[ybalkind]

Oh wow, great to get such direct feedback, thanks! Interesting to hear that you use PHP. Although I'm not a developer I lurk on forums a lot and it seems PHP gets a bad rap so interesting to see a site that is well known in HN circles using it.

While I've got you on the line I have to give my 2 cents about your scores for Johannesburg. firstly, our weather is sublime, secondly I would say that freedom of speech, racial tolerance and female freindliness, is at least good if not great. Air quality I think is at least okay if not good.

But I'm a bit biased, and I guess its all subjective :)

Happy to provide any other Joburg info if you need.

[pieterhg]

Sure :)

PHP 7 is very improved and can stand up to most other langauges now I think.

Facebook and Slack are also built on PHP.

I think asking what tools people use is probably the wrong question though. You can build successful projects with most modern languages. It's more about your style of coding I think. My style is extremely minimalistic in effort and pragmatic. Not a lot of testing either.

Thanks for the feedback on Johannesburg! You can click some of the values as they're editable. Others are from international data sets (like racial tolerance and free speech).

[callaars]

Don't let people's opinions about languages get the best of you. In the end you need to use what you are comfortable with, as it is about results first, then about optimization. If you're comfortable with PHP, great, use that. If you're comfortable with Python, also great, use that.