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Comment by iambateman | Hacker News Reader

For those of you who are proponents of other web ecosystems, I’m curious what benefits you enjoy? What framework or language do you use and what makes it great?

I use PHP everyday but we definitely have a lot to learn from others.

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Starting from 1997, over the years I completely replaced PHP with Python. Apart from the language itself, which I like a lot for many reasons, some benefits that come to my mind:

    - Better libraries and frameworks overall
    - Better programmers overall, so more competent colleagues
    - Relevant in many fields outside web development
    - Allows to learn and use various paradigms, like async/multithread/multiproc...

I do keep track of PHP improvements. In fact, I keep a small personal toy framework as a way to test its new features. Some of these were very much welcomed, like safe mode + runtime typing. But some of these were just catch-ups and none of these are compelling enough so that I would want to start a new project in PHP.

Other ecosystem I'm interested in is Go, for other reasons.

I expect Python to be more stable over the coming decades than PHP.

PHP had a lot of breaking changes in the last version. Changes which got pushed through despite being quite controversial. I fear that this trend will continue.

Python had breaking changes in version 3, but at least those made the language better. PHP's recent changes were unnecessary and counterproductive.

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