Considering all its problems, I wonder why PHP has not been forked already in a saner language.
I mean who in 2014 is going to start a new project in PHP apart from people that can't be bothered to learn something else ?
I mean who in 2014 is going to start a new project in PHP apart from people that can't be bothered to learn something else ?
People who refrain from having the standard knee-jerk "lol php is bad" reaction whenever it's being mentioned. Of course the language has its warts and pitfalls, but then again, most languages do, and it's a fairly usable tool for a fair amount of jobs.
Care to show me a language with the same adoption rate (especially among hosters, which is something a lot of web devs simply have to keep in mind), ease of getting a project from zero to gone live?
[0]: Strangle Loop 2013: Keith Adams, Facebook: Taking PHP Seriously https://raw.github.com/strangeloop/StrangeLoop2013/master/sl...
[1]: CUFP 2013: Julien Verlaguet, Facebook: Analyzing PHP statically https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKWNjFagR9k
[2]: HHVM and Hack – Can We Expect Them to Replace PHP? http://www.sitepoint.com/hhvm-hack-part-1/
http://pypi.python.org/ - 40,037 packages
http://rubygems.org/ - 70,678 packages
http://www.cpan.org/ - 129,447 packages
http://packagist.org - 24,244 packages
There's a lot of open source code out there for all major languages. And, based on the canonical package indexes, a lot less for PHP than the other main contenders in the OSS web-ready scripting space (although, obviously, PHP is very domain-specific compared to the others I've listed, so the comparison is not completely fair - even with that caveat, however, I would expect Perl and Ruby to have PHP licked).
There are compelling reasons to use PHP - omnipresence, ease of deployment - but this isn't one of them.
https://getcomposer.org/doc/05-repositories.md#types
Though I'd agree it is still a weak argument in favor of PHP.