I recently left a job that was focused on developing PHP with a very different philosophy from how I would approach it. I see PHP as a growing and evolving obj

I recently left a job that was focused on developing PHP with a very different philosophy from how I would approach it. I see PHP as a growing and evolving object-oriented programming language. I see it as a language to which design patterns can be applied, for which structured designs can be applied, and which has improved which each major release. I also am keenly aware that it has a legacy and a reputation of being something else, a rapid prototyping environment for programmers that don't have exposure to other systems, and take it as a glorified template language for HTML. But I don't see it that way, I look at projects like http://reactphp.org/ http://reactphp.org/ which brings Node.js-style evented programming, native support for ZMQ and websocket, and makes PHP a great language for developing web workers. (Though with some caveats, for instance, I use PHP for my own application because it's dependent on the cpanel xmlapi which is provided in PHP). But that really is my point, you can abstract PHP from it's humble web roots and be a productive programmer in it.