Here's the thing that always grates a little bit for me about these posts: I don't have a choice. I've worked at a couple of organisation where there are hund

Here's the thing that always grates a little bit for me about these posts: I don't have a choice. I've worked at a couple of organisation where there are hundreds of thousands of lines of code written in PHP. It's been there for years. It does its job and - from a business perspective - it does its job pretty damn well. And I get paid to keep it ticking, and to improve it. Not to rewrite it to fit my personal tastes. In my spare time I've played with Haskell, Rust, C, Lisp, assembly languages, and I enjoy them. I dearly miss some of the more functional aspects from these languages every time I write PHP. I work with a large PHP codebase right now (amongst others) and while there are a great many technical benefits I could wring from it in another language, runtime, or environment, a lot of the changes needed to get there would be prolonged, painful, and would provide no noticeable business value. I'm somewhat reminded of Python, where there is the concept of a "pythonic way" of doing things. There is very much a "PHP way" of doing things, a "${LANGUAGE} way" of doing things, and of course an "${ORG-SPECIFIC} way". I'm also somewhat amused at Rails as a frequent comparison. I've also worked with Rails, and I hated it. It was quite some time ago, I'd probably enjoy it if I tried again. But I will try to remember in future that opinions formed from bad experiences need to be reviewed in light of the time elapsed since then, and my own personal/professional growth as well. More generally, when I hear a developer (in my own office ;P) espousing the view that "${LANGUAGE} is garbage", I assign more meaning to the fact that they choose to make that statement than I do to any particular view of the language in question.