As fun and easy as it is to take potshots at PHP, and as much as I am against personally working on any medium-sized or larger project that is written in PHP, I

As fun and easy as it is to take potshots at PHP, and as much as I am against personally working on any medium-sized or larger project that is written in PHP, I feel like a bit of a hypocrite because I probably owe my career to PHP. One "feature" of PHP that really no other language or platform has touched is the vast amount of pre-existing software that is out there written in it that you can quickly and easily tweak to suit your needs. This is how I got started programming in the mid-to-late 90's as a kid in high school. There was some auction software written in PHP, and I setup an auction site and spent tons of nights making small tweaks to the software to make it a really cool and fully-featured auction site. Nobody listed a damn thing on the site, of course, but I was hooked. - Bad habits can be unlearned (I've unlearned enough to know) - You can go back and learn CS basics - You can gain an appreciation for well-designed languages and tradeoffs in design But it is really, really hard to replicate that awesome feeling when you start out with some substantial piece of software and are able to incrementally make it better - making bigger and bigger changes as you learn more and become confident. The fact that so much open-source PHP software exists, the development cycle is so short, and it is so quick and easy to host makes it pretty good for that. Honestly, as much as I like Java now, if I'd started out trying to use it, who knows what I'd be doing now. As crappy as the language is, it is good enough at a lot of things. You won't "kill" PHP by making a better language any more than you would beat CraigsList by designing a better UI.