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Voted down not because of whether or not I hate/like PHP but because the author calls people idiots just because they don't like PHP and also because he bashes Java (well, he just mentions JSP in passing at the end) but has a Duke sprite at the beginning of the article.

He's calling the people idiots who waste their time complaining about how PHP sucks. Makes sense for any language really. There are relatively few languages that were invented just to invent a new language. Most originated with solving a specific problem.

And he doesn't BASH java, in fact he doesn't BASH any language. He says he believes PHP to be better than ASP and JSP for "scripting dynamically generated HTML".

Six one way half a dozen the other. Folks that bash PHP don't like PHP so its the same thing. Regardless, name calling is unprofessional.

Let him call people what he wants, its his right (albeit unprofessional as you point out, and I agree) as its others right to hate PHP.

Personally I love PHP especially when paired up with a lightweight framework like code igniter. As someone who programs in Java, PHP, Grails, and the occasional toying with Rails, PHP/Code Igniter and Grails are neck and neck followed by Rails and finally Java...
I agree though, PHP lovers are always looked down upon, mainly because those that bash it only have experience with the "old" PHP where everything was a script and there was no organization anywhere.

Personally I wouldn't call them idiots but close-minded would be on the tip of my tongue. I would go so far as to say, those who are bashing it haven't used "ever" or haven't used in in many years.

voted down because the post was more rant than compelling argument. also makes a bunch of absolute statements at the end that php is better for generating dymanically generated html than a bunch of other languages without examples or reasoning.

Voted up because people who make language slurs based upon nothing are, indeed, idiots. :)

I love it when people say 'people say PHP sucks because of XYZ' then mention a bunch of valid reasons it sucks, and then turn around and say 'but PHP doesn't suck!' PHP certainly does suck as a language. What it doesn't suck as is the answer to a particular problem domain it was invented to address.

He also makes a tu quoque fallacy. PHP may not have namespaces, and have register_globals, and have a billion inconsistently named built in functions, but Perl is hard to read!

"you can serve enormous amounts of traffic as proven not only by OSNews (who have been dugg and Slashdotted concurrently), but by Yahoo!, Wikipedia, Flickr, Facebook, and many, many others"

Facebook is running probably terabytes of memcached instances and Yahoo properties have so much hardware behind them they could do their front end templating in LOLCODE. PHP is not the essential component in scaling sites like this.

" it is a remarkably easy tool for scripting dynamically generated HTML. And, in my opinion and experience, it does so better than Perl, better than Ruby, and a hell of a lot better than both ASP.net and JSP."

This I agree with. And it has nothing to do with the suitability of PHP as a language. Why can't we just come out and say 'look, PHP is crappy, but it's the best and easiest thing around for dynamic html frontends' the same way I'm willing to say 'look, java is crappy in many ways, but it's the best thing we've got for enterprise integration' or 'look, Perl is kind of crappy, but it's ubiquitous on servers and I need to get scripts to automate the shit parts of my job written' or 'C++ is crappy, period.' etc. etc.