>From when was that any criteria for success? Worse is better won a long back. Fighting that has proven to be futile.
No, it hasn't. Pragmatism won over theoretical grounds. And there are very many pragmatic reasons to prefer PHP for certain projects. No one is arguing against that.
But, with legacy and a changing market, some of those pragmatic choices come back to bite you.
There are many ways to combat this. One can evolve the language, for example. This has worked better for some languages (Javascript comes to mind) that share some of design flaws in PHP, than it has for PHP itself.
What I am arguing about, is that, we as an industry, as a community, as a profession, we shouldn't be aiming for a future where PHP is still dominant, any more than we should be aiming for a future where horses are our dominant means of transportation.
Now, maybe we can shoehorn modern features into PHP. It has been tried with PHP4 and PHP5.
But for what reason? There isn't any decent implementation of PHP (performance and stability wise). Other syntaxes aren't that hard to get accustomed to. The algorithmic complexity of core operations has changed between versions. It's not like there is any important code written in PHP, that must survive some transition, like there is with C.
Is it just to keep those on board, with no academic training, who only know PHP? If they were capable of learning PHP by themselves, would other languages really be that hard for them to use (or abuse)?
No replies to ad hominem attacks.
>>when they write bad algorithms, in languages with questionable language design.
From when was that any criteria for success? Worse is better won a long back. Fighting that has proven to be futile.