[wyck]

Why not? , programmers might hate it but they don't always drive start-up direction. Getting something to market and being useful is just more important than semantics when you're facing a budget.

Lots of start-ups started with PHP (foursquare, groupon, facebook, etc, etc) because of the minimal cost and the convenience offered by popularity. If it works out and they get funding they can spend all that sweet cash on whatever they prefer.

Mobile apps and heavy REST services maybe not, but websites are still popular, and PHP is playing catch up for those services too.

[betenoire]

I don't disagree. I was responding to the sarcastic comment about PHP, not really trying to address using it for a start up. Our start up used it as well. It's not the sexiest or most fun environment, but it works and it's the devil I know.

[janson0]

This is my situation too. I mean, I know PHP and I know CodeIgniter. I have tons of already ready to deploy code based in those idioms, so why port everything to laravel? or Ruby? Maybe down the line or something... but not when speed matters.

[eevee]

Speed will always matter. You'll never find time to address technical debt; you have to make it.

[porker]

How about because CodeIgniter is one of the worst frameworks around, which provides little support for separation of concerns, avoiding spaghetti code and general maintainable programming practices.

I spent the start of 2008 migrating an agency off CodeIgniter - it definitely improved their projects afterwards (developer training helped too, but not as much as a well-designed framework did for code reuse).

What gets me is CodeIgniter is how I was writing PHP code back in 2003-2004, 4 years after picking up the language as a hobby. And people still think writing it like that is a good idea.