1) PHP 5.3 takes care of name spaces and late static binding for the static inheritance problem (two of the most frequently sited complaints about the language). 5.3 is available now, and will be production ready shortly. If there are good reasons to use other language (which I’m sure there are), these aren’t it.

2) PHP treats everything as an associative array even though it might be a list. So what? Do we really need two or more data types to accomplish essentially the same thing? Lack of unnecessary complexity is probably what attracts all the inexperienced developers to PHP. Benchmark python lists and PHP arrays. Even with psyco and no op-code caching, PHP is faster.

3) Bad code examples don’t equate to a bad language. PHP makes the easy stuff easy, and therefore attracts inexperienced developers. This doesn’t mean that it’s incapable of scalable and maintainable code. From an architectural level, bad code can be written in any language.

4) As for lambdas: every language doesn’t need to be functional, procedural, OO, and declarative. A programming language provides a tool for a job. If you’re looking for a swiss-army knife, Python is probably one of the better choices. this is not what PHP was designed for.

5) Having things evaluate to boolean is a plus not a minus. The behavior of ruby in this regard (evaluating if(x) where x is zero) seems rather broken coming from — well, every language I’ve ever used. In what case did PHP not evaluate an expression exactly as would be logically expected? I haven’t run into the scenario yet.

What about the fact that it’s lacking method overloading, multiple inheritance, class redefinition, and nested classes (all for better or worse)? Or the fact that PHP has an ideal architecture of page controller discreet requests versus a front-controller long running process architecture, and how this impacts REST, object persistence, and scalability? What about the fact that PHP actually implements method and property visibility, whereas this isn’t something that Python does cleanly, and is something that Ruby seems to have gotten totally confused about? What about the fact that PHP performance doing like-for-like tasks almost always significantly blows away similar scripted languages (though, what’s with the slow object creation?)

Aren’t these things a little bit more significant?

I’ve used Eclipse. Now, you respond to the “you never know what order the arguments are in” part of my post, and Eclipse does have a type-ahead feature that reminds you of the order of arguments in the standard PHP library, but that doesn’t mean the language doesn’t suffer from that failure. In fact, I would say if your argument is “Use an IDE” then that’s a larger failure of PHP.

Specifically, you mention organizing code and SQL, which is easily doable without an IDE.

IDEs like Eclipse train you to code within the framework of Eclipse. I’d rather code with a standard editor (I use TextMate on a mac and Emacs or Vim everywhere else) and be able to work without those features.

Download an IDE please. I like to use Eclipse — PDT, the IDE comes with the PHP Language Model. With such an IDE you can organize your code and your SQL so it shouldn’t look hideous.

A few days back a colleague forwarded me a link to an article entitled Attacking PHP. It goes through a list of the problems associated with PHP. And based on my past experiences dealing with PHP in corporate environments, the analysis in that article…

Thanks, although I’m more impressed to know someone was using my specious reasoning as basis for an argument!

Fair enough. My intent wasn’t to bash Mono, just to explain why I don’t use it. If Mono makes you happy, or makes you money, or both, then more power to you. It seems my post here did come off as inflammatory, I didn’t mean for it to be a whole “I hate Mono or .NET” thing, but it seems people take it that way. No hard feelings.