PHP is much better than what you think

* The sample is not representative. It's the top 1 million according to alexa.

* The percentage cited is "x percent of all pages that we can determine are..." which skews heavily in favor of PHP since PHP exposes it's version by default at least in older versions while other languages such as ruby don't. The percentage of pages that turned up as "unknown" is not listed.

* They don't give an error margin for their stats.

* Same is true for the Content-Management Sites. It skews heavily in favor of wordpress because lots of sites do have a wordpress blog installed somewhere.

I do acknowledge that PHP is probably leading by market share, but I'm not convinced that it's as pronounced as Fabien wants us to believe.

Composer is a nice step forward, but it's still behind of what bundler can do. One of it's main problems is that it created a completely new package format, so you need a new package repo - now they're at a respectable 1900 packages. Bundler uses the regular rubygems packages and has the full list of over 40.000 gems available. All tools that used to work with gems still work. There's also a couple of features that it's missing (local overrides for development, binstubs, etc.) but I guess that's just catch-up work. That the commandline interface looks plain ugly is probably just personal preference (heck, why do I need to call 'php composer.phar' instead of 'composer'?) Last but least, it's pretty much a feature-wise copy of bundler - that's maybe "on par" but not "the most awesome and best thing in existence".

So yes, PHP has taken huge steps forward but it's still ugly. You can get shit done if you know your way around and you can write amazing and elegant software in it - it's just harder than it needs to be.

But Y?

    function Y($F) {
        $func =  function ($f) { return $f($f); };
        return $func(function ($f) use($F) {
                return $F(function ($x) use($f) {
                $ff = $f($f);
                return $ff($x);
            });
        });
    }

Good developers mostly aren't available to small shops like mine; I don't have anything to get them in. I must do with young, cheap developers anyway. Young cheap developers knows only one language, to be chosen among PHP or Java (that's just the way it is).

So I'm getting a whole lot of interns coming in for two months at a time, and they mostly know nothing but PHP. so we make them code PHP.

They built a nice application in a few months for the quarter of the money I would need to get an half-decent developer. Getting more done with less money, from a business perspective that's the only thing that counts.

Damn, you just described my job perfectly.

"Test framework? What's that? Sounds like it'd take up too much valuable programmer time. PS enjoy walking on eggshells whenever you try to change something because there's no regressions."

(╯°□°)╯┻━┻

If PHP wouldn't be such a wide-spread problem, people wouldn't have to spend so much time fighting against it.

One positive thing: His post was didn't kill my spell checker, that's an impressive achievement for a PHP developer. You don't see coherent sentences that often from those people.