PHP 5.5

But isn't that the point of PHP? Removing stuff creates version instability. If you want something lower level then there's lots of alternatives.

Great response, i love the PHP documentation. Writing clean PHP is not hard, its just easy to write bad PHP. In general it is one of the simplest languages to get started with and it'll stick with you a very long time because of its flexibility.

The PHP team does take speed seriously and just about every minor release gets a little bit faster, sometimes alot, like 20% faster. I'm not even including stuff like the opcode caches that are built in now like APC or Zend Optimizer+. Lots of times, minor releases also get more efficient with memory usage too. If you are not happy with the speed, PHP is an open source project and you can contribute patches to speed it up.

Documentation gets fixed all the time. PHP has been historically known as having one of the best docs and the docs have contributed to its success. As with the source code, the docs are open to contributions if you feel the need to modify or add something.

That's funny you say PHP can't scale. Facebook, Yahoo, Etsy and a whole lot of other big PHP shops get more traffic than most of us will ever see in a few life times. So, PHP scales. Even pre-Hiphop Facebook got more traffic than most of us will will ever see. Many times scaling is more about architecture design/implementation than language. App Engine is all about scaling and PHP runs on it. Oh by the way, at scale, every language is a data center toaster oven.

PHP people aren't mad that people are leaving. They are happy that it is still the #1 language used for web development.

The only valid argument you have is the mixed methods and stuff. It would be cool to fix, but it would mean seriously breaking the API and would cause a lot of confusion. Every minor release breaks the API a little bit and people are unhappy. So, this might never change. I don't see it as a big deal because if you are a great programmer, you know the quirks of your language and they don't throw you off. Also, there is auto-completion and docs for you to look up things if you don't know stuff off the top of your head.

It is true that lots of developers have left PHP, but it is a falsehood that everybody is moving away from PHP. If that was the case, PHP wouldn't be running on 75% of the public facing web hosts out there. There would be a business incentive (because they are using another language) to get PHP off their box. They could devote those resources to the new language they are using. The 75% number shows that their is no mass exodus, but definitely evidence not everybody is using PHP.

Oh, by the way, PHP is open source so you can help contribute to its continued success if you like. If somehow you have already contributed, don't stop till the work is done.

> And what I still don't see is anything saying they are taking their performance problems seriously.

Hmmm, you have heard about PHP-FPM right? And the built-in APC cache? And HipHop?

Besides, in my experience performance problems will arise with other parts of your architecture a lot sooner that your application code (e.g. database if you're not clever about load balancing and caching), regardless of what language you are using. Network calls and disc I/O are a lot more expensive than CPU cycles in your app code.

> Still nothing saying they are fixing their documentation.

Define fixing. It works fine for me as-is.

> Nothing addressing their hodgepodge of legacy code and mixed methods of implementing features.

Again, define addressing. Deprecating? They're doing that. What else do you suggest, breaking existing popular applications by removing legacy code that you find offensive? Let me know how that works out (see Perl 6, Python 3...).

> Its like their upset that people have moved on,

Define people. Seriously.

> but instead of providing a better core for people to build products on they keep adding chrome to the fringes of the language hoping to get more people sucked into developing for it only to realize that once they do anything of significant size in PHP they will need to do a full rewrite into a language that can actually scale or turn to a PHP to C++ lexer to actually get a product that doesn't also server as a Data center toaster oven.

Wow, that needs a comma.

I hate these ranty posts attacking open source projects. Have you any idea how many hours of dev time went into PHP 5.5, free of charge? If they work that hard to build something this significant for the community free of charge, the least they deserve is your respect. In the meantime, feel free to go use Scala/Ruby/Node/whatever excites you.

Could you be more specific? What's your performance problem? Where do you think the documentation is bad? In my experience these are two areas where PHP is doing pretty well.

I share your reservations about legacy API (the naming scheme and parameter order of many standard PHP functions should have been cleaned up years ago) and I think adding yet another slew of OO sugar coating isn't going to encourage developers to write better PHP apps, quite the contrary.

> Its like their upset that people have moved on, but instead of providing a better core for people to build products on they keep adding chrome to the fringes of the language hoping to get more people sucked into developing for it only to realize that once they do anything of significant size in PHP they will need to do a full rewrite into a language that can actually scale or turn to a PHP to C++ lexer to actually get a product that doesn't also server as a Data center toaster oven.

Wow. This big run-on sentence about not being able to do "anything significant in PHP" is just not true, and that's me parsing it generously. Big projects can and do run on PHP. It's a valid choice. If you're using PHP for genome sequencing analysis, you're not using the right tool to begin with - but the same applies to pretty much any other web language as well.