> "With PHP ... there is no template language to learn" While this might be nice for the beginner getting started, it's also a brilliant way to encourage bad h

> "With PHP ... there is no template language to learn" While this might be nice for the beginner getting started, it's also a brilliant way to encourage bad habits in people who want to turn it into a career. Leaving the "PHP is a templating language" pedantry aside, this 'benefit' encourages the aspiring developer to not bother separating concerns. Just go ahead and throw HTML into PHP and vice-versa; throw all your database logic, SQL, and connection details into those self-same files that are being served; leave XSS vulnerabilities in all your code because you probably weren't told to wrap your output in `htmlspecialchars` or whatever. Shit like that needs to stop. But as the barrier to entry is so low, the same mistakes will be repeated ad infinitum. I would love to figure out a way to introduce a beginner coder to a language, without scaring them off, but without being lax with security and separation of concerns. That being said, I do agree about frameworks, but I also think that this is because there is no "one true framework" for PHP (Zend, Symfony and Cake don't fit the bill, I don't think). There's no Rails, or Django, and there's no Sinatra or Flask as a minimal alternative. PHP is dire for framework development, not because of the language, but because so many groups of developers are trying to re-invent the same framework (but with their own idea of what 'the PHP way' should be - Javatastic bloat like Symfony and Zend, or Rails mimicry with no real understanding of PHP not being anything like Ruby), treading the same ground over and over again, when there could be more collaboration to provide the definitive offering. If that were to change, and for the better, I might extend my argument to say that such a framework may be a great way to learn PHP, just like Rails was a great way for many to learn Ruby.