When it comes to code, English speakers like to talk about how good, pure, or expressive a code language is. For example, ask people up in here to describe PHP and you'll get bile. Ask them to talk about Closure and you'll get accolades. Usually summarized as "because the language is bad the result will be bad"
...the irony is that the discussion will be in English. One of the worlds most inconsistent, awkward, written languages. [1] Further more, most code is English. Example: it's usually "if/else" not "si/sinon" or "と/又は"
IMHO I don't think the analogy holds. However, I don't know of a better way to describe it.
There are a number of polyglots who disagree with your sentiment. Nabokov immediately comes to mind. He preferred english because of its capacity for precision and expressive-ness.
I am not the original commenter, but - English is full of slang and borrowed concepts. And it has rules, but they aren't really enforced and there are many cases where the rules are explicitly broken. Every generation, we see new additions to the English language and removals of old/out of date phrasing.
When you look at it like that, yeah, it's kinda like JavaScript - not really object oriented and not really functional but borrows concepts from both, loosely typed (rules aren't really enforced), and there's a new library every month that drastically changes the language (slang, evolving with the generations).
I only speak English, so I'm not sure if other languages are like this.
PHP gets a bad rap because of the way many of the people who use it program. The language would be very good, in my opinion, with just a few standardization tweaks to the standard library.
It seems this project has retconned the standard library. I'd say this is a perfect application for this sort of language.
Weak typed, simple to read, simple to write prototyping.
Anyone can pickup: Python, Ruby, Lua, whatever. Even the more exotic new ones like Chrystal are very easy to understand. PHP really isnt. A language IMHO cant be simple if you cant derive the method names in the order of the arguments.
I fix PHP apps for a living, and sometimes I write them from scratch if a client is set on using PHP. I strictly follow PSR standards and have tons of mess detector and sniffing rules that keep me mistyping or being less disciplined. I use all the new type hinting features in PHP 7, and before that I was heavily using PhpStorm's excellent support for inferring types from doc blocks.
It's still way, way more painful to write large, complex apps in PHP than in a better-designed language like TypeScript. I actually just rewrote an entire API in TypeScript, and it was like breathing clean air.
I actually realized that having better typing totally eliminates 90% of the tests I was writing for my PHP code. With static typing, you just make sure your inputs conform to the right type, and then you always seem to end up with bug-free code. That's simply not possible with PHP without bending interfaces to suit your needs. You end up with an insane number of unnecessary classes/interfaces instead of simple types that you get in other languages.
It's definitely possible to write complex apps in PHP, especially if you have excellent discipline, but there's a really good reason Facebook created Hack. PHP = Blub
