Please spend first 90 days building a good reputation and impression for yourself with your supervisor and coworkers and later use your reputation to drive any changes. By insisting on using Arch Linux, you will be wasting yours and others time in accommodating your preferences in recreating the workflow and tools that everyone else is used too.

You should focus on learning the tools and workflow used by your employer. You are no longer a freelancer who can chose their own tools and workflow, you are a cog in a machine now and learn how machine operates.

Now, with the hindsight, it was a big mistake : it did make me loose so much time ! I did had to fix one script out of 2, the build system was not working properly, etc... And linux and Os X are not that different !

Don't do that... Use the tools that you company gives you, and try to fit in the company. Otherwise, you will be seen as the guy who does not want to do stuff the same way as the others. Even if everything goes well with your coworkers, you will end up waisting time every day.

You can install vim on windows (and sublime text does have quite a few almost decent vim plugins). You will miss i3wm a lot, but you don't need it to do good work.

The community is massive and full of people who are deeply passionate about best practices. There are more quality frameworks than you can hope to keep up with (if your ranking of quality is the meager toy that rails is, you'll be happy here). The frameworks are really good at abstracting away the awful API choices the language makes.

That said, if you're writing in "PHP" instead of a given set of frameworks... you're working at a company that hired someone who wrote a lot of code with no experience of what makes a good system... but you'll soon find the JS looks exactly like that too, because that's not a PHP problem.

* The language has comes leaps and bounds since you last used it

* Install composer and learn how to use it (PHP package manager)

* Read up on Laravel, IMHO it's the best PHP Framework out there right now. They guy behind it is a genius and has great vision for it.

* You'll want to use nginx + php5-fpm (No more apache and php_mod)

* Check our PHPStorm, if you are going to use an IDE you can't bear intelij IMHO and PHPStorm has support for a myriad of things

* ORM's have greatly improved, even if you aren't going to use Laravel read up on it's ORM to see what is possible

> if you are going to use an IDE you can't bear intelij

if you are going to use an IDE you can't beat intelij. They are also the people behind resharper.

Read up on Composer and Packagist. It's basically NPM, Gems, or PyPi for PHP. There are now solid interoperable libraries for most common tasks.

- https://getcomposer.org

- https://packagist.org

Laravel is a great framework, but quite a bit of what's out there seems to be built on the Symfony foundation.

- http://laravel.com

- http://symfony.com

There are also great coding guidelines and tools that are evolving. The PHP Framework Interoperability Group has produced some solid coding standards and tooling has followed.

- http://www.php-fig.org

WordPress...it makes me sad. But it's ubiquitous. If you're stuck doing WP work, take a look at the Roots project. It's a sane, modern approach with good tooling.

A few things come to mind of Windows if you choose to give it a try. 1. Vim for windows works pretty well 2. It's pretty fast to switch to a different application context on windows using win-key. On windows 7 still win + 1-9 switches to the cirresponding application on task bar - and the order of applications can be reordered by dragging a mouse.

Windows nowadays is pretty solid tech but it's aimed at a general demographic so finding all the power user levers take a while. Of these:

-powershell ISE is a really nice command line (well, better than cmd) and it comes out of the box

- some people swear by automation through autohotkey scripting

- win-r is a fast way to start apps and scripts

- hitting win key and typing the name of an application is a fast way to start applucations by just the exe name

I asked if they can let me install Linux on the computers, they said I have to use a VM.

I'm fine with a VM but I also need my window manager of choice (i3-wm) and so on.

Would it be okay if I install Arch Linux on VirtualBox and I fullscreen the VM? What about performance then?

All the other developers are using Windows and putty shells and Sublime Text as their editor.

I asked if I could bring my own laptop but they said I can't.

Changing from Linux to Windows is indeed rather painful. As others have mentioned, depending on deployment/process etc -- you might still be better off trying to live on the windows side.

I'm not a windows dev, but from what I've seen mentioned by others -- running php on windows w/IIS and SQL server works fine -- but you'll want to have a test/dev environment that matches prod -- or you'll just constantly run in to pain points -- especially if the team isn't on board/interested in investing in a full heterogeneous environment.

For a small example with node, see eg:

https://github.com/keithamus/npm-scripts-example/issues/5

Hopefully your new team has some automation in place -- it's unlikely it'll work out of the box under linux if it's never been tested/linux has never been a requirement.

On the bright side, vim works fine under windows, and with some mingw32/64[2], things aren't entirely painful. If you're used to script things with ruby, that should be even easier. Having to work with cmd.exe and it's nasty find.exe rather than grep, feels like running with one leg tied behind your back.

Lack of proper tabbed/keyboard-friendly window manager is probably the biggest productivity drain -- thought there are some alternatives for that too[3].

[1] http://www.hanselman.com/blog/SwitchEasilyBetweenVirtualBoxA...

[2] http://msys2.github.io/

It wasn't OOP at the start and had weird warts.

As PHP mature it's much better than its past and have fixed some complaints but unfortunately the bad rep still stuck. Plus there are some fundamental warts that you can't just fix.

In general, I'm happy that PHP is thriving and continue to improve. It looked bleak for a while and I regretted choosing PHP over Python or Ruby for web dev.

I find that it doesn't matter much if you're using MVC frameworks such as Laravel. You hardly need to memorize or use crazy stuff with PHP and most of the time you're just googling framework stuff how to grab param from route, etc...

I've done Scala Play framework that that language get in the way a lot on top of googling how to do stuff with play framework.

But I suspect that this observation is because more of dynamic language vs type language more than PHP vs Scala.

--

I think in general it's just language evolve and got better.

http://www.phptherightway.com/ is a great resource for most things you'll need to know when working with modern PHP. Definitely start here.

Familiarize yourself with the ecosystem by poking at the most popular frameworks, at least skimming the docs to understand the types of things they provide and how they're structured: Zend, Symfony and Symfony Components, Laravel, Slim, Silex. Study WordPress, the "stereotypically bad" piece of software, for anti-patterns, but there's also a lot of good stuff in there and some improvements on the roadmap.

Composer is the npm of PHP. Check out packagist (horrible UI though) or browse github's PHP repos to find some of PHP's commonly used packages, like Monolog and phpunit. You can build a simple app in minutes in Laravel, and even put together a small product MVP using 90% boilerplate code within a matter of days on Laravel. Since there's a growing ecosystem for these tools now, it's getting easier and easier to write quality software in PHP, and it's actually a relatively pleasant experience.

Plus shipping and managing PHP in production is a breeze -- it's the most widely supported web platform, after all. We've got support on great CI systems like circleci and scrutinizer-ci.

Yes. This should work provided you have a system with memory > 8GB, but you might face some issues when using a folder shared from windows. If something involves symlinks, then tread carefully. And file access to a shared folder is pretty slow too.

> Once you're aware of the gotchas (and keep your head stuffed with this useless info the whole time you are working with PHP) its not as bad as everyone makes it out to be..

First, you need to be aware of the gotchas. But this is not possible because,

1. We are still counting (take a look at /r/lolphp).

2. Even experienced (8+ years) php programmers know a very small percentage of the php gotchas. See this http://www.reddit.com/r/PHP/comments/2zhg6z/how_true_is_this.... You can see one commenter. who is an experienced php programmer who was not aware of that at the time. I myself had 8 years of experience when I was bitten by this bug..ahem..feature. So unless you haven't gone through all of /r/lolphp and commited the relavent ones to your memory and check them for every single line of code you write, you are bound to be bitten by one of those.

3. And documentation does not help. For eg. Even php core develpers agree that some of the important parts of documentation is incorrect but NO ONE CARES about things like that. Every one is out to implement flashy new stuff that fanboy can brag about. Even the existing documentation is does not go much deep into details. For eg this is the php.net page regarding exception handling

http://php.net/manual/en/language.exceptions.php

compare this to Pythons documentation

https://docs.python.org/3/tutorial/errors.html

https://docs.python.org/3/reference/compound_stmts.html#try

If you want to find how a return statement behaves inside of a finally block, the info simple isn't present in the php's documentation. Because "who cares because we copy stuff from java, so we probably does not not what is important to document anyway."..

>Suggestions welcome.

Keep looking for a new job. I guarantee this is the tip of the nightmare iceberg you're about to hit.

1) if you switching from ruby to php because there is no remote jobs.. well, there are plenty of them

2) you didn't touched php for 8 years, so why go php?

3) they are locked to windows and you can't install linux, well, don't go there

The bigger gotcha will be getting used to the execution model, if it's standard LAMP-y type application hacking. Remember that, in this style of app, all of your state has to be either explicitly stored in a backend or in the browser cookies. The script begins not knowing anything, lives briefly, excreting HTML or JSON, and then dies, leaving behind only what it's explicitly saved. In some ways it's more complex than a Rails-type model, and in others it's simpler.

PHP is a language like any other. it has good and bad parts. what might prove useful is to focus on learning the codebase.

> I asked if I could install Arch Linux on bare metal but they said no. They said I have to use a VM. They also mentioned I can't bring my own hardware.

Beggars can't be choosers :(

Whether your Linux VM setup is acceptable will depend entirely on what the rest of the shop is used to. For example, if they develop on Windows desktops and deploy to Windows servers, you may need to use Windows scripts and test for Windows-specific corner cases, which would be difficult to do on a Linux VM. You may need to adjust all of your tools to use Windows line endings (CRLF). You may find that some of your tools don't work correctly on a vboxsf or samba filesystem. Be prepared to make compromises where necessary.

On the other hand, if they deploy to Linux servers, your knowledge of Linux and your VM might end up being a valuable asset for the shop.

In any case, don't say that you "can't use anything else". Of course you can. Learning to use a new OS or editor is not terribly different from learning a new language. If you can learn a new language, you can certainly learn to use Sublime Text or whatever.