The PHP Singularity

An anonymous reader writes "Jeff Atwood at Coding Horror has a post about the awfulness of PHP — or, rather, a post about posts about the awfulness of PHP. He points out that PHP has been the whipping boy for the developer community for years, and while everybody seems happy to complain about it, nobody seems willing to do anything about it. He writes, 'From my perspective, the point of all these "PHP is broken" rants is not just to complain, but to help educate and potentially warn off new coders starting new codebases. Some fine, even historic work has been done in PHP despite the madness, unquestionably. But now we need to work together to fix what is broken. The best way to fix the PHP problem at this point is to make the alternatives so outstanding that the choice of the better hammer becomes obvious.'"

Comments

Choose Ruby!

[rubypossum]

Modern ruby is the cleanest, most elegant, expressive and fastest of the big 4. It offers a bigger standard library (gems(40,000) vs cpan (25,000) vs pypi (1,022)), a wider selection of interpreters and platforms (IronRuby, JRuby, Rubinius,Cardinal, etc), not to mention much better documentation and educational resources.

Ruby is used by a wider group of people and in a wider area than it ever has been. Also, there's a lot of other really great languages out there you should consider before you idolize one language as perfect. Erlang and Haskell are amazing and certainly worth checking out. Not to mention node and the javascript revolutionaries (which some people abhor.) A lot of people get stuck on their first language I encourage you to branch out and try Ruby at least. You'll find a much different language than you seem to think.