[ErrantX]

Ask yourself this: would the Instagram team have been as successful had they chosen PHP?

They absolutely would.

Building an actual application is a hard problem; a lot harder than the kinks of individual programming languages. Whichever tools you choose it is never going to be an easy ride.

Anyone who has written, deployed or maintained a large scale application of the sort listed there knows this.

It's the step after ranting about how bad X language is.

[cageface]

Building an actual application is a hard problem.

It is. Which is why you can't afford to have the challenges of building something non-trivial compounded by the frustration of working in a broken language. If you're just slapping together another spaghetti CRUD app maybe you don't suffer enough to care.

I wonder if people in other engineering disciplines defend broken practices so irrationally. I suspect they don't have the luxury.

[ErrantX]

PHP has its frustrations. It's not outright broken.

But my point was that all other programming languages suffer their own "broken" problems. I managed a team working in Ruby not long ago; they had no end of gripes and frustrations.

The key point is that compared to the challenge of building a complex application, those "difficulties" are trivial. And once you are at that stage, anyway, you're so used to the way your chosen language works it doesn't matter.

These are not constraints on what the language can achieve or do and simply require knowing about them so that you don't paint yourself into a corner.

Because application design is a hard problem it doesn't matter, given a relatively skilled team, what language is chosen.

This is identical in other engineering disciplines; a friend of mine works in motor design (electrical motor) and is constantly griping about nuances in the tools and equipment. Same issues.

[cageface]

Recognizing that all languages have their problems is one thing. Arguing that all languages are essentially equivalent in the larger sense is another.

Sorry I just don't buy it. Tools aren't the only factor but they do matter.

[bmj]

I think we're a bit spoiled these days. Five or ten years ago, we didn't have Ruby (or at least a mature RoR), Django, Clojure, or Scala (to name a few), so PHP was a pretty decent option for someone trying to get something out there efficiently. These days, there are lots of interesting platform choices (all with different barriers for entry), so many "serious" developers have moved in different directions.