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Comment by methodin | Hacker News Reader

This rant boils down to a tweet "If you don't like PHP then use another language or build a better one". What a revolutionary concept! That has worked wonders for languages since. Except not one has come out that is as simple as PHP thus PHP will continue to exist. Everyone that invents a language now focuses on abstract concepts that do not help the everyday developer do anything useful. Is it so shocking it's still around? If these rants are supposed to be rally cries they are really just awful attempts. Who wants to follow a whiner?

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> If you don't like PHP then use another language or build a better one ... Everyone that invents a language ...

But he said nothing about "inventing" a language. In fact said very clearly that he wanted to take an existing language and add to it - particularly the things that PHP does do well.

from TFA:

> "to buff up a open source language ecosystem such that it can truly compete with PHP in ease of installation and deployment"

If an existing language already has potential to replace PHP then I don't see why it wouldn't have already. What would/could you tweak that would get you there without fundamentally changing the language capabilities and syntax?

Mr Atwood will have to answer that himself; he's the one who thinks he can do it. However the last line of my reply above is, I think, the best answer that your question will get until he shows us more.

I suspect that he is being deliberately vague here; in other words there is an announcement coming at some later date and this is preliminary PR. That doesn't make it untrue though.

Setup costs - PHP has a low barrier to entry in the sense that Apache's mod_php5 is a simple "a2enmod php5" command away. Even PHP-FPM with Nginx is only a few well-documented configuration options away from working.

Currently, no other language can match that. They either require a VM running (Java, Ruby, etc.) or at least have a compile/build step (Python).

UWSGI has a lot of promise, but until it's as easy to get configured as PHP-FPM, PHP is still way easier than everything else.

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