profession, but that does not seem to be the case. Surely, since there are so many people today that want to get into the field of IT simply to receive a programming job, the competition is as high as ever. However, this skill requires a lot of effort, time, patience and dedication to truly learn and master. Reliable and professional programmers are always going to find a high-paying job – it’s good to keep that in mind! So, as you can see, there are many different pros and benefits for learning programming, and you shouldn’t think that the programmer’s salary is the only “great thing” about the job. Since you can now have a better idea about the profession of programming in general, let’s move on to talking about the individual programming languages of the “PHP VS JavaScript” discussion. We’ll start off with PHP.

PHP

So… What is PHP used for? PHP is a popular scripting language mostly used in the field of web development. If you’re completely new to programming, you might say – so it’s not a “programming” language? It actually is – the ‘scripting’ part means that PHP supports scripts that allow developers and programmers to automate certain specific processes, thus saving a lot of time and avoiding manual programming. PHP was conceived and created in 1994, by Mr. Rasmus Lerdorf. Since then, it has received multiple different updates and is now considered to be one of the most popular programming languages in the field of web development. The popularity of PHP stems from a few key strong-points of the language – let’s quickly run through them. First of all, PHP is considered to be a great choice if you want to work fast. This is because a well-made PHP framework will be able to make and perform the best decisions when it comes to solving various different issues, thus speeding up the whole development process by quite a bit. This hasty development is made available thanks to the constantly growing open source PHP community worldwide – it’s a point that will be very important later on in our “PHP VS JavaScript” comparison. Another great thing about PHP is that it’s a very team-friendly scripting language. If you’re learning programming, chances are that you want to become a developer in a company. This means that you’ll have to be working with a team of people, which isn’t always all that easy! That being said, if the company uses PHP for its web platform development needs, the introductory and learning processes should be very smooth and fluid. Since there’s a lot of information about the language online (this is true for both programming languages in this PHP VS JavaScript comparison), employers are more flexible with hiring less-experienced developers, since they know that there’s a lot of great content to learn from. Now that you’re a bit more familiar with the general idea of the scripting language and know what is PHP used for, let’s transition this JavaScript versus PHP article and talk about JavaScript.

JavaScript

What is JavaScript used for? Well, JavaScript (or sometimes simply referred to as JS) is very similar to PHP in terms of it also being a scripting language that automates specific runtime processes. JS was created in 1995 (which makes it one year younger than PHP) by Mr. Brendan Eich. JavaScript, as the name probably implies, is heavily “in-line” with Java – these two languages share a very similar syntax. You will find that JavaScript is often regarded as being more “flexible” than, for example, PHP. This is mostly because of the fact that JS is very easily insertable into most web pages out there, while some certain page extensions may cause problems with programming languages such as PHP. It’s just something to keep in mind moving forward with our PHP VS JavaScript article. Even though we’ll talk about this a bit later on in the JavaScript VS PHP comparison tutorial, it is important to mention that both of these scripting languages are, by comparison, very popular and have huge online communities dedicated to their preservation, updates, discussions, and general well-being. Community support is very important, and we’ll talk about why that’s the case soon enough. So, with all of that said, you should now have a pretty good idea of what is JavaScript used for, and how both of these programming languages fair against each other, in general. All that’s left now is to provide the actual PHP VS JavaScript comparison, right? Well, close, but not quite yet. Before we do that, it’s important to establish some key points of what makes a good programming language. Once we have these, it will be easier to compare the two scripting languages against one another.

Comparison Criteria

Admittedly, there are many different things that make up a good programming language. It’s usually a mixture of all of those things that help people decide whether the language is worth their attention or not. However, there are certain criteria that are “a must” – without them, a programming language would either be very difficult to learn or wouldn’t be worth the time, at all. For this PHP VS JavaScript comparison, I’ve chosen three points to cover – popularity, ease of use and salary. Let’s briefly go over them before diving into the JavaScript versus PHP comparison.

Popularity

As I’ve stated earlier, community support is very important when it comes to a good programming language. But why is that the case? Sure, it’s nice to know that the language is loved and appreciated by a huge number of people worldwide, but there are some practical uses to that, as well. A little while ago, I had a friend come up to me and say that he’d decided to learn programming, and has chosen some niche language to start off with (I can’t remember its name, which I guess proves the “niche” point even further). When we met about a week later, he seemed bummed out. When I asked him what was wrong, he told me that he had to give up on learning the programming language that he wanted – there’s simply no information about it available online.

Even though this is a rather specific case, these things actually do happen much more often than you would expect. That’s why popularity is important – if a programming language is popular, you can be sure that there’s going to be plenty of information, tutorials, and guides of how to successfully learn it found online. That’s a very important feature for beginners!

Ease of Use

Even though this might seem like an obvious point, it’s actually rather controversial. Let me explain. If you’re a complete beginner in the field of programming, you’d probably want to take as easy of a route as possible. This means that you could choose a really simple programming language, skip all of the tough coding and thus learn really fast. While that does sound rather appealing, there are many industry veterans that are very adamant on the point that this is a really bad way of looking at it. They say that if you start with an easy language, you’ll completely miss the point of programming, and will lose the opportunity to learn some valuable skills. Controversies aside, the ease of use of a programming language still seems to be a hot topic among beginners programmers – everyone’s trying to find the easiest-to-learn language out there. That’s why I’ve included this point in the JavaScript VS PHP comparison.

Salary

I don’t think I need to further explain this point – it’s rather clear as it is. Some programming languages offer a higher salary than others, which makes them that much more attractive to learn. We’ll see how this plays out in the actual PHP VS JavaScript comparison.

PHP VS JavaScript – Which one should you learn?

I’ll go through each of the individual points separately, briefly describing how the two programming language fair against one another in each of the point. In the end, we’ll see if there’s a clearly superior scripting language in the PHP VS JavaScript debate.

Which one is more Popular?

Even though popularity is somewhat of a subjective point to analyze, a single Google search will show you that both PHP and JavaScript are very popular scripting languages. It would be almost impossible to distinguish the “more popular” one, but there’s actually no need to do that, in the first place. Whichever you’d choose to learn, you’ll find plenty of information about both PHP and JavaScript online.

Which one is Easier to Use?

There are a lot of conflicting opinions online, but the general consensus appears to be that JavaScript is quite easier to learn than PHP, even though it might seem like the opposite in the beginning. This is because while PHP has more functions, it has a pretty steep learning curve once you start getting into some of the specifics.

Which one offers a better Salary?

According to Glassdoor.com, a PHP developer can expect to earn almost $94,000 USD per year, or around $7830 USD per month. On the other hand, JavaScript developers are estimated to make $72,500 USD per year, which comes out to be a bit over $6040 USD. So, which one of the programming languages wins in the PHP VS JavaScript debate? Well, while PHP does have a better salary, JavaScript tends to be a bit easier to get the hang of. Ultimately, it all boils down to your own personal preferences.

Conclusions

We’ve reached the end of this “PHP VS JavaScript” comparison article. I hope that the information presented within was useful to you and that you’ve found out what you came here to learn. Remember – in the end, the outcome of the JavaScript versus PHP debate all depends on you. Until next time!