I Like PHP

Yes. it's rather fucking good.

> Show me one popular web programming language which has a full page, up to date, with examples and user comments and version incompatibility info, per function.

Have you ever read Python's documentation? In the last ten years?

Python's docs have a complete and readable description of the language[0] including its data model and the various core protocols[1], it has a number of quality howtos and guides[2] a complete documentation of how to use C-level APIs[3][4], a pretty good and complete tutorial for beginners[5], a complete, well written and exhaustive changelog with examples[6] drilling down to C API changes[7] and most stdlib modules are extensively documented with examples and links to to the actual source code for the module[8] and versioning information[9], with the whole documentation being heavily hyperlinked and permalinked (every section, subsectio, sub-sub-section, class, method, function or constant getting its very own anchor) linking to its own source[10]. And just in case you want to contribute, or even just want the documentation offline, it's included in the source tree and trivially compiled to not only an HTML version, but a PDF (via latex), plain text or EPUB one as well[11]. Hell, the documentation is so extensive there's even documentation on documenting[12].

Oh, and the documentation is available for every single version of Python past, present or future (for which it could be found anyway, as far as older versions of the language are concerned), including bugfix releases[13]. And then it goes the extra mile by letting you run examples to ensure nobody broke them[14].

As to "full page per function", I really don't think you need that. And the PHP doc comments are closer to youtube comments than to anything worth reading, I simply can not see them as anything but liabilities.

[0] http://docs.python.org/py3k/reference/index.html

[1] http://docs.python.org/py3k/reference/datamodel.html

[2] http://docs.python.org/py3k/howto/index.html

[3] http://docs.python.org/py3k/c-api/index.html

[4] http://docs.python.org/py3k/extending/index.html

[5] http://docs.python.org/py3k/tutorial/index.html

[6] http://docs.python.org/py3k/whatsnew/3.2.html

[7] http://docs.python.org/py3k/whatsnew/3.2.html#build-and-c-ap...

[8] http://docs.python.org/py3k/library/collections.html]

[9] http://docs.python.org/py3k/library/collections.html#collect...

[10] http://docs.python.org/py3k/_sources/library/heapq.txt

[11] http://hg.python.org/cpython-fullhistory/file/tip/Doc

[12] http://docs.python.org/documenting/index.html

[13] http://www.python.org/doc/versions/

[14] http://sphinx.pocoo.org/ext/doctest.html

(the lack of markup in HN comments is getting seriously annoying)

Most web apps are ultimately more like shell scripts or console applications than desktop/mobile applications. It's no coincidence that most of the former are written in C or C-like scripting languages, and most of the latter are written in OO languages running on .NET or Java. Your basic operations are "print some stuff", "read from a file or database" and various sorting, slicing and text-processing tasks inbetween, all of which are done well by PHP, Perl, C and so forth. ActiveRecord, TableDataGateway etc. are great patterns for data access, but sometimes mysql_query("SELECT foo FROM bar WHERE x = y") is just so much simpler that it becomes the better option.

The lack of OO makes PHP's documentation much more browseable, and makes code more readable in certain situations. If I look at your code and I see a function I don't know, I just google it. If I see a method invocation on an object, I need to figure out the type of the object (not easy in a dynamic language) and google the combination of class and method name, which often fails to return a result (has anyone ever managed to find anything useful in the Zend Framework docs?). PHP isn't the only data point for this argument - I think it's probably why Drupal handily beats ZF, Symfony etc. in terms of popularity, despite the superior OO architecture of the latter. You can google pretty much any API function and get an accurate result, which you just can't do with ZF (which lacks documentation at the method level, and what documentation that exists is buried in some Doxygen-based site which is made impervious to search by the use of frames). I'm also reminded of Linus's argument against OO in the Linux kernel - when you're all about the patch files, you need clear function names to understand what's going on without massive amounts of context. Drupal's rate of contributions probably exceeds that of other frameworks for similar reasons.

Of course, this bias against OO is also what makes PHP a bad choice for certain things, and this is why plenty of devs hate it. I honestly don't know if, in the final analysis, this makes PHP a good or bad choice. It probably depends too much on the problem you're trying to solve for there to be a simple answer.

Do you have a static analyzer or something like it that enforces the no-circular-dependencies rule, or is it just a procedural thing?

I've done a little C and Java web stuff where my code printed HTML output - ugly. CFML and PHP mingle HTML and code together - also ugly, but better. I can't fathom any way NOT to mix them but would love to have some resources to see what I'm missing. I know there needs to be something better. Thanks.