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Try writing a web app in Luminus (Clojure) or Phoenix (Elixir). I guarantee you will be enlightened. The danger, however, is that you may lose your tolerance for OOP languages thereafter.

Elixir/Phoenix is great and promising but you don't get everything you have in Symfony out of the box. For example the EEx template system is behind Twig (I especially miss inheritance) and Auth/Autorization is kind of a mess.

The ecosystem is also smaller and deployment in Elixir is still a work in progress (mismatch between Mix and Erlang releases).

Yeah because inheritance was always such a great idea :D

Well as Jinga2 and Twig showed, it is for templates ;) Compared to traditional nested includes.

Maybe you don't realize this because you haven't studied them, but "bloated framework" is unknown in Go or Clojure or Rust. Each of these languages tends towards minimal frameworks. Clojure, in particular, is known for its composeable libraries which make frameworks a bit of a sideshow for that community. Go is known for having enough in its standard library that some aspects of frameworks are not needed.

About this:

"because it takes time and energy away from actually solving useful practical problems,"

You can not know that without first studying other languages. You might find that you are 10x more productive in Rust. You can only find out by studying Rust.

But you bound the conversation in ways that I didn't when you write:

"in the web community"

I feel that developers can learn a great deal if they study projects that don't necessarily have anything to do with Web programming. Nothing in the article or on this page necessarily restricts us to only considering Web programming.

"It's not about the tool, it's how you use it."

I wouldn't use a hammer to go fishing. Nor would I use a saw to turn a screw. Nor would I use a frying pan to tune a piano. It helps to learn about a lot of different kinds of tools, because over the course of your career, you might be confronted with diverse tasks.

Why was this downvoted? What in this comment is untrue?

> I continue to be baffled by this sort of "novelty-chasing" --- do I really care about "interesting new places" or "interesting new ideas"?

Is this a troll? No you don't need to care. Feel free to go live off roots and tubers in the forest. Or write some COBOL. Anything is justified if you're putting "interesting new ideas" in quotes.

I worked with PHP full-time for several years and energetically rationalized away the time I invested into building that expertise. I liked it, I was getting things done, it would help me get jobs in the future. Utter nonsense. What a waste of my life.

Eventually I snapped out of it. Turns out you can just move to places Silicon Valley, there are jobs at awesome companies working with the cool modern technologies. You don't need anybody's permission, just do it. Want to write Haskell/Go/Rust/Elixir/Clojure every day? Want to work with ML or robots or big data or whatever floats your boat? Just go do it. You don't need to sit there writing PHP as the world passes you by.

PHP is a backwater. People live there and tell themselves that it's fine, good as any place really, can't imagine anything better, probably wouldn't like it anyway. Or they just stop thinking about it.

PHP was never in fashion. In the beginning it wasn't as powerful as Perl. Then it was looked upon as not serious compared to java or hobbist by the business asp crowd. At one point because of a facebook movie it was in fashion for a year but that created a I hate php backlash. Php has changed so much I'm seeing people rediscover it.

Remember java was cool or mongodb or node or ruby on rails. It feels like go is becoming less cool. I wonder what next year will bring? Perhaps php will be rediscovered when SV changes once again.

Exactly. Anyone who puts “interesting ideas” in quotes is literally a blub programmer, as Paul Graham described:

http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html

Some people could care less about SV. Or maybe they want to ship products their clients can handle after launch. Whether you like it or not PHP has created more value than any of those languages you mentioned. It's like you're saying it's better to be a Ferrari mechanic than a Toyota mechanic. The user does not care. So ship stuff that matters in whatever tool of choice.

Then however we're on a platform made by Paul Graham which stated that lisp delivers more value than any other language.

DHH says the same thing about rails/ruby.

Taylor Otwell says the same thing about laravel/php.

Mark Zuckerberg says the same thing about React / HHVM / Hack (PHP variant).

I'm sure Steve Jobs said the same thing about Objective C or Swift.

It's called an opinion, just because one person who spends more time investing in VCs, and just because we're debating an issue on a site, doesn't mean we have to take the creator of the site's past essays as the absolute truth...

Go, php, ruby, python, lisp variants ALL are the best script if A. it's the only one you know and you just want to launch something or B. You've done your due dilligence to figure out what you need, is it just a crud app? PHP is fine, is it a chat app? Well you might need erlang or elixir on the backend, or something with concurrency.

If you're spending 100+ hours debating on platform instead of building shit, then that's time you can't get back and that's wasted opportunity acquiring customers to a platform you could've had built last week -- if you weren't stuck in...confusion about what framework to build in, or spending all your time in tutorials because you picked the shiniest framework or language that is above your pay-grade so you have to learn everything.