That's a bit strong; I would even say it borders on being outright false no matter how you meant it. PHP is convenient for bashing out quick server-side scripts, but it doesn't "power the Internet" any more than any other language does.
Facebook, Wikipedia, Wordpress, Drupal, etc. etc. You can whine all you want about this and that, but you can't argue with success.
"Success"? You say it as though the use of PHP were in any way consequential to the success of those projects. Wordpress and Drupal, maybe, but Wikipedia and Facebook are squarely business successes more than anything.
I'm not saying PHP is necessarily as bad as people make it out to be (though I personally think it is), but the fact that a company like Facebook uses PHP (and in fact has poured millions into desperately engineering around its many faults) isn't exactly a shining testament to the virtue of the language (any more than a hypothetical Company X using COBOL internally would make COBOL a better language).
Most people who praise the fact that Wikipedia and other software is written in PHP have never actually taken a good look at the source code and tried to do anything with it.
Care to discuss the design and architecture of the Mediawiki parser and template system, and what its history and future look like?
That's a bit strong; I would even say it borders on being outright false no matter how you meant it. PHP is convenient for bashing out quick server-side scripts, but it doesn't "power the Internet" any more than any other language does.
Facebook, Wikipedia, Wordpress, Drupal, etc. etc. You can whine all you want about this and that, but you can't argue with success.
"Success"? You say it as though the use of PHP were in any way consequential to the success of those projects. Wordpress and Drupal, maybe, but Wikipedia and Facebook are squarely business successes more than anything.
I'm not saying PHP is necessarily as bad as people make it out to be (though I personally think it is), but the fact that a company like Facebook uses PHP (and in fact has poured millions into desperately engineering around its many faults) isn't exactly a shining testament to the virtue of the language (any more than a hypothetical Company X using COBOL internally would make COBOL a better language).
See:
* http://www.quora.com/Would-Facebooks-maintenance-costs-be-lo...
* http://www.quora.com/Quora-Infrastructure/Why-did-Quora-choo...
* http://www.quora.com/Do-Facebook-engineers-enjoy-programming...