Taking PHP Seriously
I find the virtues quite uncompelling, take for example<p>&gt;First, state. Every web request starts from a completely blank slate.<p>Except for, you know, when you don&#x27;t want to reinitialize everything everytime someone makes a new request. There are tons of things that you only need to run once.<p>&gt;I claim that PHP’s simpler “think; edit; reload the page” cycle makes developers more productive. Over the course of a long and complex software project’s life cycle, these productivity gains compound.<p>I cannot disagree enough with the conclusion he draws from the quick feedback loop in PHP. I do PHP in my day job, because that&#x27;s what our codebase is in, but recently I finally got the opportunity to use Haskell for a side project. The feedback-loop might be slower (honestly not by much, automatic reloading is a thing in almost any framework), but I&#x27;m a zillion times more confident in my code, because you are able to encode so much logic in the type system, meaning the compiler will catch whatever. Contrast this with PHP, where I&#x27;d almost have to visit every branch of code when I alter something because of it&#x27;s many weird behaviours. <i>Particularly</i> when refactoring code, which you often end up doing while hasing something out.<p>Also, PHP works at a quite coarse granularity of concurrency. A thread per web request only? As soon as you want to do something more advanced, you are forced out into the many patchwork solutions (wanna do async? queue that shit).<p>Sure, a lot of people have done a lot of quite cool projects in PHP, but I would much more benefit that to the lower barrier to entry - heck PHP was my first language and I made a CMS from scratch without even knowing much of what I was doing.<p>That said, it has come a long way, and something like HHVM&#x2F;Hack definitely helps a bunch! I just think the pros in this blog post are quite weird and IMHO incorrect.<p>&lt;&#x2F;rant&gt;