I don't fit in your box. And I still think PHP is a decent language for introducing people to programming.
I've written web apps in: Ruby (both Rails and Sinatra), Javascript (Node.js with Express), PHP (my own framework, CodeIgniter, and eying Laravel), and been maintenance programmer for a C CGI application. I've written desktop and CLI apps in Object Pascal (Lazarus and Delphi), to CLI apps in Go, C++, and probably a few I've forgotten. I've done Object Oriented, Evented, and to some degree Functional programming. I am a polyglot programmer.
The problem is bashing PHP. As Jeff said, PHP's power is its ubiquity and its near omnipresence. It runs on just about any platform with any configuration, with almost perfect consistency. For the most part there's no switching extensions or libraries because of the OS. Develop wherever... deploy wherever... get almost an identical experience without lifting a finger.
In fact, I have great hope for the future of PHP with 5.3 and 5.4 as they (finally!) have added and improved upon the language, and have begun to cull deprecated features. The problem for PHP right now is twofold: web hosts refusing to upgrade in a timely fashion, and legacy codebases that refuse to be rewritten. Both these are demanding backward compatibility, and slowing the advance of PHP.
I'm tired of the bashing of PHP. Bashing, in general, is the absolute least effective way to communicate your point. At least Jeff Atwood is attempting to do something.
I've written web apps in: Ruby (both Rails and Sinatra), Javascript (Node.js with Express), PHP (my own framework, CodeIgniter, and eying Laravel), and been maintenance programmer for a C CGI application. I've written desktop and CLI apps in Object Pascal (Lazarus and Delphi), to CLI apps in Go, C++, and probably a few I've forgotten. I've done Object Oriented, Evented, and to some degree Functional programming. I am a polyglot programmer.
The problem is bashing PHP. As Jeff said, PHP's power is its ubiquity and its near omnipresence. It runs on just about any platform with any configuration, with almost perfect consistency. For the most part there's no switching extensions or libraries because of the OS. Develop wherever... deploy wherever... get almost an identical experience without lifting a finger.
In fact, I have great hope for the future of PHP with 5.3 and 5.4 as they (finally!) have added and improved upon the language, and have begun to cull deprecated features. The problem for PHP right now is twofold: web hosts refusing to upgrade in a timely fashion, and legacy codebases that refuse to be rewritten. Both these are demanding backward compatibility, and slowing the advance of PHP.
I'm tired of the bashing of PHP. Bashing, in general, is the absolute least effective way to communicate your point. At least Jeff Atwood is attempting to do something.