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Comment by jgrowl | Hacker News Reader

I don't think many would claim that PHP isn't capable. It's that some of us just don't enjoy it and find it to ugly. Especially given how mature competing languages have become.

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I work at a PHP shop, coming from a Python background. I chose to come here for the team, certainly not the language. When I asked about why some things are inconsistent in PHP compared to other languages, its age was a common defense. I was shocked to find that Python is older than PHP, and Ruby is the same age!

However, Ruby didn't see the uptake of usage that PHP did. It was popular -- one of the first languages that you could use as an alternative to CGI!

However, age isn't why it's got so many sharp edges. That's Rasmus' fault, and the core team's.

I agree, but there are many with a large investment in PHP, and since it isn't going away, it's very much worthwhile to make it better.

All due respect it is easy to write shitty code in PHP but you can also craft elegant design patterns that are easy to grok.

I can't think of a language that has out of box adoption for web development similar to PHP.

Perhaps time to revisit PHP some time then? It also has become more mature :) Much of PHP's old built-in functions are crap (side effects, inconsistent parameter order, wierd naming), but you can't really (and shouldn't) compare those parts with another language as there is no correlation.

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