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Comment by SideburnsOfDoom | Hacker News Reader

> 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"

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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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