[pillock]

I wish people would stop trying to defend PHP against "the haters" - firstly because no amount of reasoned argument is going to change the views of fundamentalists, and secondly because they are a minority group whose opinions are unlikely to inhibit the rise of the PHP ecosystem.

[simonw]

I would argue that the "rise of the PHP ecosystem" has been massively damaged by the amount that has been written about PHP's flaws. An ecosystem needs talented programmers working on open source libraries for that ecosystem, or helping spread best practices.

You don't see much fresh innovation in the PHP community these days - instead, you see developers who work with PHP having to recreate libraries and techniques developed by other languages.

Meanwhile, the Node.js, Python, Rails etc communities are overflowing with talented developers who used to work with PHP and are now busily inventing the future on top of different languages.

[orang55]

I'd take issue with arguing that there isn't much innovation in the PHP community.

It might not be the best language for every application (I find myself using it less and less these days), but there have been a whole ton of recent developments that have made it much nicer to work with.

PHP 5.4 made some pretty significant improvements, and Laravel is one of the nicest full-stack frameworks I've ever worked with. PHP now has good/sane dependency management via Composer, and many of Laravel and Symfony's components can now be used outside of the main framework. Microframeworks are a pleasure to work with in PHP, which is especially nice for smaller one-off webapps.

Many of the recent improvements have been (very) late to the game, but they're nevertheless welcome. I could do without the Java-esque levels of verbosity that PSR-0 encourages, but it does seem to result in highly-maintainable code.

"New PHP" projects (written from scratch, targeting 5.3 and above) tend to be of surprisingly high quality. As I've mentioned before, Laravel emerged from nowhere as a lightweight and very high-quality framework, long after the PHP community had been declared moribund.

[PommeDeTerre]

The people you refer to as "haters" are usually just professional software developers. As professionals, they don't stand for the unjustifiable inferiority exhibited thoroughly by PHP and JavaScript. So of course they'll speak out against such programming languages.

And contrary to your beliefs, what they say does have an impact. We wouldn't see so much emphasis on web development using languages other than PHP and JavaScript if what you were saying is true.