Beauty is subjective. I don't think Ruby is beautiful, I much prefer Python. The difference is that PHP was not really designed for the type of use it gets. It

Beauty is subjective. I don't think Ruby is beautiful, I much prefer Python. The difference is that PHP was not really designed for the type of use it gets. It began as one guy's hobby project and somehow snowballed to power some of the biggest sites on the internet without really having the backing necessary to support that position. PHP maintainers have been desperately attempting to backport the type of functionality that Serious Business people need, but it's never going to be as organized or clean as something that was conceived to serve that purpose. If you care about code quality, choosing PHP already puts you at a disadvantage. It's not that people can't write adequate PHP code, or that people can't write ugly code in other languages. It's just that most other languages give you a pretty healthy head start over PHP when it comes to cohesion of organization, presence of important language features, etc.