Earlier quoted context omitted.
When you talk about PHP being too "web centric [... and] just not flexible enough", how do you mean? Would less web-centric mean being useful in making desktop apps? What other dimensions of flexibility do you have in mind?
"Would less web-centric mean being useful in making desktop apps?" yes that and bots, and God knows what other back end programs; PHP is decent at the one thing it does (way better than Perl 5 - the thing it replaced), but why limit yourself to just being able to code only web apps? to me that's PHP's biggest weakness, but again that's just my opinion to me what I still don't understand is why people aren't willing t…
I've been using PHP almost exclusively when doing stuff for the web, but frequently feel that I want to pick up both Ruby and Python. I still haven't actually done it yet.
It isn't a lack of community or the presence of jerks that keeps me from getting there. A big part of it is that it seems to take a bit of a different infrastructure to get started. This may be somewhat driven by misunderstandings.
If I want to incorporate a great library that someone wrote in PHP, I drop the source in and start linking to it. File system operations; I know those. For others, say Ruby, it seems like I'd need to run an installer that grabs files and places them somewhere. Then I type out a text file and run another script that builds my database. I don't know how that clock works, so I don't feel comfortable basing my schedule on it yet.
It seems like an awesome way to do things, and I'm excited about getting into it, but I'm making time tradeoffs between (learning another language and how to manage apps) and (day-job and building project ideas that I love).
The key is going to be to shift (learning another language ... etc) onto the project stack.