PHP vs. Node.js: the Battle For Developer Mind Share

snydeq writes: Simplicity vs. closures, speed of coding vs. raw speed — InfoWorld's Peter Wayner takes a look at how PHP and Node.js stack up against each other. "It's a classic Hollywood plot: the battle between two old friends who went separate ways. Often the friction begins when one pal sparks an interest in what had always been the other pal's unspoken domain. In the programming language version of this movie, it's the introduction of Node.js that turns the buddy flick into a grudge match: PHP and JavaScript, two partners who once ruled the Internet together but now duke it out for the mind share of developers."

Comments

Not the same use cases

[Rhaban]

These two languages each have their own use, and to chose between them you should not ask which is better but which is closer to my use case.

PHP, for all its problems, is still a very useful language for developing web sites, if only for the quantity of tools (frameworks, cmss, etc) available and their quality (far from every php tool is good, but you can easily fond a quality tool for each category: symfony 2 is a very good oo framework, drupal and ez publish are good cms...).

Node is younger, and does not have such a toolset. Sailsjs is a good framework but far from mature.
But it does what php can’t: a nodejs application is its own server and runs continuously, instead of being a set of scripts that must reload everything with each request.
It makes it a very good language for real-time uses, like the back-end of a small multiplayer game.

Re:Before reading TFA ...

[sanosuke001]

Any dynamically typed language that isn't just used for scripting (your perl is probably okay) should be taken out to pasture and shot. JavaScript used to be okay; then application development came and it should go die in a fire.