I'll preface things with, I don't care about the cleanliness/consistency/correctness of languages, I really just care about tools to get a particular job done.
PHP isn't sexy, hell, it might be classified as a backwater these days. Fact is, it is a simple language, it works, and a whole lot of useful tools are built on top of it. I've done many bad things with PHP, some I will admit to, some I won't. Hell, I built a bunch of authentication services and prototyped a storage backup system using PHP because it was the most mature language at the time (this was years ago, and mod_php was light years ahead of mod_python, ruby wasn't even in the discussion). It worked, the security issues were known, and we knew how to scale the system.
The first post on http://anodejs.org a couple of weeks ago was pretty amazing. The title "We work at Microsoft and we use node.js". That statement in itself was amazing (you wouldn't have seen that 5+ years ago), but the use of Javascript in a large company/large team environment is an interesting exercise. My experience is that a team of 4-6 people working in the Javascript/Node server side have to put tools in place to ensure code quality and consistency that was never needed in PHP.
Each language has it's strengths and weaknesses. In the case of PHP, it isn't sexy, it is pretty homely, but a lot of people are still getting a lot of stuff built using it.
You know, with Microsoft people using node.js, Microsoft is actually really friendly towards JavaScript at the moment. They have made proper JavaScript debugging tools and Visual Studio integration!
PHP isn't sexy, hell, it might be classified as a backwater these days. Fact is, it is a simple language, it works, and a whole lot of useful tools are built on top of it. I've done many bad things with PHP, some I will admit to, some I won't. Hell, I built a bunch of authentication services and prototyped a storage backup system using PHP because it was the most mature language at the time (this was years ago, and mod_php was light years ahead of mod_python, ruby wasn't even in the discussion). It worked, the security issues were known, and we knew how to scale the system.
The first post on http://anodejs.org a couple of weeks ago was pretty amazing. The title "We work at Microsoft and we use node.js". That statement in itself was amazing (you wouldn't have seen that 5+ years ago), but the use of Javascript in a large company/large team environment is an interesting exercise. My experience is that a team of 4-6 people working in the Javascript/Node server side have to put tools in place to ensure code quality and consistency that was never needed in PHP.
Each language has it's strengths and weaknesses. In the case of PHP, it isn't sexy, it is pretty homely, but a lot of people are still getting a lot of stuff built using it.