Have you seen this cartoon before? The Lisp panel is especially ((((((hilarious)))))). It is fun to mock each eccentricity of a programming la...
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Really great article! Congrats.
I think, most of people that dont like PHP, think about Wordpress and similar older codebases. They dont know "Modern PHP" with tools like Composer, frameworks like Symfony, Laravel or Libraries like TWIG or Doctrine.
And some developers are influenced by the "Hype" and only want to use the new and shiny languages and frameworks.
For me PHP is one of the most balanced languages, considering learning curve, clean code (thanks to frameworks like Symfony), performance and infrastructure costs.
All languages have its pros and cons. Talking about Node, for example, you mention callback hell, I can say a lot more. There are at least 3 different ways of handling callback funcions (callbacks, promises, and async/await). Then you have ES6. and CommonJS modules. And a new framework coming out everyday. And I havent talked about the core JS Language. NaN != NaN, Really??
People reading this might think I hate Javascript and Node, but no I really like it. I am building a Node app right now! Its just a matter of recognizing and understanding all the pros and cons and choose the most appropriate language of framework for your project. Every project is different.
Being able to recognize that is what distinguish a Top Engineer, from an average one.
In the end I just want my project to be successful, with a clean, easy to maintain and performant code. You can achieve all that with a vast number of languages. The same way you can write crappy code in any language.
You’re hitting the nail on the head. It’s really important to pick a language that makes sense for you or your team and the project requirements. It’s easy to get caught up in hype and assume one language will make everything in your app better, but that’s not true.
Thanks Andrew. My first big app that really did great things was written in php. It was very simple but reduced the wait times in the hospital I worked for from 45 minutes down to an average of 15 minutes.
Best part of was that because of php, some one like me who was more of a Ops person than Dev at the time was able to accomplish this feat. Also I agree with you about hating on languages. They are tools just like your OS. To add to your point about not knowing, I get frustrated at javascript but alot of times it is due to my lack of understanding of javascript.
Well, no you probably get frustrated by JavaScript because it was designed in a hurry and has many flaws. However it was designed and its design improves every year now.
PHP was never designed. It's just a pile of stuff that makes sense because it's naive solutions to everyday web developers problems. It's a collection of small constructs and functions to help build a Personal Home Page.
So yeah beginners find that great because they quickly get results with it. Now when you work on bigger things or when you need to go faster (because you're not discovering things anymore and it's your actual job) then PHP is just a hurdle not worth it being given the vast amount of alternatives in this world.
What bothers me is that most the PHP haters think PHP has stop in time and all the code is like Wordpress.
But PHP has evolved a lot in the last years. Composer, Symfony, FIG-Standards, Laravel, Twig, Doctrine, Blackfire and many many more.
Sure the core language has a lot of inconsistencies and flaws but still I found it to be one of the most balanced languages regarding learning curve, performance and infrastructure costs.
Anyone with enough experience can go very fast in their favorite language. I can go very fast with PHP and with clean code.
Of course, I wouldnt use PHP for everything. I recognize there are stuff that are better suited to be implemented in another language. The ability to understand that and choose the most appropriate language or framework for a project is what, in my opinion distinguish a top developer for an average one.
In my company in the last 6 months I have worked in PHP, Go and Java, and I am doing some side projects in Node so I am not a "one language" man ;)
Despite that, I would stil start most of my projects in PHP. (unless other language is more appropriate of course based on the nature of the project) Symfony is just beatuful :P
Oh I don't think that PHP stopped at WordPress, even though it comes biting me in the ass now and then.
I've setup a full development environment for a PHP team with Composer, a private company repo, a Git workflow, unit tests and all the goodness you can imagine.
That's why I know how much work it is in comparison to other languages.
Good to know. the problem is that many people who say dont like PHP take WordPress or similar for reference and dont even bother to check the latest evolutions of PHP.
In your case I respect your opinion and experience.
I like Node and Go, but still I am in love with Symfony Framework and I am really productive with it. Without Symfony probably I wouldnt have the same opiniion, who knows.
You might be more productive with another language and /or framework and thats perfectly fine as long there is respect for others preferences ;)
I have similar feelings towards node. I always loved javascript despite its flaws in the past 20 years and somehow I did not manage to like PHP even after all those new oop features and libs in the past 13 years. Probably it's because the $. :D This picture is a few years old, many things have changed since then in node too. I think the only major hardship for a node beginner is understanding and writing async code, but that part became much easier with async-await.
It's not so much that PHP is a bad language, as PHP was designed around a way of doing things that doesn't make a ton of sense in the modern context.
Back in 1995 when dynamic pages meant serving up lots of fixed HTML with a little bit of dynamic content from the DB thrown in it made a ton of sense. The status quo at the time was CGI Perl scripts that generated HTML by literally writing print statements. I literally mean print "
$title" and so on.Enter PHP, where you could write a well formed HTML document, just escape to PHP mode in the few places you need to print out a variable or have some logic. It creator never even set out to write a full fledged programming language, he just wanted to create a little scripting language, do some includes and such. It was great for its time but its limitations show.
Web apps today don't work the same way as they did in 1995. Almost all of the code today tends to be "business logic", and people prefer not to mix code and HTML in the same file. A telltale sign is when almost every php file starts off with <?php and ends with ?> and is never in HTML mode at all, all all HTML is generated with another templating language (eg. symfony), which uses a different syntax.
In other words, despite the improvements that have made along the way, frameworks that help mitigate some of PHPs inherent flaws etc., at the end of the day PHP has outgrown its original purpose and you're really fighting it every step of the way when you're writing a modern application.
It certainly doesn't say anything bad about you as a programmer if you're in a company with a large PHP codebase or a large team that already uses PHP. If you have a legacy app it's probably hard to make the case take the time and effort and other costs to switch to a new platform. But if that's the language you choose to go with in a project without those constraints, you have to step back and ask yourself why.
The ultimate point of my article was that building a successful application is our goal as developers and we shouldn’t critique each other so heavily for choosing one language or another. I understand that PHP has flaws, but it is modernizing and can be used to make a solid web app. Many programmers are comfortable with the language and can make a good non-legacy website with it so I would be careful to not just relegate PHP to the past.
Out of curiosity, which other platforms have you seriously tried out? By seriously, I mean actually taken the time to lean and tried to build a non-trivial project in.
I'd be interested in your answer the other way around: what modern PHP frameworks have you taken the time to learn and built a non-trivial project in? Is your criticism of PHP based on genuine experience, out of date memories, or just received wisdom and prejudice?
I've used PHP for many years including a custom website that got millions of pageviews a day, and I've used WordPress quite a bit including custom themes and plugins. Yes, more recent version of PHP are better than older ones but I've seen nothing that makes me want to go back.
It's not just PHP that's got better, the frameworks and ecosystem that are available now are so different from just a few years ago. Saying you've written some WordPress plugins is a bit like saying you've written some Java applets, so don't see any reason to give a Java framework a try. It's pretty harsh to assume everyone only uses PHP because they don't know better, if you're only judging it from that distance.
I think a lot of people hate PHP because a lot of other people hate PHP. I don’t think I’ve ever really heard a good argument against using PHP that made me think “oh yea, PHP definitely sucks because of that reason.”
Hi Andrew,
I perfectly understand your point. I used to hate Javascript until this summer and I realized that it was because of the negativity about it in other communities.
Summer I've started working on a web app and we've built our back-end with PHP because my partner loved it and he said it's the simplest way to do the thing. To be honest, he was right. I fell in love with how naturaly and easily PHP glues together the back-end and the front-end.
So, since than, my opinion changed 180 degrees and PHP is one of my goto languages. :D
Programming in PHP can be a lot of fun and you can make great websites with it, it’s great that you discovered that. It’s interesting that JavaScript has some irritating issues, but has been able to overcome the stigma with Node.js. I’m guessing it’s because everybody has to do some JS at some point.
Marketing is a hell of a drug.
I get laughed at most of the time by friends criticizing php.
Fortunately I have found my self working with c# in my new job and I have come to appreciate the simplicity and flexibility of php even more.
Hah, I remember when PHP was one of the most wanted languages of its type, have seen it go through a major reboot, and it's still popular due to at least one successful content management system. So yeah, I'd say you're definitely not an impostor. This is all spot on.
And I started programming professionally in 2000, after four years of college, and sadly, this sort of derision of programming languages and/or tech stack in general has been common since at least 1996 from my view. I've made good money working in the Microsoft world (OMG you idiot! Real programmers use Linux and other open source! Everyone knows PostGres and/or MySQL depending on year is the best DB!), doing interpreted "script" languages (Cold Fusion, ASP Classic), working in CMSes that weren't sexy with developers, using gasp jQuery after it was cool, using SQL in general (OMG everyone is doing NoSQL now!), used graphical IDEs (yes, that's a thing people seem to hate), etc.
I've also used at least four variations of Unix, worked in various flavors of Java, used the heck out of the command line, etc. I use what works best given my constraints to do the job I'm doing. Period. The derision smacks of insecurity and having to prove your superiority somehow because you literally have nothing else to go on. Meh, I have preferences and I run with them if I can. If not, I adapt.
And for those reading, with my ~15 languages I've learned at some point and 17 years of professional development (more if you count co-op jobs in school)... I STILL have impostor syndrome. I haven't touched a lick of Python or Ruby or Scala, and if you read large portions of the internet, those are all the languages that anyone appears to use. I've barely done work on the cloud (fixing that). I've done Javascript for well over a decade, but am not as versed in frameworks as I'd like to be. I do data work but haven't done a lot of NoSQL. I'm even a couple versions behind in how C# really works, and I HAVE done a ton of that. I've never pair programmed (the idea scares the hell out of me).
So yeah, keep on going with PHP or whatever else you use, be curious about other things, but don't feel like you're bad for not doing them. The people who hate a technology probably either don't understand it, or are scared to admit they don't know something that you do.
You've not used NoSQL? gasp
Just kidding and thank you for the candor! Trendiness is something to be wary of in any industry, but particularly in programming. Adapting to new technologies is important, just not at the breakneck pace that's so often required by trends. I have learned other programming languages and what it showed me is that they are all trying to achieve the same goal (in regards to web development at least). So, all this Ruby vs PHP vs Python vs Node.js vs C# is all unnecessary if you're making a good product and you like what you are using.
I went looking for youtube videos on "NoSQL" the other day. When it came time to query the data every damn video I saw that day was using an SQL-like syntax. "NoSQL" is a poorly chosen buzzword.
True. I think the idea was that it's not a traditional tightly couple transactional database, and just covers all the other ones (document store, graph database, etc.).
It's ECMAScript > Javascript all over again.
I always hated the derision that PHP gets, too. Or any language, for that matter - every language has its uses and flaws. The "perfect" language doesn't (nor will it ever) exist.
As you pointed out, coders tend towards cliquish behavior based on their language choices. I think that's one of the reasons I've stayed on the edges of (or completely outside of) any tech community. This being the first I've even remotely interacted with online.
PHP is generally my language of choice. It's what really got me into programming and my love for the back end. It started as a hobby in 2009, and is what helped me transition careers into web dev three years ago. Whenever people talk down about PHP, I tend to remind them that it's used in over 75% of the web. :)
That’s a great point. Sometimes I wonder if PHP’s ubiquity is what lead to the bad reputation. So many people use it that there will be more instances of bad coding in PHP than other languages.
I think that is part of it yeah. The fact that PHP is used in web development and is at first glance a relatively easy language to pick up means that a lot of people came to it from a design/front-end developer perspective. Even if you're a designer who has never really programmed anything before it is relatively easy to make changes to- or write new server-side code that "works", but it can lead to codebases written by people who lack good fundamentals of software engineering and security best practices which especially for public-facing websites can be dangerous.
This was arguably a bigger problem in the old days of PHP when the default installation of PHP had some very questionable security practices (e.g. magic quotes and register_globals defaulting to on in PHP 4) and when the built-in MySQL API did not yet support prepared statements meaning you had to manually sanitize/escape your queries to avoid SQL injection vulnerabilities (this was improved when the mysqli API was added in PHP 5, though the old MySQL API remained available and I suspect a lot of people continued using it unfortunately).
Good point. PHP’s ease of use can also be its downfall sometimes.
I know security was a common issue with PHP, but I’ve been encouraged to see the core team putting more effort in that area like the MySQL extension being removed in 7.0 or libsodium being added to 7.2.
Anything under a certain level of complexity with a budget under a certain amount is perfect for PHP. 50% - 75% of the web fits that criteria. For anything over that threshold every critique of php is perfectly valid.
But for my friend's rental car service of less than 50 cars across 4 locations on 3 islands in a 3rd world country and not being eligible for a merchant account from the local banks and losing a gigantic portion of every international money tranfer to government fees if he tried to use a foreign bank (as well as the risk of fines and imprisonment because technically no citizen of his country is permitted to have a bank account outside of the country)... well... a super simple PHP & MySQL app + a Wordpress blog all on shared hosting was an acceptable choice for his budget, needs, and available options in his situation.
But somehow the mere fact that I chose php over X, mysql over X, and shared hosting over X makes me a dumbass who'll never be capable of being a "real" developer.
Something I realized recently is that a lot of first world developers do not care about 3rd world problems, even developers who were born in a 3rd world country and eventually emigrated. Anything popular in the 3rd world is garbage and 1st world devs must not touch it or their reputation is tainted. And they also do not care about finding ways to help their fellow devs stuck living and working in the 3rd world. I asked around in a few different communities, including the php community, about expanding documentation translations to more languages and investing in keeping the current tranlations up to date. All I got were shitty responses along the lines of "If you do not learn English you will never be a good developer so translations are a waste." The vast majority of the world does not speak English. The vast majority of English speakers will never learn a 2nd language. If China/Japan/Korea/Russia/Middle East/Central Africa/etc were to create the next life-altering technology with effects as powerful as The Internet, the English world would be left behind unless the information was translated.
PHP was the first language I've seriously been into. It's the only language I've know for years. I have been a professional PHP developer as well.
This taught me one thing: PHP is a piece of shit. It's utterly bad and beyond saving. Even Facebook (aka React, aka PHP applied to JS) decided they needed another language being given the crap level of PHP.
Worse, look at the code base. Most of PHP softwares are just bombs waiting to crash your server. Maybe there's a Right Way© but the culture there feels like moving a mountain.
You can build successful products out of PHP. You can also run a marathon while dragging a tyre.
Do yourself a favor and learn a decent programming language.
This comment seems to be a harsh generalization and proves the point of my article. I don’t think you should throw out the entire language or tell others what to learn just because you don’t like it. If no good software can be built in a language, then it’s fair to question it’s existence. However, if there are hundreds of pieces of functional software in a language then don’t completely write it off.
There is perfectly functional programs written in Brainfuck, doesn't mean it's a good idea.
Once again, many tools can achieve the same results.
And everybody is free to choose whichever tools they like.
But I'm sure as hell not choosing PHP, because it's the most messy and inefficient language I've worked with by far. And I've worked with JavaScript.
Hi,
I work with PHP for web backend often. With Java to develop Android native apps and with Java for desktop software.
The only thing I have to say about this is that I agreee with you when you imply that the healthy choice is picking a language, an IDE and a framework (if any) due to the ability to resolve the problem that you need to address.
Putting dogma in the choice (either by falling in love with a language or hating one) doesn't seem to be the right way.
"There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses." - Bjarne Stroustrup
Thank you for this. I literally just had a hair pulling day in PHP. Every time I'm working with PHP I feel like I'm wrestling a bear. And you know what the worst part of the fight is? NEITHER of us ever win.
I find that comparison very apt. It's not that you can't get things done in PHP, it's that it feels like unnecessary bending over backwards a lot of the time. If a programming language is a set of Lego blocks that you snap together to build something, then PHP's issue is that half the time you're missing the fitting piece, and the rest of the time you're trying to put Lego and Duplo blocks together with some weird knockoff 3rd party brand block thrown in randomly. You can make it fit somehow, but it'd be much smoother sailing with a consistent set of pieces.
Beside the fact that they always try to make it sound like PHP is a "second-rate language", they actually have the audacity to try to convince you to drop PHP and learn their preferred programming language.
I used to love PHP. But then it broke my code on a minor version bump. I had to take the upgrade due to a critical security failure, but in fixing the security issues they'd changed the syntax.
I now have a huge preference for languages with multiple implementations.
It's funny, I've used quite a few languages over the years, but I always return to PHP. I'm a web developer and PHP is built for the web, along with JavaScript. Neither of them are perfect languages but they work.
If I was writing an App or some other type of software I'd use another language.
A valid observation. I often hear how PHP is a 'hack language' from guys who implement Oauth2 by hand in Spring, costing the client more than a human year of 50€ working hours. Since long ago, the bottleneck in most projects is developer time, not CPU or memory efficiency, not how 'beautiful' your code looks, not how 'scalable' your initial solution is. As is very well demonstrated by the popularity of Wordpress, clients want stuff that 'just works' and they want it yesterday. So if you can set up a MVP in a week with your language of choice, great. Else GTFO.
Personally I feel PHP is best one for developing web app. After using PHP 7, I started it like it more. Ruby is the language i hate most (From user perspective of the open source apps, not as developer) - it's been always very difficult to setup.
I love the fact that coments for very nice article about one downside of being PHP programmer (people tell you php is bad) is people telling "PHP is bad".
This is bad for people all around. Stop being so negative. You enjoy working in PHP? Good for you! You enjoy working in Erlang? Good for you! You've made production code in [insert language]? Good for you! You wish to deride others for language they choose? BAD!
Use the tools you know will work the best. I use VB.NET for desktop apps because we have an all windows environment, and the other programmer here knows it. I use PHP for dumping data from one server to another because I know it and it works well. We're all constantly learning new stuff anyway. No idea why we need to stick with one thing.
Ironically, on a post about being more accepting of others developer choices; by the 3rd comment we've devolved back into criticisms of people's choice of tools.
They are tools, what we do in the community would be no different than if carpenters got together and started talking like this: "You use a Framing Hammer! Bah! You fool, everyone knows a Roofing Hammer is better, more efficient, and comes with magical fairy dust! Look at this handle, so much better than your handle!"
Learn to use multiple tools, build things, and don't let people make fun of your tool belt. You still built the house and it keeps you warm at night. There may have been better tools, there definitely could have been worse tools, but you got it done using the tools you had.
My tools aren't your tools, and unless you're building my house keep your comments to positive critiques and advice vs negative criticism and bashing.
If you're referring at my posts, I've been careful not comparing PHP to other tools but rather putting the emphasis on how bad was PHP by itself.
To keep on your metaphor: you're hammering a nail with a spoon? Well do as you'd like but you'd better choose some kind of hammer to do it.
Now again, that's none of my business.
I put together a super simple web app for people to congregate around Impostor Syndrome - impostorroster.com. It recently enjoyed a brief time on the front-page of Hacker News, so you'll find all sorts of posts there - both serious and silly.
Exposure is the best medicine!
I think just like you in every way, it's as if you had read my mind, still many people still think that PHP is useless, but many of us are creators of large projects in PHP and then demonstrate how fast and efficient you can get to be, at that time they have nothing left to talk to the wall haha
Duh. You didn't add the module first.
extension=princess_rescue.so
Lets be frank, good tools doesn't make a good carpenter. PHP is a toolbox full everything you need to either make a horrible mess of it or a wonderfully designed application that reflects a little bit of thought reflected in design patterns.
Frankly, I've used PHP as an alternative to bash script in order to leave a trail of readable code behind for the next person who happens into that code. It's really no more complicated than a #!/usr/bin/php to set the interpreter and off you go.
This is the problem with being a widely consumed language, some people cut their teeth on it, move to a framework and forget the road that got them there. That's fine, it's an evolution, learning, growth and all that good stuff.
What's worse are the developers that suffer an innate capacity to remain closed minded knowing-what-they-know and being chatty-cathy styled regurgitators of their own dogma.
As stated within the pages of PHP: The Right Way, There is no canonical way to use PHP.
There are abominations in every language.
Yeah, I agree. The constant hate on PHP gets old. It's a fine language with some quirks, it's also been evolving since 1995. I agree it wasn't necessarily a "designed" language, but who cares? It's easy to learn, easy to use, is installed everywhere, there are a ton of developers who can write it and most of the poor design choices can be worked around. Modern frameworks like symphony and laravel make PHP pretty painless, and it's great for quick prototyping. There's also a pretty solid community that is generally friendly to beginners who don't know anything about programming. Some people really hate it, and that's fine... lucky for them there are other languages. Personally, it gets the job done and while it might not be my first choice for a new project in 2018, it's still the #7 most popular programming language according to the TIOBE Index so it must be doing something right.
I like it how people say that php evolved and look at symfony. Hello, symfony is a web framework, you dont say that java evolved because look at latest spring. Sad fact that there is no php as a language with opinion or coherent concepts behind it, no usable stl and no evolution. This is why comic strip about php is legit. But to understand that one has to exit php-comfort zone and try out other languages (plain, no frameworks) to understand the difference
PS and its interesting that people write how symfony promotes good practices when in fact it does completely opposite - hook everything to internal events, any bundle can set a global listener, whole idea of bundles, promoted for a long time and finally considered a bad idea by creators themselves, validator component etc.
I've been doing PHP full time for about a year and i think it's a very useful language to do web apps.
The language itself has a clear syntax with both argument type hints and return type hints which allows devs to be a lot more strict about method inputs and outputs without stupid type checking inside the method block. I also like the dollar sign because it distinctively indicates that you're dealing with a variable. You have constructs to build interfaces and abstract classes as well as anonymous functions and classes.
Standard library offers quite a a few interfaces to work with too. However many of the SPL's functions act pretty inconsistently (differing parameter order, some take parameters as values, some as references). It's a bit annoying but doesn't really get too much on my way.
I like how you can create a blank project template with Composer, PHPUnit and PHPStan literally in under a minute and start creating unit tests.
Back in the day I would frequently come across people writing php in notepad.exe with no syntax coloring. The key reason they chose php was because $ made it easy to see which words were variables, lol.
I once was drinking coffee in a dining room of an outsourcing company. Some C# devs were talking badly at the other side of table about PHP devs. It was first time in my life when I've shut a person's mouth with a glare. Unfortunately not the last time I had to defend PHP from the ones who are ignorant. I hope some day PHP reputation will be cleared(but hey since 5.3 there were only improvements!)
I think a lot of people hate PHP because people enjoy joining the trend train. I don’t think I’ve ever really heard a good argument against using PHP that made me think it actually sucks or there is major issues with it. Most of the major platforms today are built on it.
Hi Andrew,
It is all about politics...
Yes, even in development languages ..
Java owned by Oracle,
C# as your know , by microsoft
(lately microsoft is taking control on Python)
and PHP is left for the Poor developers :)
I've been developing in PHP for very long time at least 10 years ...
PHP is strong as JAVA and C# (yes , the right way to compare php is to these languages)
PHP is even stronger then JAVA and C#, as deployment is much, but much , more easier and cleaner the others.
The real jump was made from 7.2 and above
Where OO has become as C# and JAVA alike
If you are a good PHP developer , jumping to C and C++ is quite simple ... you will find the syntax much a like
I
Yes! Choose your language on its own merit purely in the context of your project; nevermind how people feel about it.
I'm happy to say that while the only languages I'm in any way competent in are Ruby and SQL, I'm sure that other languages are still fine to use, and not indicative of character flaws.
Oh wow I'm sorry for you and myself :(
Javascript has flaws but it also had a lot of constraint that explains those flaws. I do not like JS (even if I dabble in it) but no fuss, like you said, it’s cool that there are a lot of choices.
That being said, I did a lot of PHP and this language is just flawed by design, the number of things you have to keep in mind about the language when you start doing serious application, is absurd in my humble opinion, which is why I do not like it, I think it is flawed. You can do a lot of things with it, many people did and still do but I believe that on the long run, it causes more issues and also it cost much more resource to keep a PHP code base sane. I also think that most PHP developpers don’t try out other stacks,
which makes it hard to talk about alternatives.
Facebook did great things on PHP (Hack & co ) which makes it much more manageable but without FB to back it up, it would be doomed, since the PHP community; which is one of my favorite actually, mainly for its pragmatism; do not seem to truly engage in it, in my opinion (why the wait for PHP 7??)
The good thing, is that, it does not matter, like mocking Lisp incredible syntax, so why take the cartoon so seriously ?
There are not much scientific study on the value, impact or quality of languages anyway, so it’s just claims, opinions and common sense that truly smart people spend a lot of time sharing.
Thanks for loving PHP Andrew! I use it every day and proud of my language.
PHP IS GREAT.
I know C, Java, JavaScript, PHP and make program with all of them. So, depending of kind of requirements one is more suitable that other.
i'm in a job how php programmer, I was developing in java and delphi before. I'm loving the form who the language works, without the complexity who nobody knows explain
oops
The LISP panel made me laugh uncontrollably.
For people who don't realize bad sides of PHP language yet - eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fract...
They are just jealous because PHP is on ~80% web sites on the Internet, while their puny languages are on less than 1%. Do your own thing, screw the haters.