I enjoy reading this post but want to point out why it receives quite negative comments from the readers. That is, you quoted some statistics which claimed PHP as one of the highly trending languages but jumped to conclusion that we should avoid PHP for web in the end. This is somehow a kind of hasty generalization.
Here is an opinion from my perspective.
* Some backgrounds:
PHP is indeed still very popular among dynamic languages for the web (easy to learn, dynamic without compilation, huge community resources). You can easily find a great source of PHP developers anywhere. It’s the dominating language for the web since Perl and CGI. PHP was created by a Danish guy for the web.
Now Ruby and Python rose as scientific/ scripting/ general-purpose languages. The languages were designed by highly accomplished engineers. Thus, they had many powerful characteristics that the C programmers had wished for if they didn’t prioritize performance over productivity. These languages are well-designed and reaching towards the world of web.
* My opinion:
Some people just hate the syntax of PHP so they try to avoid them. I know Github founders @mojombo, @defunkt are those who worked with PHP at the beginning of their career and then found Ruby sexy.
I think picking a language suitable for the project, and for the team is far more important. For most projects, I know PHP could solve the problems just fine, and it is easier to find experienced PHP web developers in Vietnam.
The reason PHP is receiving negative opinion nowadays is its ability to deal with scalability, which most large-data companies are facing. There are too much detail to discuss the topic here but I think we don’t have large-data apps around Vietnam.
Finally, one example to back up my statement about picking the best language for the job and the team is from Facebook. Zuckerberg was a PHP dev from the start and most of the stuff he wrote were in PHP. The company then grew and hired some more talented PHP devs and then years back, they hit scalability problem with the language. They developed HipHop execution engine that converts PHP on the front to C++ on the backend for performance purpose. Yes, they still write stuff in PHP as most of the codebase.
In a word, PHP syntax is not really nice and the performance maybe a bit slower than Ruby and Python.
