Have you written a production app for PHP in the last 5 years? It handles (out of the box) multibyte encodings, locale-aware number and date formatting, parameterized prepared statements for your SQL, etc as well as most any language.
But to be absolutely clear: before PHP used to be the only language I wielded for money. I have enough lines of PHP on my back to claim the right to an opinion.
That said, last time I looked into PHP, modus operandi seemed to being focusing on making things easy, not making it easy to do things right.
AFAIK this one quote from "PHP is a fractal of bad design" still holds true and that if you ignore all the other obvious things (wildly inconsistent BCL, etc), it is probably the core reason why I can never bring myself to like anything PHP:
PHP is built to keep chugging along at all costs. When faced with either doing something nonsensical or aborting with an error, it will do something nonsensical. Anything is better than nothing.
AFAIK that's still true, and I find it hard to have confidence in any code written on top of something based on that core tenet.
Edit: Experience clarification
Also I have no trouble developing PHP code that halts on the first sniff of an error. But yes, with no experience of the language it will happily chug along.
They're almost completely different language, and while PHP 5.3 certainly has warts it's vastly better than PHP 5.0.
Compared to something like python, where version 3 has basically one major improvement over version 2 (ie, a unicode core); everything else was done pretty much right the first time, and massive changes aren't needed.
Heck, you can still use 2.5 (the python of 2006) quite happily today, and you'll be missing out on a few nice features that would make your life easier, but there's nothing wrong with it like there is with previous version of PHP.
y1 = 0.02x + 1
y2 = 0.10x + 0.5
Regardless of the fact that y2 started at 0.5, fully half of what y1 started at, at some point y2 overtakes y1. It's impotent to whine endlessly that a language used to be bad.
So PHP 5 years ago was terrible. PHP today is 'nearly as good' as Python (I'd argue it's better). In 5 years PHP is going to blow Python out of the water.
These languages that are 'better than PHP' have no appreciable market share, and it's not a vast conspiracy and it's not because PHP caters to the lowest common denominator. It's because they suck, fundamentally, at getting things done. WordPress doesn't exist in Python. Symfony doesn't exist in Python. Doctrine does, but PHP has more database drivers than Python so Doctrine is better.
You can be terse, elegant, and beautiful in Python. That's great, but no one I know has ever cared about what the code they're paying for looks like. They care about stability, agility, and testability - things you've been able to get in PHP since 2005.
Again with the scales, I agree that PHP is great for getting things done to start with, and once you've started with something then carrying on using it is easier than changing. That's why my biggest and most successful project still uses PHP, even though experience has taught me that everything else is more productive after the initial setup hurdle~
Stability, agility, and testability have been in other languages for decades, and in all three cases other languages have done them better, so I'm not sure why PHP having them since 2005 is supposed to be a good sign...
Not your functions, not your plane, you don't get to define parameters.
> starting off awful and rapidly turning into a giant blob of band-aids :P
PHP has been completely rewritten at least twice.
> everything else is more productive after the initial setup hurdle~
Can you give a single example of something in Python that introduces greater productivity than PHP?
> and in all three cases other languages have done them better
> so I'm not sure why PHP having them since 2005 is supposed to be a good sign...
Now you're just being a pedant. The point is that it isn't 2005 and it's not 1978. It's 2012. Talking about what the capabilities of a language were almost a decade ago is useless.
The PHP of 2009 might be worthwhile for the creation of business value (and possibly the reduction of maintenance-related risks), but as I said, the easily available programmers have no experience in those features or concepts. The more common scenario is that a particular programmer has experience in some other language that already included those features and doesn't mind working on old PHP systems. Believe me, there are not legions of these people.
And regarding the 'PHP of 2012', the major problem isn't the availability of programmers who have experience in the new features (they almost don't exist). It is the availability on distros stable enough to support an SLA or provide a modicum of security assurances. This problem applies to all languages though. I'm just pointing out that the 'PHP of 2012' is not as much of an option as it may appear.
Nobody in this discussion has raised the possibility of writing web apps entirely in C and suppressing all compiler warnings as they did so. That is a scary idea. And it gets even scarier if we are advocating for newbies to start writing web apps that way.
You don't have to close tags,.
You can add(misspell) unknown attributes to tags.
<input type="text"> works the same as <input type="foobar">
You can have multiple tags with the same ID field.
You can do ALL that and your page will still render, and probably look just fine. That's a major reason why the web took off. Because it didn't take perfection to get something done. Anyone that wanted to make a webpage could fumble around and make something that looked like a webpage.
Perhaps the web would be in a better place if browsers gave an fatal error if it tried to load a page that doesn't validate ... or maybe there wouldn't be a World Wide Web, much like there aren't any CueCats lying around.