Google Compute Engine available for everyone, App Engine adds PHP

Thanks, will fix :)

This has been reiterated over and over again and is just a bunch of fluff. It doesn't explain why PHP is bad with examples and while I know there are a ton of sites that do, many people including myself have used PHP successfully in the past.

I will refer you to an even better quote: 'Software engineers are becoming like "photographers". They spend so much time arguing over the right lens type, focal length, camera body, flash and other sets of tools until they discover they've already missed their opportunity at taking some great shots. Software devs are now doing the same thing, arguing over the tools they use, wasting precious time instead of getting work done.'

Really? I've heard all these ridiculous analogies but for some reason no one's every written up actual PHP examples to explain why this is true (Most of the examples in that link are weird things I've never seen anyone actually do).

I've spent the last 8 months writing a fairly complex application as a REST API entirely in PHP and I can't say that I've ever run into any weird scenarios where I think to myself, "Damn, this is sure it like have a hammer but with claws on both sides."

My code is very OOP relying heavily on my own classes and not quite as much on the built-in PHP functions. I have also found that when I need to do something odd that there's usually a pre-built function already in PHP for doing it.

So if you're going to bash PHP at least throw out some actual PHP code and explain why it's bad (and make sure to point out that there's no other really good way to do it in PHP using you're own classes/methods).

I recently left a job that was focused on developing PHP with a very different philosophy from how I would approach it.

I see PHP as a growing and evolving object-oriented programming language. I see it as a language to which design patterns can be applied, for which structured designs can be applied, and which has improved which each major release.

I also am keenly aware that it has a legacy and a reputation of being something else, a rapid prototyping environment for programmers that don't have exposure to other systems, and take it as a glorified template language for HTML.

But I don't see it that way, I look at projects like http://reactphp.org/ which brings Node.js-style evented programming, native support for ZMQ and websocket, and makes PHP a great language for developing web workers. (Though with some caveats, for instance, I use PHP for my own application because it's dependent on the cpanel xmlapi which is provided in PHP). But that really is my point, you can abstract PHP from it's humble web roots and be a productive programmer in it.

I think you would be hard pressed to find anyone praise Wordpress code if they've had to work with it, apart from actual contributors to the WP core of course. Wordpress is popular almost entirely because it's easy to deploy and has a vast ecosystem of plugins and themes which mostly just work.

You could probably build a competing CMS in, say Laravel 4, replace the plugin system with Composer packages or something similar, use Twig and PDO out of the box, and have a much more elegant and modern system that probably almost no one would use, unless the user experience was just as brainless as it is with Wordpress.

Which is also one reason why, I think, despite all the arguments in their favor, static site generators (which do get mentioned now and then as an alternative to WP) still have a while to go before they're ready for mainstream use. It's not enough that it's well coded, it has to be easy too, and easy wins out over pretty every time.