[johnsmth]

I can definitely relate to the author's viewpoint. The dynamic he refers to is felt by talented developers who have an independent streak that runs to contrarianism. Not to toot my own horn but to speak up a bit in solidarity, I started programming on a TI-81 and then was lucky enough to attend high school where you could learn Pascal, so I got recursion early, then C++-based curriculum in college and also several semesters of AI in Lisp. So I'm not an absolute idiot at least.

My first real job was with PHP5 and it seemed fine to me then as now - of course I never used it as some do, with code and markup intertangled. My typical response to folks who denigrate PHP is similar to PG's discussion of Lisp as a competitive advantage (wonder what Zuckerberg might write if he were similarly inclined) - if you don't get it, fine with me. Except the author is right, developers are more trend-conscious than we would like to think, and without possessing a unique deep goodness such as Lisp's there's a real risk of PHP becoming redundant.

For my own projects, I've decided I will ride the PHP train as long as possible while spending a lot of time on the javascript side (so I have resume bullet points that are respectable to unenlightened folks) and then if/when the stars move too far out of alignment just switch to whatever looks best. I've got a framework (which I've been working on for a long time before it was trendy and then un-trendy) with the server components written in PHP but I seriously think it could be converted to Python in a few days. Clean code is clean.