In this post, a polyglot dev (PHP included) says we need an alternative to PHP. By which he means a widely used replacement for PHP for web applications and web sites. The idea being that, if you get a simpler, more consistent, secure web app/site language that has built-in support for fun new technologies and techniques like HTTP/2, WebSockets, unikernels and concurrency/async primitives, they will come. “They” in this case being developers who wouldn’t normally know how to write good code in PHP and will magically do so in a language that makes it easier to do so.

The post concludes with no clear recommendation of an existing language, nor even “X language plus Y features”. And, more importantly perhaps, the post doesn’t tackle how that language would rise to fame; remember that we’re talking about an alternative that can take its place as the lingua franca of server-side programming in a web application context, ostensibly by providing killer apps for both new development and cross-language refactors  I’ll come back to this omission in a minute. First, let’s do over the stated objections to PHP as it stands. Read the rest of this entry »