The only-ever-PHP coders I have known tend to be fairly polarized between fear of the unknown and the "grass is greener" attitude.

The ease of estimation thing was an aside, but I'm getting more convinced. With PHP there is only one way to do any feature: look up the library function, type it, refresh the page, and slowly accrete your functionality. With other languages there's some hope of a free lunch and it engages our tendency to optimism.

Asking as someone who's mostly only written PHP (and some javascript, more recently): can you expand on this? What kind of "hope of a free lunch" is there with other languages?

The first is the promise of DSLs and meta programming, where you can tune the syntax of the language to more naturally express your problem domain. When this works it's beautiful, but sometimes it is a distraction and makes the code difficult to debug.

The second, which is conceptually very different but I find it can play out similarly, are rich type systems where you can hopefully build up your application as a series of well defined type relations and transformations. Again, when this works you get really robust, reliable, and easy to modify software but there are often cross cutting concerns or business practices that break the model.

Edit: when I talk about a free lunch or a silver bullet, I am often thinking about the writing of Fred Brooks.

That's about as far as you can go with Java, I guess, but honestly, now that I type that out, I guess that does get you pretty far...

The most salient problem is the fact that the languages do not distinguish between references and values (aka “mutability by default”) which means that the compiler will not maintain those invariants for you unless you annotate things specifically, and the authors of the libraries you use do the same.

My overall preference is for F#, which is ironically a better object oriented language than C#, by virtue of using ML-like syntax instead of C-like. Nonetheless, C# is a passable functional programming language these days, and the language designers keep adding more functional-inspired features with every release.

Peter Norvig at some point came to the realization that the deficiencies of Python relative to Lisp were not deal-breakers, and I don't think that stemmed from his limited experience.

Since then I've done (real, professional, for-profit) projects in PHP, Go, Java, Kotlin, Swift, Rust, JavaScript, Elixir, and Clojure.

So when I work on PHP and Java I can feel what they're missing. It's simply the luxury of having experienced working in (what I consider to be) better languages. Clojure and Elixir were not my cup of tea, but I still find them to be better quality languages than JavaScript.

I have met many developers in my life. Some with quite a lot of experience. The VAST majority of them have only ever worked in a handful of very similar languages. Mostly the ones I listed originally (I forgot C# in the list, but that's more-or-less Java++). If I'd only ever used PHP and Java I would literally not know what a good type system looks like. It's ignorance, but not stupidity.

And I'm talking about people I have much respect for. People who I acknowledge are smarter than me. That doesn't mean I don't know anything they don't, though. And if they've only used PHP and Java, then I know some things they might not. That's all.

EDIT: Also, I'm not sure what Peter Norvig has to do with it. I bet he doesn't like PHP, either.

Your comment wasn't about people who like PHP. Your comment was about people who defend JS or PHP to the minimal extent of saying their deficiencies are not deal-breakers.

There are people with broad experience who are willing to accept deficiencies of a particular language if the context is right.

(I don't actually know what the right context would be for PHP; I'm more stating a general principle.)

I was more, in my head, describing people who say "Well, all languages have issues." or "You can write good/bad code in any language." or whatever other bottom-of-the-barrel defenses I often hear and read.

However, I also use C/C++(Mostly low level embedded), C#, and Golang regularly.

If I was given the choice of what language(excluding C/C++) to launch a new web site I would still choose PHP with `strict_types=1` enabled.