As for the productivity part, I think for the most part you hit it right on the head. PHP to JSP isn’t really an apples to apples comparison, but depending on what you want to do, PHP could greatly reduce the amount of code you have to write to accomplish the same task.

It’s still my favorite language, but if I was really going to write a stand-alone app this one is a show-stopper for me. I think this factor is an important reason why Ruby and Python are so popular.

Sure it’s not supposed to be abstract *classes*?

Many people without formal training use PHP because the ease of getting things running – no matter how ugly the implemntation is.

Java on the other hand is so daunting at first encounter that the developers unsing it tend to be quite experienced. Once they cut their path trough, they tend to overuse the features and frameworks provided and overcomplicate things.

The path to enlightment the combination of both ways. The pragmatic approach of the prototypic PHP coder applied with the knowlege how to write proper code of the prototypic Java programmer, realized with the language which suits the task at hand best.

“The mere fact that you can write purely procedural PHP code doesn’t mean that PHP isn’t OO capable”

And the mere fact that you can write purely OO PHP code doesn’t mean that the language is OO.

Someone: “PHP does not even have types! How can you program seriously with that?”
Me: “PHP does have types, what you mean is type-safety!”
Someone: “Whatever – besides, what’s the difference?”

:-S

My impression of people leaving PHP for Python or Ruby (which was what I said, rather than Rails specifically) is really only based on first-hand knowledge of friends and colleagues. Both Python and Ruby have a lot more to love about them as languages. PHP does have merits, but the language syntax and core libraries aren’t included in those.

Unit testing – you’re right, it’s not the responsibility of the language. If we were talking about C or another general-purpose language I’d be agreeing with you in a heartbeat. But on the other hand, MySQL support, integration with GD, encryption, output buffering or any of the other myriad specialised functions in the PHP core API aren’t the responsibility of the language either, but PHP gives you them. PHP is a language that has built its userbase on providing a suite of commonly used tools for web development – a “batteries included” approach, if you will. But for some reason, PHP seems to feel that automated testing is less of a core language feature than, say, spell-checking support, PostScript or SWF library support. As such few beginning PHP developers even know what unit testing is, let alone that they actually *need to be doing it* if they’re writing production code in a dynamically-typed interpreted language. That’s what I mean about PHP and its encouragement of poor code – it provides lots of powerful tools for implementing *features* in web applications, but very limited support for the development of robust, stable, well-engineered software. That’s not to say that the tools to do this aren’t out there. But honestly, if you had to pick one of these statements then which would ring more true:

“PHP’s core API is dedicated to making it easy for inexperienced developers to build feature-rich web applications”

vs

“PHP’s core API is dedicated to providing the tools developers need to produce robust, high-quality web applications”

…?

To me the answer to that is pretty obvious. A low barrier for entry on a language can be an advantage; but doing that at the expense of much-needed features to support actually developing stable software is not, because it results in a wealth of developers who’ve never tested a line of code in their lives.

I’m glad we’re on the same page on the terse thing, and I agree with you on the Java/.NET ExtremelyExcessivelyLongNamesThing. But the ugliness in PHP comes from the heavy use of totally worthless non-semantic characters like $ and -> where they’re actually totally unnecessary. Having to prefix completely vanilla variables (!!!) with a shift-key-requiring modifier is just crazy. I mean damn… does anybody do much programming without variables?

Getting onto deployment.. I wasn’t actually entirely thinking of Rails here. PHP has it the easiest because mod_php is a thing of beauty and just works. mod_python is OK, but I’ve had issues and had to resort to FastCGI at times – something I’ve never had to even be aware of in PHP. mod_ruby is a turd and nobody uses it, with most deployment happening behind Ruby web server clusters and proxy balancers.

I haven’t experienced any of your problems with Rails though. It’s certainly resource-hungry, but given reasonable resources I’ve had no issues with it in production apart from ActiveRecord hitting the database too hard if you fail to pay attention and scope your queries properly. And hey, if you want to do Ruby development with most of the advantages of Rails but with better performance metrics then there’s always Merb.

About #5, I think PHP is the best because you don’t really need IDEs as much as you require them in Java. Vi is perfect in most of the cases that I’ve seen. Ofcourse, most of the java people don’t understand that you can code well without an IDE.

3 – introducing a namespace is a NOT a trivial thing