[rjknight]

OK, but he's still on the hook for "mentally mutilated".

Also, my point is that "good" is really a relative term. PHP is good, because the baseline for programming language quality is quite high. You can do so much stuff using PHP - you can build YouTube[1], Facebook, Wikipedia, WordPress and much more. I don't know what the total value of web applications written in PHP is in billions of dollars, but it's a big number. My point is that if that's what we can do with PHP, just think what we could do with better tools! In my definition, "good" means "enables the creation of valuable things", and PHP does that. I hope that it gets replaced by something better, for the same reason that I hope current medical treatments get replaced by better ones, but I can't call it "bad".

It's weird, but programmers are sometimes the people with the least appreciation for how valuable their creations are. We do things that non-programmers simply cannot do, creating massive value in the process. Yet many programmers are afflicted by impostor syndrome and the sense that what they do is not really that valuable and that most of what they build is crap. This negativity is misdirected, towards other programmers - "I'm better than her because she uses PHP and I use Haskell" - when it should be directed towards the things that cause real project failure. A well-conceived and well-managed project that creates a PHP web application is much more valuable for everyone than a badly-managed project that produces a Haskell application that nobody uses.

[1] The first version, at least. Google doesn't do PHP.

[krapp]

It's not that php is good per se, although that is not nearly as objective a term as language bikeshedders tend to believe, but that better languages are still worse at the one thing php was intended to do - or at the very least, better in ways which don't actually matter. Almost all web application development is CRUD anyway, and php is perfectly adequate to the task.