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That is good advice, but what will PHP teach someone exactly? I don't believe it has anything interesting to offer someone who has learnt a number of languages.

That is good advice, but what will PHP teach someone exactly? I don't believe it has anything interesting to offer someone who has learnt a number of languages. All it has going for it is that it has low barrier to entry and is a commodity in terms of it's developer and low-end hosting. I consider these as good selling points for PHP but that is all I think it has going for it. I think the social ecosystem of a language is very important, and I think there's more information and quality libraries in Ruby at the moment, so the popularity vote for PHP is a bit moot nowadays for web application development. I try not to be a snob, I try to use 'the best tool for the job' but I don't think PHP is a very good tool. And I'm sorry but as someone who uses these tools all day I do not consider it a good tool.

Ixiaus 16y ago
I agree with this strongly. I was a PHP programmer for quite some time, a good one at that. I started itching to move away from PHP beacause I knew of its weaknesses and the expressive beauty of python. Long story short, I am now a web application programmer that solely uses python. The argument that language choice doesn't matter, it's the engineer that matters, is very valid. I'm an excellent engineer in both and produce high quality working code in both. But python is clearer, more fun, and right.
j_baker 16y ago
"I try not to be a snob, I try to use 'the best tool for the job' but I don't think PHP is a very good tool." That was my point actually. :-) Just because you don't want to use PHP doesn't make you a snob.