The other complaints are:

- not much in terms of community to help answer questions or maintain your code, whether a guy down the hallway, documentation, or answers to questions you can Google for - much greater probability of a random library existing for PHP than for Lisp (which is perhaps another case of the first point)

I keep coming back to Clojure as a way to do Lisp and still get many of the benefits of building on a popular platform (Java, in Clojure's case).

Scheme implementations on the JVM have the added benefit that it's easy to find CS grads with Scheme on the resume. Not that it takes much time to pick up, but having it on resumes fits mainstream hiring practices better.

When he says "not much in terms of community to help answer questions or maintain your code", he meant "I can´t google my way out of a tough programming problem"

Lisp is not for sissies.

Sometimes really remarkable programmers start out as "sissies", you know.

People who give the language a reputation of having a rude and insular community accelerate its death.

As opposed to the sophisticated self-proclaimed programmers who give PHP the reputation of being such an elegant tool.

Really remarkable programmers usually don't start out as sissies - they use, understand and improve upon the tools other remarkable programmers gave them. Or invent completely new ones.

And that is one reason why not to use Windows - it really won't help that goal. The whole environment is not conductive to this king of tool refinement.

I'm pretty sure nobody is saying PHP is elegant, just that they think it's easier to set up and drop in place than Lisp, and it's easier to find junior programmers familiar with it. Several loud voices in the Lisp community have implied that this isn't really a problem, which is a great way to convince people to write it off as a web programming platform.

Instead comparing PHP to Lisp for that purpose, I'd be more interested in a comparison between PHP and Python or PHP and Ruby.

"Instead comparing PHP to Lisp for that purpose, I'd be more interested in a comparison between PHP and Python or PHP and Ruby."

I agree. More to the point, it would be more interesting to compare PHP frameworks to Rails or Django, as Ruby and Python are more general purpose languages and PHP, while it can be used for other things, is built to generate HTML.

The original (quite lame) article is in the lines that "I tried to use this ocean liner to go to the supermarket and it is infinitely less convenient than the car I was used to. Nobody should use ocean liners because cars are more convenient". It´s awful.

I think the comparison Brian Hurt makes between "core" and "edge" languages (http://enfranchisedmind.com/blog/2008/09/20/programming-lang...) is pretty relevant here. "Edge" languages are often used as "glue" languages, because they're good at wrapping separate components and making them work together, while "core" languages are usually better for complicated systems that do most of their work internally, such as compilers. Lisp and OCaml are primarily core languages, while Python and Perl are primarily edge languages.

No, Lisp is for weenies.

There are some highly idiosyncratic bugs/problems I'd rather find the solution to on Google because finding the solution myself wouldn't be very edifying.

I see the complaint as this: Does Lisp Feature a PECL Installer? - What if you need a clustered server environment - how are you going to role out a large application to 20, 30, 500 servers? PECL and PHP Offers libraries (functions really) to accomplish much more off the shelf through it's Standard Library than many other languages. -Compiled-In DB Drivers (MSSQL,MYSQL,PGSQL,ODBC,SQLITE) -LDAP -KADM5 -Mcrypt -PDO -Sockets -XML -SOAP -(an excellent set of string and array functions)

Actually can someone who knows more about .Net, Ruby, or Java tell me of the features I listed what languages have these features that come with, or are optional?

I don't find the language to be ugly, dirty, or unpleasant. Java is the most popular programming language in the world, and I cannot stand it, if I have to create one more NEW object simply to format CSS text I am going to explode.

I have no problem properly naming and using 1,000 functions. I would rather know each function than have 10 objects with 100 methods each. Objects have their place for Webapps (which ultimately output text last time I checked) Web Applications do not need to be abstracted to the point of Object Inheritance Oblivion!

Can someone please tell me of all the better ways to write this in other languages that are so far superior to PHP?

<?php $br = "<br />"; if(!empty($_SERVER['HTTP_REFERRER'] && !stripos($_SERVER['HTTP_REFERRER'],$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'])) { print "Remote Login Denied!" . $br; } else { print "Success!" . $br; } ?>

Here is even a better way...

$br = "<br />" && !empty($_SERVER['HTTP_REFERRER'] && !stripos($_SERVER['HTTP_REFERRER'],$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']) && print("Remote Login Denied!" . $br;) || print("Success!" . $br);

I always code like this and call it if-less programming. No matter how smart the new grad is, they find it very hard to follow:-) Job security dude.