first, I am happy to see you are not just a troll, and actually engage in discussions, thanks
What I meant with cobol is that we could well be using it today in all day applications if we didn't search for better alternatives for security-sensitive applications on the web
> it is really, really good at what it does and it doesn't suffer any of the issues plaguing software development in more modern technologies.
could you provide examples? Because I could really use a better approach to developing in PHP and end my grief where I work.
> The empirical view would be that truly crappy things don't tend to get both the adoption and staying power of something like PHP.
that is a naive statement that disregards the history of PHP. When it was conceived there wasn't anything much better and people just went with it, and it was a lot convenient and filled a gap that javascript just couldn't fill, that is writing code alongside HTML.
> PHP's greatest issue is its accessibility. It is so easy to get started with PHP that for over a decade it was the first language for most web developers
That is far from its greatest issues. There are a lot of accessible languages out there, that is simply not the case. The problem with PHP is that it is bad designed at its core, and not much can be done without breaking compatibility. The surrounding tools are either really bad, example for refactoring, for intellisense etc. or really expensive (PHPStorm). There is less crap code written in haskell, or rust than in php not because haskell is a niche language, but because the language is designed to make stupid decisions hard, something that can't be said about PHP. The language has to hold the programmers hand sometimes.
Even python for this matter has such an idiomatic approach to language design that it feels just weird to write stuff that is not according to the language style guide, even more if programmers stick with style check tools from the beginning.
>Your comment wasn't constructive criticism, it was kvetching.
> But most of the time, "PHP is bad" is just a low-effort comment people make hoping to get a few nods from the internet.
That should not be an excuse to write equally low effort answers. I didn't really think much of my comment, I was just being sarcastic for the sake of it. It wasn't supposed to be constructive criticism. I mentioned criticism in response to what you said about PHP and it's code lines output per criticism.
But just to be clear, I am not saying anything with ill intentions, take this all with a light heart, no hard feelings.