Keith Devens .com

PHP always strikes me as more of a "product thingy" than a language, kind of like (pre-.NET) Visual Basic. Sure there's a language in there, but the language isn't interesting per se, only as a way to get some specific thing done.

For PHP it's quickly doing DB backed websites. For Visual Basic it's quickly doing DB backed client apps.

This is somewhat of a generalization, of course.

It seems like major parts of PHP behavior are still changing between releases, kind of like how major VB behaviors changed between releases. There are still a lot of people who think VB died after version 4.x, when 5 moved over to a COM base.

And, well, support some certain standards IS important, and if a language doesn't have pretty good support for them then maybe you want to do your project in a different language instead of also having to pay the cost to develop modules for those standards as well as your actual business logic.

Sure there's a language in there, but the language isn't interesting per se, only as a way to get some specific thing done.

Absolutely - I agree. But, while it's ok if it's not the greatest language in the world, I lose patience when it actually gets in the way.

PHP is as much a toy of a language as bash shell scripting is or batch files. It serves a purpose well and that is all. Features beyond the core set are added early so everyone can play with them but, because they are added early, they are buggy and broken. Because of this I'm not really surprised that objects are (somewhat) broken in 4.x. The 5.x releases will surely clean this up and introduce other new and buggy features to bitch about.