Will PHP die out or Shine?

I’ve been using PHP for a few years. I love it and I think it’s a great language. Of course it has it’s soft spots, like naming convention for functions(like n2br(), strtr(), str_replace, etc.).

Though with the growing popularity of Python and Ruby, what’s going to happen to PHP? Ruby, a language built for convenience and Python, a powerful language built for speed both run over PHP in those two aspects. Is there a reason to stick with PHP? And why not switch to something more efficient? PHP scripts sometimes take longer to write and are also harder to debug. Ruby ranks as one of the highest in terms of maintenance and ease of speed. Python is portable, powerful and fast!

PHP’s strong points are it’s documentation, afford-ability, support and popularity. A person with a business plan can rustle up PHP free-lancers pretty fast. PHP is that language that has almost always had support from hosting companies, and that being said, has always been more available to beginners. PHP also gets a rap for allowing inexperienced developers to create unmaintainable, messy code. This happens too many times, where code gets passed on and all you can do shake your head… At the same time experienced coders have developed some of the net’s most popular web applications.

The real test for PHP will come when they finally release PHP6, which has been anticipated for four or more years. By eliminating tons of crap, adding name spaces, better speed performance and more efficiency PHP6 will show what PHP is actually capable of. This will truly be PHP’s time to shine.

Please pass this on to your fellow developers.:)