Would less web-centric mean being useful in making desktop apps? What other dimensions of flexibility do you have in mind?
yes that and bots, and God knows what other back end programs; PHP is decent at the one thing it does (way better than Perl 5 - the thing it replaced), but why limit yourself to just being able to code only web apps? to me that's PHP's biggest weakness, but again that's just my opinion
to me what I still don't understand is why people aren't willing to learn and migrate to either ruby or python... they are very easy to use and understand (just as easy as PHP imo), while being very powerful and flexible at the same time; plus they're popular enough with large enough communities (though yes at times there are jerks in the ruby side - but they are very helpful when asking ruby questions)
I've been using PHP almost exclusively when doing stuff for the web, but frequently feel that I want to pick up both Ruby and Python. I still haven't actually done it yet.
It isn't a lack of community or the presence of jerks that keeps me from getting there. A big part of it is that it seems to take a bit of a different infrastructure to get started. This may be somewhat driven by misunderstandings.
If I want to incorporate a great library that someone wrote in PHP, I drop the source in and start linking to it. File system operations; I know those. For others, say Ruby, it seems like I'd need to run an installer that grabs files and places them somewhere. Then I type out a text file and run another script that builds my database. I don't know how that clock works, so I don't feel comfortable basing my schedule on it yet.
It seems like an awesome way to do things, and I'm excited about getting into it, but I'm making time tradeoffs between (learning another language and how to manage apps) and (day-job and building project ideas that I love).
The key is going to be to shift (learning another language ... etc) onto the project stack.
everything new is hard and initially inconvenient until you get past the initial hump
another problem with PHP compared to x language is that it's too web centric; it's just not flexible enough
imho You're better off either using Rails or Django, but thats me