Programming Paradigms

PHP is a flexible, dynamic language that supports a variety of programming techniques.

Procedural Programming

Procedural programming is based upon the concept of the procedure call. Procedures, also known as routines, subroutines, or functions, simply contain a series of computational steps to be carried out.

Think of it as writing a list of instructions to tell the computer what to do step by step. It relies on procedures or routines.

Object-oriented Programming

Object-oriented programming (OOP) is a programming paradigm based on the concept of “objects”, which may contain data, in the form of fields, often known as attributes; and code, in the form of procedures, often known as methods.

PHP has a very complete set of object-oriented programming features including support for classes, abstract classes, interfaces, inheritance, constructors, cloning, exceptions, and more.

Functional Programming

Functional programming is a style of building the structure and elements of computer programs — that treats computation as the evaluation of mathematical functions and avoids changing-state and mutable data.

PHP supports first-class functions, meaning that a function can be assigned to a variable. Both user-defined and built-in functions can be referenced by a variable and invoked dynamically. Functions can be passed as arguments to other functions (a feature called Higher-order Functions) and functions can return other functions.

Meta Programming

PHP supports various forms of meta-programming through mechanisms like the Reflection API and Magic Methods. There are many Magic Methods available like __get(), __set(), __clone(), __toString(), __invoke(), etc. that allow developers to hook into class behavior. Ruby developers often say that PHP is lacking method_missing, but it is available as __call() and __callStatic().