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Comment by mahmud | Hacker News Reader

PHP gets websites built. But what use do I have for it if I want to make software? you know, something other than pumping ascii over a socket descriptor?

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Careful, that's a form of heresy around these parts.

The kicker for me was discovering that Facebook's PHP shell (http://www.phpsh.org/) is in fact written in Python.

The toolbelt of even the least experienced craftsman has more than a single tool.

Give me an example of something you can't do in PHP. The language is turing complete .. your statement makes no sense.

Given the needed supporting technology, you can write a filesystem driver in PHP. With FUSE, you can.

What we should be questioning is how pointless would such endeavor be.

Like kenjackson pointed out (and, oddly, this time I agree with him ;-)), your toolbox should not be restricted to PHP, however Turing-complete it may be.

I wonder if you could write FUSE in PHP...

You would need to extend PHP somehow and make the kernel and its data structures visible.

But I have no intention of even dedicating one minute to such thoughts

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_tarpit

I think the issue is whether one would even want to attempt to develop certain types of software using languages and environments that were designed to be used in a specific way. PHP would certainly not be one's first choice for developing native Windows desktop applications, for example.

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