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Another major difference is that Javascript has trendy things with hype machines.

PHP is not trendy, and there's pretty much no hype around any PHP project.

It's not the hype, for me I use JavaScript because I have no choice. I dislike many things about it, but I have no choice, I need my code to run in the web browser, no plug in, no Flash or Silverlight etc.

For my start up, I can't see a single reason why we'd use PHP, try to not think of it as me saying PHP is bad, it's just other languages and frameworks offer us more value.

JavaScript is creeping into more places too; I'm going to be starting a project in JS soon because it needs to run the JavaScript sandbox provided by mobile OS's. And that is specifically to get around platform restrictions involving downloaded code and to make it easily cross-platform. If I had the choice, I'd use something else.

So this also leads to using node.js (for early development and testing).

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