When I arrived, PHP was already chosen. I think PHP was chosen because it is very similar to C and it lowers the learning curve for the students.
I know PHP sucks sometimes, but it's still a cool language to play with.
I know PHP sucks sometimes, but it's still a cool language to play with.
It's one of those things that (negatively) surprised me about Hacker News, actually. People go around and unproductively bash each other's programming languages when they could use their energy to elaborate on the stuff they actually like. The group consensus seems to be that Lisp is the best thing a language can hope to be; and since very few people actually develop in Lisp-likes, they fall over each other to claim the next-best place in the All-Time Universal Programming Language Hierarchy(tm).
I believe the origin of this behavior might be a somewhat mistaken PG essay[1] implying that all non-Lisp languages are "Blub", which is a synonym for "sucky, powerless, inferior language".
I'm sure I can find crappy Ruby/Lisp/whatever code and excellent PHP code out there. If you are a bad programmer, you write bad code. Of couse there are languages that try to prevent that forcing you to follow certain patterns, but it will not stop bad programmers.