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Funny. People criticize PHP the language and the PHP fanboys retort by praising PHP the platform.

Jeff Atwood more or less said that we should provide the platform advantages of PHP in other languages in order to steer new developers there.

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You can't provide the platform advantages of PHP in other languages because either there aren't enough programmers in that language (Ruby, Python) or that language is fundamentally much more difficult to work with (Java).

So create something new.

But I like PHP. Even with its numerous warts, it's the easiest language I've ever written.

There are plenty of people writing Ruby and Python.

There is another reason, which is that some of PHP's design choices seem easy but make things harder down the line.

Jeff Atwood wasn't the first to say that, by a long shot. PHP devs have been saying it since Rails made Ruby popular. That it's 8 years on, and Atwoods rehashing old arguments is telling.

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