PHP "community"

[Simon Wistow]

On Wed, Jan 16, 2013 at 02:59:50PM -0200, Daniel de Oliveira Mantovani said:
>  "PHP : training wheels without the bike." - Randal Schwartz
> 
> when I said PHP devs, I meant 'people who choose to use PHP because
> they think it's the _best_thing_in_the_world_.'.


Most of the PHP devs (like the guys who wrote HipHop, the people from 
Flickr etc etc) I know would be able to tell you 10x more things that 
were wrong with PHP than you will. In much the same way I can tell a 
Ruby dev way more things to hate about Perl than the things that they 
routinely parrot.

Yet they and other people still use it. Despite its flaws.

Oh yes, you can claim that partly it's because it's just webdevs who 
don't know any better or because it's so easy to install.

But why then, for example, do people like say Cal Henderson still use 
it. He's a smart guy. He literally wrote the book on building scalable 
websites. And when he left Flickr and started Tiny Speck they used PHP.

Let's face it - a language's popularity is based on way more factors 
than its synatx. In fact, in some ways I'd opine that syntax is probably 
one of the least important factors (I'm willing to be argued with on 
that but I'm trying to make a point).