[na85]

Sure. I'd rather use a PHP site with good, lightweight CSS than a site loaded down with AJAX and jQuery. Any day of the week, ESPECIALLY on mobile.

13-year-old kids still in high school styling themselves as "PHP Developers" is what gave PHP a bad rap. They're the reason PHP-Nuke existed. But novice developers produce mediocre code irrsepective of the language.

I'm not saying it's the best thing ever created. I've never used PHP 5 but there's not really anything fundamentally wrong with PHP4 other than clunky syntax and stupid choices in naming some intrinsic functions. It's certainly easier to hang yourself with, say, C than with PHP.

[krapp]

Syntactically, I would say javascript is better than PHP. PHP only recently got around to allowing array shorthand, and I don't even know if the most recent version has anything like js' object shorthand. The way javascript handles anonymous functions and closures is better too - it's just easier to write.

Though whenever the DOM gets involve, both break down into awkward messes.

[dovel]

In my experience AJAX is used a lot to do the opposite of 'loading down' a site. Often used for staggering page load - preventing a huge download time at first page load and means one page sites can be possible, with many images even, and not take 2 minutes to download on mobile.