a few replies
"""I like how "all those code samples to copy/paste" is considered a bad thing. Because saving time on a project by reusing code someone has already made is such a terrible thing and should never be done!"""
Reusing well-written code libraries rather than reinventing the wheel is one thing. Googling your current task and pasting in the first snippet you find that seems to achieve it, without any understanding of what it's doing, is another. To be fair, I guess the same thing can happen in whatever language you choose. IM[recent]E it just seems more prevalent in PHP, but a decade ago, this was exactly how I learned Javascript ;-)
Don't get me wrong - PHP is one of the best tools around if you're knocking together a website. Feel free to drop out of the interpreter during nested if/else statements if dumping HTML is going to get the job done quicker; I'm not going to keep a man from his pint! And having tried both, I'd much rather be working in PHP than ASP.
My personal aversion to PHP is partly fuelled by the fact that I had to pick up the pieces of a site written using pretty much the above Google-and-paste technique, and figure out how to accommodate the fact that it was about to be translated into Chinese...
Maybe it's also because even after extensive rewriting, introducing an OO approach, and even applying consistent formatting, PHP code still looks dog ugly. "$object->member" is just a brain-wrong compared to "object.member". Stare at a screenful of PHP and a screenful of Python for 8 hours and I know which one will make you wish you'd put all the sharp objects in a locked drawer. Even squiggly brackets and public static void main( String[] aaaargh ) are easier on the eye than that.
""" why don't you get involved in it's development and fix what you think is broken instead of spouting your somewhat arrogant ignorance about the language? """
I don't know if it's possible to submit "ugliness" as a bug report. I've just taken a peek at the forthcoming namespace syntax (backslashes...!) and I don't see it getting any better. All because somewhere really early on it was decided to use the dot for string concatenation, and that meant they decided to use -> for object accessors, and... and... PHP's syntax betrays the fact that it's been built kludge-on-kludge.
Which brings me to this:
"""On what do you base your claim that PHP programmers have little exposure to other languages?"""
This wasn't my quote - but someone seemed to "agree" with the above; my own point was with regards to the survey sample.
Surely the only way PHP can ever outscore Python on "Maintainability/Readability" is if the person doing the marking has never actually read (let alone written or maintained) Python code. Of all the languages I've come across, Python has been the easiest in terms of quickly understanding Someone Else's Code without even needing reference to documentation. (And if you can't follow an indentation convention properly, please don't ever make another person read your code in any language.)
I've never used Ruby myself but even a cursory glance suggests to me that its readability is similar to Python's (i.e. miles nicer than PHP).
In the other categories, fair enough. Python's online documentation, although complete, is horrible to use (the current search facility is a case in point, retrieving and drawing the results one at a time using a needless AJAX-y step, and sorting them *alphabetically* - try finding the entry for "str()" ...) and performance as a server-side language is significantly slower than PHP.
But does anyone seriously think PHP is more readable than Python?
Biting the hand that feeds IT
