PHP is Amazing

Already existing libraries can hurt development. You can liken it to Jeff Atwood saying "Regular Expressions: Now You Have Two Problems". Not only do you have to write your code, but now you have to understand that library and how to use it.

Just because their is a library doesn't mean there are any consequences that come with using it. There will come a point where the limit of the library has been reached and you must either A.) contribute to it or B.) if things are proper fucked and you end up writing a custom library

Either way making the argument that development is easier because of all the libraries available is like saying, constructing houses is easier because of all the blueprints available. (contrived examples always win)

PHP is a fine language along with Ruby, Python, and Javascript. Each have their strengths and weaknesses. No sole language will win all the time.

references: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/06/regular-expressions...

Broken deployment being easy is not a feature.

Heh, battle tested.

You don't need thousands of developers, just a few good ones. You'll find that for pretty much any popular language.

And open source libraries? Really? Someone here is overlooking the sizable ruby gems and PyPI, and the gigantic CPAN.

It'd be interesting to start a company that wrote software in two different languages at the same time. Have a bunch of programmers that don't know PHP or Ruby develop the same features in both languages. It'd be interesting to see how easy or hard they found each language to be and why.

It's interesting that the author uses the term "easy" to describe PHP, as there have been a few talks in the Clojure community about the difference between something being simple and something being easy, and the former tends to be recommended over the latter.

If you ship that easy, then you may not be able to grow easily in a structured and sane way.

This is true of any language/framework, however. Others encourage better structure and methodology.

Really curious what people get out of bashing a language they don't like. I'm no psychologist but I'm sure it's common behavior outside of programming and typically deals with ego.

> There seems to be a lot of negative commentary directed at PHP recently

If by recently you mean the last 15 years.