I wouldn't want to go back to programming PHP due to its many issues[1]. I especially wouldn't want to work somewhere that spends development energy on BobX[2] to make PHP easier to work with. That means I have to use two technologies that won't give me any way to advance in the industry, and will most likely hinder me at this point.

[1] http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-de... [2] http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/We-Use-BobX.aspx

I have no doubt you can do a lot of powerful things with PHP, provided you have the experience and put in the man power + time. But this does not justify the use of PHP now (for new projects), it just means that if you happen to be stuck on PHP because of legacy code, you could make it work.

What I'm confused by, is why is this even a conversation? PHP is possibly the most used language in the world. I'd presume that there's tons of highly qualified engineers to choose from, who are already bought in to the value of the language.

So if you replicated their special and custom 'platform' in Ruby or Python and it exceeded PHP's performance by miles what would their reasoning for continuing to use PHP be?

This article was written in Oct 2010, but it looks like they still use PHP.

While I sympathize with the situation MailChimp is in, I am getting tired of this anti-elitist attitude of PHPers. Of course, part of the reason why I feel that way is because I think PHP actually is crappy, but putting that aside doesn't change much.

There's this notion that programming languages are all really the same, and devs are just a bunch of prima donnas chasing the newest thing. It couldn't possibly be that we have used PHP before and have good reasons for not wanting to use it anymore. No, instead we must be a bunch of groupthinking prigs, scoffing at PHP because we're afraid to let our peers see us using such a shameful thing. You can tell they think that by the title of the post.

I guess what I'm wondering is, at what point will they consider using PHP to be too costly? If:

- they already have a limited talent pool due to location and the business they're in,

- PHP only serves to reduce that pool even further,

- presumably software development is important to the future of their business,

- and they're not changing markets or locations anytime soon,

when will it get too expensive to continue using it?

What rankles is the digging in of heels, the attitude of "oh, if only devs could see how clean and great our PHP code is!" They see a tons of developers not interested in using the tool they use, and decide that all those people are simply mistaken, and just need to be convinced otherwise. The problem couldn't be on the other side of the table, no sir.

Hey, it works, you shipped a working product and that's all that really counts. I wonder, if all the endless man (and woman) hours spent on this site, masturbating over whether people should use Go, or why Go is the new hotness, or why don't people grok Haskell, or the latest Rails security fails, if instead people actually, you know, built stuff, even with PHP, then the conversation could be a bit more stimulating.