A nice long list of things all concisely put into one blog - I'm sure this took some time to write. Can we move on though? Seriously - no one's forcing you to use PHP, so in your own worlds "It has paltry few redeeming qualities and I would prefer to forget it exists at all." do just that - forget it exists and wake up tomorrow a bit less grumpy. Trust me, you'll feel better!
There are those of us who have been forced to use PHP, and quite honestly, we could use a few good round-up posts of why there are better choices for a project these days than PHP.
Sometimes we can't forget that it exists, so we try to educate people so that with a little luck, they won't pick PHP for their next project.
You may be able to do some fancy (i.e. useful and profitable) stuff in another language and show it to your boss. Maybe do this in your spare time while learning another language for fun. It may impress them!
No offense, but you should really find the time to learn. That's not a hit against PHP (which I don't care much about one way or another; anything good enough for Facebook but full of such a large number of gotchas can obviously be read either way) and it's not even a comment about the marketability of your particular skill set.
Instead, it's just intended as a friendly reminder that you, not your boss, are in charge of your life. :)
Hm. I think my choice of words weren't adequate to describe my situation.
It's not that I don't know how to do other things. It's that the things that I'm capable of doing put me in a narrow niche. With a long-standing back injury and medical problems resulting from exposure to chemical allergens, there's very little work I can do in the light industrial sector.
I have training as a carpenter (and I can do everything from foundation and framing to roofing and finishing - I have the training), but I'm no longer physically able to do it.
The list of programming environments I'm comfortable in is quite long, too. It's just that my choices are PHP, C#, and Ruby. And the PHP guys are the only ones hiring. I really should move to Seattle or something, but the cost of just getting there is a little over what I can do.
