[SwellJoe]

True of maybe half of those features...but the other half? Well, if you don't know enough to miss them, I don't have any way to argue with you--there's no common language in which we can converse about them.

But, I feel uncomfortable every time something I write takes two or three times the lines of code because of what the language lacks. First class functions or lambdas, closures, and a good library fall into this category...and PHP fails on all of them (there are many PHP libraries, but most are buggy and rather scary, and the standard library has ad hoc'ery written all over it...I like for the standard library to at least be a little bit planned out rather than crammed in via 3000 or so functions in the same name space).

But PHP is a perfectly valid language for many classes of problem. Just be careful not to use it for the classes of problems for which it is extremely poorly suited.

[calpaterson]

>Well, if you don't know enough to miss them, I don't have any way to argue with you--there's no common language in which we can converse about them.

While I agree with your actual premise ; this statement is pretty bad form. It is the logical equivalent of a Christian saying that in order for me to critique his faith, I must become a Christian.

Replying, "you wouldn't know; you're an imperative programmer" is moot; maybe he is an imperative programmer - but he could also be correct. There is no connection between the two. Deductive logic has never been allowed in the scientific method, which is, ultimately, the barometer of truth.

I'm aware that Graham is the originator of this somewhat popular meme, but it's a wrong popular meme. The nature of ignorance of certain desirable features can only explain why people don't immediately demand them; it doesn't prove their usefulness.

[SwellJoe]

"Replying, "you wouldn't know; you're an imperative programmer" is moot"

That's obviously not what I said. My reply was, "If you believe all of the features listed above are useless in a real world development situation, I'm not capable of convincing you otherwise, as we're going to be speaking very different languages". I think there is a difference, though I can see how it comes off as arrogant. It wasn't really intended that way--I'm not a great programmer, and never claimed to be. But I know what makes me (as an adventurous, but not necessarily brilliant, hacker) more productive is good tools. And first class functions, closures, and a great set of libraries (like that found in Perl, Python, and to a lesser degree Ruby), are the tools save me lots of time. When I develop in PHP, and I do so pretty frequently, I miss all of those features constantly and my code is longer, less readable, and harder to maintain.

My point was if you haven't worked with a language that has those features you wouldn't be aware of how much time, and how many lines of code, they can save you. I'm not a smug lisp weenie pushing the blub paradigm (though there is definitely something to the argument) or implying that imperative developers are the scum of the earth. I'm a pragmatic sort of fellow...if it works, use it. But if something works better, why not use it instead?

That said, one of the places where PHP is a perfectly valid language is web applications. Some of the largest applications in the world run on PHP--Facebook, many Yahoo sites, etc. But they also have lots of languages doing the non-frontend work, because PHP is really horrible at a lot of backend tasks. Data and systems management, for example, where Perl and Python, or Java (depending on scale and performance requirements and existence of libraries), would be a better choice.

[calpaterson]

Sorry, I didn't mean to characterise you wrongly, I only rephrased the actual quote because it fitted better with the deconstruction. I actually do think it's a reasonable representation of what you said (or, more pointedly, the concept in general).

Good reply, looks like I made a mistake about part of your opinion, but I can't agree with you about not being the value of these features being difficult to explain. I always just explain situations where closures/anonymous functions work well (while I'm not much of a web programmer, I can think of a couple of examples). I agree, there is something to the blub concept. There certainly is a spectrum of languages.