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Comment by kamac | Hacker News Reader

Great. I was looking forward to a good alternative with decent syntax to PHP, and now that ASP.NET can run on linux, there's nothing that stops people from using it over PHP.

Honestly I wonder what reason would one have to choose PHP over ASP.NET for their apps in a few months / years time.

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Same reason people choose PHP over Ruby on Rails, Node.js, Compojure, Yesod, or the billion of other choices available today: because so many small business have their hosting via super-cheap linux boxes that you only get FTP access to.

Cheap hosting and PHP do go well together, but when you work at a company that has a lot of stuff written in one language, and the whole team is experienced with that same language, there needs to be a legitimate reason to change the whole technology stack. Because it's "cool" or not is generally not a good enough reason - unless it gets to the point where it isn't supported anymore, you can't find employees, the community has dried up, there's nothing new happening with the language, etc. But PHP, despite the problems it does have, it suffers from none of those things. So I don't see a mass exodus happening any time soon.

Completely agree. It's very exciting, and extremely cool but in terms of a business decision for larger technology teams, it will very much be like node.js, it's a similar thing, runs on cheap linux boxes and can do everything PHP can but it's taken time for companies to get it in where it "fits"

You could say the same about PHP vs Ruby, and would have been able to for a long time. Yet, people still use PHP. I suspect stuff like Wordpress has a big influence on that.

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