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Comment by tikhonj | Hacker News Reader

Namespaces, closures and traits are "all the bells and whistles you might dream of in a modern web language"? Really? Now I understand why Lisp users are smug. And that's ignoring the basic syntax touted as a feature.

What I actually dream of in a web language (or any language, for that matter) is quite a bit more. I want to be able to get event-driven IO without writing event-driven code. I want to get parallelism for free or as easily as possible. I want to encourage smaller functions and reduced coupling. I want good, or at least decent, performance with no especial effort. I want a consistent and elegant underlying design rather than an ad-hoc collection of features somebody thought were useful.

Ultimately, I want a high-level, modern language that's concise, fast to write, easy to maintain and reasonably performant. And PHP is none of those things. Which is why it's no good.

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Well, we can all dream, but what are you using now do get things done and make a living? I'm pretty sure Python and Ruby fail your criteria.

Using the "perfect language" is a luxury that I for one can't afford. I need something that I can use reasonably easy and that is sought by employers. The fact that is has event-driven IO and parallelism (what kind of parallelism do you need for web sites?) is nearly irrelevant.

Yes, Python and Ruby do fail my criteria. Which is why I don't advocate them either.

I'm currently using OCaml, but I would probably prefer to use Haskell. They are both far ahead of PHP.

Assuming your website is doing anything non-trivial, parallelism would certainly be useful. Just because it's a web project does not mean you're not doing something computationally intensive, after all. But even if you don't need it, it certainly doesn't hurt to have the option!

Event-driven IO allows you to maintain more connections on the same resources than a thread-based model. There is just less overhead per connection. That's going to be relevant for most web projects. If you could get this for free (that is, without having to rewrite your code like in Node.js), why wouldn't you want it?

Just because employers seek PHP does not make it a good language, or even not a bad language. It just becomes a necessary evil.

Besides, that depends entirely on the job market in your area. Where I am (near SF), PHP is not in very high demand where Java, JavaScript, Python, Ruby and Objective-C are. I've also seen jobs using Haskell, Scala and (obviously) OCaml. This is obviously going to be different elsewhere, but my point is that it's all relative and not a function of any particular language's quality.

Well, OCaml and Haskell are nice, but I wouldn't think of using them for webdev. I would be literally unhireable in my area (major EU country).

I haven't done any webdev in years, but I am focusing on PHP instead of Python because I have more experience with it and it's easier to relearn. It will be a complement to my main skills which are actually mobile/desktop/embedded dev.

I don't know why you are being downvoted for your opinion. Redditors - go back to your caves, you heathen!

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