Learning Curves for Different Programming Languages

I used PHP 15 years ago for making my first web developments.

The problem with PHP is that it's like everyone's bitch. You can do whatever you want with the language. It really allows you to abuse it, and has some of the naugthiest features a language can have.

On those years, if you wanted to fire a simple script, to make a SQL Query on MySQL, extract some information and output a XLS file, you could choose between PHP, Perl, Java, C, C++, VB... So PHP was the only real option. Today we have Python, GoLang, (Ruby... bla bla bla), all of them have rich libraries and have great features too, but doesnt allow you to make a GoTo Statement (avoid Global Variables, and so on...), and well, are brilliant languages (Im talking to you Python)

Sidenote, I still remember fighting a day long with a bug in my code just to discover it was actually a PHP Interpreter bug, and I still remember how much the Language changed around the year 2002 when they simply stopped to be compatible (they tried very hard to transform the language from a shitty one to a decent one), today is not a naughty language as the one I used, but still I see it both as an offensive language, and with gratitude because when I was 16 and had my HostWay webpage I had two choices for my webpage: PHP or Perl, and damn PHP really introduced me to the world of programming.

TLDR; Just ranting.

Since when did monads become a synonym for Haskell?

Everyone seems to be focusing on the PHP vs Haskell thing and seem to be missing the other points. Here's a summary:

Callbacks in Javascript make you feel more productive, but in fact you become less productive.

Design patterns in Java don't actually make much of a difference in productivity, but you think they do.

Templates in C++ seem hard but with a big payoff, but they don't accelerate productivity.

Unit tests in python do make you more productive, though it doesn't feel like it. Decorators on the other hand do not make you more productive, but they make you feel more productive.

In Lisp, macros accelerate both the feeling of productivity and actual productivity.

In Haskell, once your brain stops hurting you become productive. When you learn monads, your brain will hurt for a bit. While your brain hurts, your productivity declines. Once you get past understanding monads, your productivity grows at roughly the same rate as it did before you knew monads (in other words, monads do not accelerate productivity). Then you learn category theory, which has no bearing on your productivity but makes you feel less productive.

PHP is a bit of a cheap shot, stating that you won't become more productive over time but you will always feel super productive.

PHP is full of problems that lead directly to security vulnerabilities if you aren't constantly aware of them and very careful when writing your code. So when someone who doesn't know those problems (most people) "hacks together" something that "just works", it is almost always providing a backdoor into that server. Once you do learn a little, you find that every scripting language is just as easy to work with as PHP (if not easier) and much safer. So why use PHP over perl or python or ruby or even javascript? They just aren't compiling into apache for no reason.