I'm not trying to defend PHP too much here; I like it, but it is a horrible language on many levels (as are other languages).
I started writing a long rant which essentially boiled down to exactly that - PHP may be shit, but so is everything else. I hate all the languages that we're stuck with, and every time I start a project it's more a matter of picking the least shittily inadequate tool for the job than a matter of picking a language that I actually like, because there are none. They quite seriously all suck, very badly in most cases. The pain comes in different places, in varying degrees, but it's always there, whether it's coding pain, tools pain, ops pain, installation pain, documentation pain, etc. I have yet to find a development stack that didn't make me want to scream "fuck!" at least a dozen times over the course of a week of using it.
The real problem with most non-PHP stacks is that they front-load that pain: I have to say "fuck!" and hit Google many more times before I see a page generated from Ruby, Python, Scala, C, Java, or Haskell running on my webserver than I do to see a dynamic PHP page. Is it any surprise people tend to go with PHP pretty often, given that?
I think detractors would be wise to focus a little bit more about what's awesome about PHP, rather than what sucks about it (there's a lot, nobody argues otherwise). Because there's got to be plenty that's great about the language (or perhaps the environment overall) if it attracts people in such large numbers. We should be trying to add that to other languages/environments, not merely looking down on the newbs that still use PHP.
I started writing a long rant which essentially boiled down to exactly that - PHP may be shit, but so is everything else. I hate all the languages that we're stuck with, and every time I start a project it's more a matter of picking the least shittily inadequate tool for the job than a matter of picking a language that I actually like, because there are none. They quite seriously all suck, very badly in most cases. The pain comes in different places, in varying degrees, but it's always there, whether it's coding pain, tools pain, ops pain, installation pain, documentation pain, etc. I have yet to find a development stack that didn't make me want to scream "fuck!" at least a dozen times over the course of a week of using it.
The real problem with most non-PHP stacks is that they front-load that pain: I have to say "fuck!" and hit Google many more times before I see a page generated from Ruby, Python, Scala, C, Java, or Haskell running on my webserver than I do to see a dynamic PHP page. Is it any surprise people tend to go with PHP pretty often, given that?
I think detractors would be wise to focus a little bit more about what's awesome about PHP, rather than what sucks about it (there's a lot, nobody argues otherwise). Because there's got to be plenty that's great about the language (or perhaps the environment overall) if it attracts people in such large numbers. We should be trying to add that to other languages/environments, not merely looking down on the newbs that still use PHP.