[davidw]

I don't think those people understand the economics of programming languages. It's not going to die off any time soon, what with all the thousands of companies that use it, and zillions of lines of code.

As someone who would rather not ever work with PHP again, the best thing is to simply focus on other languages and environments, helping to bolster those ecosystems.

[lmm]

Agreed, but publicising stupid problems with PHP actually does help that cause - it might push someone who's "on the fence" over to using a better system.

[balac]

I'm one of those on the fence. I've spent most of my programming life working on PHP and the recent barrage of negativity against PHP has made me more interested in learning another language, if just to make an educated comparison and see whether I am continue to use PHP "because I know it" or because it is actually good.

I'm currently having a go at Python + Flask in my spare time.

[davidw]

Recent? I never cared for it, and I know that was a common sentiment amongst many 'HN' type people (even though there was no HN then), but until Ruby on Rails came out, I had never found something that had everything I needed and wide appeal. At the time, for me, that meant continued work on Apache Rivet ( http://tcl.apache.org/rivet/ ) , which in a lot of ways was better than PHP, but always suffered from not having a lot of users.

[slurgfest]

To clarify, "die off" means "stop getting NEW projects," not "everyone spontaneously destroys existing legacy apps." That has never been on the table.

When you say you don't want to use PHP again and want to focus on other languages, you are saying you want PHP to die off.

[davidw]

I'm certainly no fan of PHP, you're correct, but people will continue to do new things in it for many years to come, because that's what they know.