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Any critic of PHP who advocates other languages, like Ruby, Python or Java has to answer a question "Where are the apps?"

PHP has accomplished code reuse on the app level: applications like Wordpress and Drupal are world class and you just can't find installable web apps in other languages that have reached anywhere near the level of success. Occasionally you find an app in another language and generally it doesn't have the fit-and-finish that the successful PHP apps have.

Other languages, on the other hand, grow frameworks like cancer cells, and I wonder what disease they have that prevents these frameworks from being actually usable to build apps.



The only reason Wordpress and Drupal became successful is because PHP is present on basically every shared host you can find on the internet. They stayed successful by building a community of plugins and themes.

The actual internals of both are a complete mess, and trying to get them to do anything outside of trivial blog hosting and content management is a nightmare.

Just because you don't know of any Python/Ruby/Java "apps" doesn't mean they don't exist. Jenkins, Redmine, Trac, etc.


Note that all three examples of yours are software project management systems. That's a very narrow segment of the market.

You've also got to ask the question of why PHP is so widespread compared to the others.




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