I keep reading always the same things from people who simply don't know how to use it properly and feels hurted by a different-than-what-studied-at-school syntax.
But more to the point, if anybody knows how to use PHP properly I'd think it is somebody who has worked at Facebook, and you can't just dismiss natmaster's complaints with hand-waving that he must not have been doing it right.
Well, considering the scenario he described in his own post, it's obvious that PHP wasn't used in the right way. Working at facebook itself, unfortunately, means nothing as i have no idea how their code actually is and what natmaster was doing there.
> Well for what it's worth, I keep reading that from people whose exposure to programming languages and techniques is limited to making LOB applications in PHP and maybe one or two other lowest-common denominator languages.
For what is worth, i've seen PHP applied with different patterns and architectures in scenarios that were pretty wide, powering millions of contacts daily. It's probably because of this that i learnt that it's actually a well-done language whose only fault is that it isn't popular among engineers and mostly used by amateurs. But this has nothing to do with the language itself.
Just because some orgs can wring a production system out of it does not mean it's the bee's knees. Far, far from it.
PHP is functional, I'll give it that. But arguing it's merits in a world that has Rails, Django, Node.js or even Chicago Boss, is going to lose you friends amongst people who appreciate elegance and speed in their libraries and applications.
As if you couldn't guess, my personal opinion is that PHP is one step up from CGI scripts in Perl5. PHP5 gained mindshare because your grandma could figure out how to embed a variable in a template and toss it in a directory that apache was already hosting with mod_php. And that, my friends is why we're even talking about PHP.