Mono is a great community effort, but the server side has always lagged Windows pretty heavily. Having the same level of API and implementation support at a core level on Linux will be awesome.
Shall be interesting to see how this affects IIS market share in 5-10 years time.
As a Microsoft developer with two MCSD certifications and an MCDBA certification, I actually laughed at this. IE11 is certainly better than IE6, but I find it unusable comparable to its modern day competition.
Abysmal plugin support, none of the nice usability features of Chrome (ex: Paste and Go on address bar, right-click Search Google for highlighted text, etc) and more leads me to believe Microsoft should give up with IE and start over with an IE branded version of Webkit or heck even Chromium. They could continue their Xbox marketing and call it Internet Explorer One and actually dominate the browser wars again. Leave the old IE classic on there for the small percentage of people that need ActiveX support (blech).
I tend to use IE11 because it is lighter on memory usage than Firefox or IE and my machine has only 4GB of RAM. Also, it has a lot of those features. By default, I have right click and search with Bing and there are many accelerators that do the same thing. Plus, I don't see how so-called limitations in the shell should lead to an underlying engine change. I think Trident works well, although the main frustrating thing is that it doesn't work with a lot of IE only sites ironically (my company's old version of Outlook webmail, my credit union, etc.).
The plugin support may suck, the dev tools may suck, but in terms of the browser itself, it is much more capable than what they've had in the past.
Microsoft has definitely been putting its money where its mouth is w/r/t developers recently, and that's what they SHOULD be focusing on.
And so you know, ActiveX is already in Chrome, but they call it native client. Supposedly it makes a world of difference in the Google Kool-aid camp.
FYI IE has search X for highlighted text via accelerators, first introduced in IE8, though I'm not sure a search accelerator existed back then. It certainly exists now.
For more info, see
http://www.asp.net/vnext/overview/aspnet-vnext/aspnet-5-over...
http://www.asp.net/aspnet/overview/owin-and-katana/getting-s...
https://www.mail-archive.com/ozdotnet@ozdotnet.com/msg11187....
Well OWIN supports self-hosting so perhaps this will not bode well for IIS outside of enterprise environments.
In my humble opinion, self-hosting is useful as long as it's feasible to reinvent the web server wheel. In terms of IIS that can include url rewriting, caching, compression, performance tracing, critical error logging, request logging, endpoint configuration including SSL (and SNI), zero downtime deployments, graceful shutdowns and much more.
The programming tendencies nowadays is to build highly specialized software (high cohesion), with only the needed dependencies (low coupling) and a small surface area to promote faster iterations (micro services).
Based on the above observation, the approach of Microsoft to release and endorse a cross-platform <core> .NET is commendable and is exactly what we need right now.
There's much to say about the downsides of the bring-your-own-x composition approach, but I truly believe the issues we face today will be addressed over time as the discipline and dedication of the programming community as a whole increase due to the increase in responsibility.
I think the technical debt of PHP is a huge reason why development of the software behind Wikipedia hasn't fixed any of the huge issues in the last 5 years.
You don't need to convince me that PHP is a clunky, unpleasant language. My point is that there are still legitimate reasons to choose it.
Symfony 2 is quality engineering. It's quite nice just to browse the source.
Languages are just tools. Some are better than others for a specific task. This is a fact. You choose the language for a given task because it fits the task better than other options. That's all there is to it.
I don't currently use PHP, but I acknowledge that there are situations where using it makes sense. I'm just not in one of those situations in present. Saying that PHP is a bad choice in every situation is worse than stupid: it's simply wrong.
Its standard library is no more comprehensive than those of comparable languages.
The only advantage left, then, is the same one all the sibling comments bring up: it's already installed on the server.
So the question remains: Why would anyone who has a choice and knows that other languages exist ever use it for anything?
Because that shit gets the job done. Pick the right tool for the job, sometimes PHP is the right tool.
Javascript is a sad story though, it's an abysmal language (even with ES6, though that does make things better) but it enjoys a monopoly over the browser runtime space.
I think asking why anyone would start a new project in PHP is a very reasonable thing to ask.
If you want quick and dirty there is Ruby + Sinatra, Python + Flask or Go + Martini. All of which are safer, have less 'quirks' as you say and are all faster. None of them require any more work than the current PHP alternatives.
PHP may be superior to some languages in some regards, but it's definitely no longer the king of the hill of prototyping languages.
This year, I put a thirty-five dollar C# book on my holiday wishlist.
On a Windows server however it's compiled and highly optimized. Which PHP/NginX/HipHop you also have a compiled environment and is just as fast or faster.
I have no data to back it up at all, but I'm going to guess ceteris paribus the performance differences are marginal at best.