> Do the people you know have experience with other comparable* languages, and still think PHP is a well-designed language and platform?
For the most part, yeah. There are the obvious quibbles you get with any language, but for it's domain, it's the best bang for the buck. Does that mean it's the only language in our stack? No. But for my money, for the web side, it can't be beat. If I were to do a site in a non PHP language, it would be Python hands down. That being said, it all depends on what the project is, and what it entails.
Listen, I can't help but wonder if your imparting some past on the current crop of PHP developers (and by current, I mean those that moved to PHP5 some 8 years ago). Maybe you had experiences with another group of people that focus on just one language.
The PHP community of today is far from that. It's made up of practical people, who focus on more than just PHP. More to the point, calling someone a PHP developer these days just reflects that when they do the server side web code, they are using PHP. Not that it's their only language.
To be honest, my personal experience is that everyone I've met who pans PHP and proclaims to have switched happily to Rails (because that's what they switch to first, never Ruby), or Python is that they needed the extra structure these languages enforced. Basically, the PHP code they deride so much was code they helped write.
That, of course, is just my point of view. I don't know many people who use Ruby for web development, so it would be unfair for me to suggest the entire community was like that.
> Do the people you know have experience with other comparable languages, and still think PHP is a well-designed language and platform?
Is this the only thing upon which to base your opinion of a language? As someone who's seen at least a glimpse of the world beyond PHP, I'd concede that the design of the language, especially in earlier versions, is probably not its biggest selling point. But as you and I agreed below, PHP derives its value in other areas.
Maybe it's implicit in a question like "What's your most disliked programming language?" that those other areas should be excluded from consideration, but if that's not the case, then focusing solely on language design is a bit unfair to PHP.
> I'd concede that the design of the language, especially in earlier versions, is probably not its biggest selling point.
Keep in mind, the design of the language wasn't to create a new language, but instead, make using various libraries easily usable in a web environment. Hence the reason for the multitude of c or c-like functions. Eventually, the shift moved in a different direction.
I like to think that while PHP wasn't intelligently designed, it did evolve. And for my money, evolution beats out intelligent design.
> I've never seriously learned a second language, so I think it's a great language
Do the people you know have experience with other comparable* languages, and still think PHP is a well-designed language and platform?
I concede that the PHP community, and PHP itself, has dramatically improved in the last few years. PHP 5 is a revelation compared to PHP 4.
[*] i.e. not "The other language I know is C, and I love that PHP is so high level!"