Software in 2014

Yes, php is more checklist complete than it was a few years ago, but there's still quite a bit of ugliness in the language. For example, you mention

    * closures (including support for $this)

I looked at this a couple days ago, because closures make a lot of problems easier. However, PHP's handling of closures is more than a bit ugly and hackish. Yes, it supports $this, but this was done after the initial release, doesn't give much confidence in how it's handled under the hood. Plus, you have some real syntactic ugliness; in order to scope variables into a closure, you have to declare them again with a now overloaded keyword -- use -- with them passed by value by default. Closures in pretty much any other language, you just put them in the scope of your function and the compiler/interpreter knows how to handle them without any hints from you.

While php is less bad now, there's still quite a bit of ugliness in it due to its tendency to just spackle new parts on without any regard for what the end result looks and functions like. The php team needs to make a concerted effort to clean the language of its rough points, even if it breaks backwards compatibility, otherwise, useful ideas will continue to be hampered by an overbloated ugly core.

My two cents: the ease of use of a platform is inversely proportional to the speed at which business needs move to remain competitive using it. The more rapidly business needs change, the less time a stable, elegant interface to the platform on which that business is based has to stabilize.

Business needs on the server side do not change terrifically fast. The things we needed to do on the server side has certainly changed over the past ten years, but the changes have been gradual. I struggle to name a single server-side upheaval as violent as the release of iOS or the demise of flash was to client-side. As a result, things are pretty well-understood. Thanks to POSIX and *nix, the operating system interface has been effectively static for at least a decade. Concurrency is hard to wrap your head around as a developer, but once you do you find that the actual tools you use have achieved something resembling stability. Persistence is one place that's actually seeing interesting changes with various database platforms coming into prominence, but if all else fails, you can get a decent amount of mileage out of good old SQL.

Client side programming, UI programming in particular, is where an application's most immediate value resides. As a result, it's where the most competition and development takes place, and so its interfaces and programming techniques are most changeable. Consumer-facing platforms come and go at a consumer-market pace. Platform providers like Google, Apple, and the W3C are constantly struggling to keep ahead of the manic pace both of of consumers' expectations regarding features and businesses' demand for capabilities. As a result, there are no time-honored abstractions like the Unix file system, or SQL, but rather a roiling soup of constant upheaval.

What's the takeaway? Rather than bemoaning the lack of stability in the client programming world, come to terms with the fact that you as a developer are going to have speed up. So long as client-side magic and consistency is a source of competitive advantage for applications, the state of the client-side programming art will continue to change rapidly. Things will get easier and harder as time goes by, but change and inconsistency are the natural order of this world.

Call me crazy, but PHP JSON manipulation is maybe second to node.

Hear, hear. This is just one man's opinion, but Windows Phone 8 turned out to be a shockingly good mobile OS, the terrible market share of which is a combination of being late to the game and being a Microsoft product. It's a little sad that Microsoft's bad/monopolistic reputation of 10-15 years ago still hurts the products it releases today.

Altogether Windows Phone 8 is pretty phenomenal. The UI is head and shoulders above Android and iOS, and the perfect lockstep integration with C#/Visual Studio is a pleasure for development.

App store review times? It's generally 5 business days.