In his latest blog entry, Jeff Moore tries to dispel a rumor about PHP code that's been floating around for years now - that it's considered hard to maintain.

The technocrat, heavily invested in his own technical prowess, faced with successful yet technically inferior code experiences cognitive dissonance. The only thing to do is to belittle the successful, but surely offensive code. "I could write better code than this," he says, or "this code sucks," or "this is unmaintainable."

Unfortunately, what Jeff says about many programmer's first introduction to PHP is right - that they download a popular application to check it out. This code is not always, shall we say, stellar. Jeff also brings up the point that the "PHP doesn't scale" myth goes hand in hand with this. After all, the larger the application, the larger the code, right? And the larger the code, the less maintainable it is, right?

Of course not - there are wonderful large PHP applications that are as easy to jump into and add/modify functionality to and keep up to date as there are small. PHP has one major thing going for it - it's simple nature lets developers keep things simple, and simple is good.