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Comment by bdg | Hacker News Reader

I love sculpin! I'm biased (I wrote the original getting started guide).

Modern PHP is one of the best places to be doing web development in 2015.

PHP has a huge external perception bias from how awful it was up to 2011, and it doesn't help that 80% of PHP programmers you will run into are woefully unaware of modern PHP tools and techniques so they keep writing mangled messes.

Sculpin wraps the really nice templating engine Twig and you basically get all the features it provides, and the extensibility is really powerful. Sculpin let's you leverage all the components and packages for templates, i18n and perhaps more complex use cases.

I'm not sure why you want speed for generation of static content but if that is a constraint... I doubt that you will find better performance in node or ruby over PHP5.6 or PHP7.

So... PHP has the features, speed, and packages. What's the reason not to pick it? The syntax?

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Speed would definitely play a part if I wanted to integrate any CI deployment for a large site. My experience with PHP was never very good in the past, and after switching to Node, I haven't looked back. It had an inconsistent API, was unpredictable, etc. But then again, it has been awhile since I've used it. If it has gotten better since then, that's awesome. I should take another look at it.

API is still inconsistent as hell, if you are curious.

Actually, I would say both blaming (a couple of years ago) and praising (right now) PHP are a matter of fashion and nothing more. PHP was and still is pretty simple and practical tool to use, but core developers were and still are making ridiculously stupid design choices which they generally think of as a "compromise" and which no other programming language designers I know of currently make. So, if you are looking for good design in a language — PHP is still a disaster, I assure you.

What actually changed for good is not the language itself (which has changed, but the quality is questionable anyway), but infrastructure. Now we have HHVM, Composer, better libraries (Sculpin being a nice example, by the way), FIG-standards. It's far from Node or Python in a sense of tools and libraries available, but significantly better than it was some 4 years ago. And deploying it is still much easier than Python, Ruby or Node, so that makes a reasonable choice overall.

> So, if you are looking for good design in a language — PHP is still a disaster, I assure you.

PHP is like an unholy blend of Python and JavaScript with Perl syntax rules. If there's some feature you like in one of these languages, PHP probably has a slightly-confusing variant of it.

It has first-class function support (more-or-less), closures, classic OO, dynamic OO, reflection, namespaces, exceptions, auto-resolution of missing classes, generators, iterators, something like eval(), etc.

Do look at it but you need to considered the ecosystem around it, not simply the language.

http://www.phptherightway.com is a good start. I would also look at the Symfony 2 framework and even try this as a learning resource: http://symfony.com/doc/current/create_framework/index.html

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