Define "proper"? Does meeting a business need, bringing in money, putting food on the table, and paying the rent mean "proper"? If not, why not?
PHP has a plethora of flaws, but it's still a serious tool and used to build creations of significant value, that can't be ignored. As far as quality, what platform do you use to guarantee quality? I've heard many stories about terribly broken code bases in every language that's out there, from C to Ruby and Python to Java.
By "proper" I mean building a piece of software which has a clean and maintainable implementation, logical semantics, proper encapsulation, and last but not least, which is solid.
That is, should be able to withstand real world challenges and input-data without crashing, failing, silently failing, creating corrupted data or any combination of those things.
Granted, it's been quite a while since I've done PHP, and it that sense the initial point of the article stand true, but when I need something done in PHP, I always find myself spending more time ensuring basic truths which a proper language should guarantee for me are actually true, than I spend writing code doing something.
I find PHP silently failing all the time making debugging code hard. And it makes it hard to do things proper, because you may have failure-modes which you should have been able to catch, but which PHP "kindly" shields you from.
Right. So by your definition there are no good platforms to write "proper" web applications in, since it takes a lot of special effort to avoid all of those problems in any language (ruby, python, c, c#, java, node.js).
Some languages makes it easier, some make it hard. I would argue that PHP falls into the "hard" camp. And C would definitely be in the "very, very hard" camp.
And then you have stricter languages like C# which makes doing things proper the default, although often at the expense of making other things harder.
That said: This is definitely crossing the line between factual and subjective right now. And I can see how this is a subject open to discussion.
Define "proper"? Does meeting a business need, bringing in money, putting food on the table, and paying the rent mean "proper"? If not, why not?
PHP has a plethora of flaws, but it's still a serious tool and used to build creations of significant value, that can't be ignored. As far as quality, what platform do you use to guarantee quality? I've heard many stories about terribly broken code bases in every language that's out there, from C to Ruby and Python to Java.