> I think this sums up everyone I've met who actually likes PHP.
That says more about the people you associate with then with the language.
The people I know care about programming, care about doing it well, care about elegant solutions, and care about a wonderful end product. What they don't care about are stupid language wars.
> the grass actually IS greener in Python and Ruby land.
I never got serious with Ruby, so I'll confess, I might be missing something. But, going by what I see in Destroy All Software's screencasts, I don't feel like I'm missing anything.
I can't help it, but ever since Rails came on the scene, I can't help but feel like the PHP people that make up the PHP community has dramatically improved. This, of course, is purely based on the people I've met.
> Do the people you know have experience with other comparable* languages, and still think PHP is a well-designed language and platform?
For the most part, yeah. There are the obvious quibbles you get with any language, but for it's domain, it's the best bang for the buck. Does that mean it's the only language in our stack? No. But for my money, for the web side, it can't be beat. If I were to do a site in a non PHP language, it would be Python hands down. That being said, it all depends on what the project is, and what it entails.
Listen, I can't help but wonder if your imparting some past on the current crop of PHP developers (and by current, I mean those that moved to PHP5 some 8 years ago). Maybe you had experiences with another group of people that focus on just one language.
The PHP community of today is far from that. It's made up of practical people, who focus on more than just PHP. More to the point, calling someone a PHP developer these days just reflects that when they do the server side web code, they are using PHP. Not that it's their only language.
To be honest, my personal experience is that everyone I've met who pans PHP and proclaims to have switched happily to Rails (because that's what they switch to first, never Ruby), or Python is that they needed the extra structure these languages enforced. Basically, the PHP code they deride so much was code they helped write.
That, of course, is just my point of view. I don't know many people who use Ruby for web development, so it would be unfair for me to suggest the entire community was like that.
> Do the people you know have experience with other comparable languages, and still think PHP is a well-designed language and platform?
Is this the only thing upon which to base your opinion of a language? As someone who's seen at least a glimpse of the world beyond PHP, I'd concede that the design of the language, especially in earlier versions, is probably not its biggest selling point. But as you and I agreed below, PHP derives its value in other areas.
Maybe it's implicit in a question like "What's your most disliked programming language?" that those other areas should be excluded from consideration, but if that's not the case, then focusing solely on language design is a bit unfair to PHP.
> I'd concede that the design of the language, especially in earlier versions, is probably not its biggest selling point.
Keep in mind, the design of the language wasn't to create a new language, but instead, make using various libraries easily usable in a web environment. Hence the reason for the multitude of c or c-like functions. Eventually, the shift moved in a different direction.
I like to think that while PHP wasn't intelligently designed, it did evolve. And for my money, evolution beats out intelligent design.
> The people I know care about programming, care about doing it well, care about elegant solutions, and care about a wonderful end product. What they don't care about are stupid language wars.
I was just thinking this same thing. My background is mostly in PHP, C#, and more recently JavaScript.
Each of these languages is completely different from each other, but I haven't gotten to point where I curse the fact that one program is written in one language versus the other.
Each language has it features and pitfalls, but as long as you can accomplish the task you've set out on, I'm not sure that it really matters.
For example, I absolutely love the ease of passing functions around in JavaScript, but you can also make a real stinkin' pile if you don't structure things right.
Having used JavaScript, I find myself thinking about using delegates and anonymous functions a lot more in C# than I did before because I've seen the benefit of them in JS.
You can't tell a good programmer by their choice in language but in how they leverage that language to make awesome software.
> What they don't care about are stupid language wars.
Then why don't you care about PHP's horrible design, implementation, and development team? I veer away from PHP, fearing very much the Broken Window effect from all the glass scattered in the ground around PHP all the time.
> fearing very much the Broken Window effect from all the glass scattered in the ground around PHP all the time.
You can't program if you use a broken window as a measure of whether you use the language or not. I do not know of a language without issues, ugliness, or mistakes.
That says more about the people you associate with then with the language.
The people I know care about programming, care about doing it well, care about elegant solutions, and care about a wonderful end product. What they don't care about are stupid language wars.
> the grass actually IS greener in Python and Ruby land.
I never got serious with Ruby, so I'll confess, I might be missing something. But, going by what I see in Destroy All Software's screencasts, I don't feel like I'm missing anything.
I can't help it, but ever since Rails came on the scene, I can't help but feel like the PHP people that make up the PHP community has dramatically improved. This, of course, is purely based on the people I've met.