I also believe that people should focus primarily on what they’re comfortable with and can build their application in the fastest with the least amount of potential vulnerabilities. If you’re the most qualified to work in your .NET Environment, so be it. If you can RTM faster in J2EE than Ruby on Rails, have at it.

My specialty may be PHP, but I consider myself to be a pretty well-rounded developer. I know no Java and wouldn’t touch Ruby with a ten foot pole, though. After some of the experiences I’ve had over the past couple of years, at my present job and doing freelance work for other companies, I’ll be the first to tell you that PHP certainly isn’t for everything. But, I’ve had one too many experiences where it could’ve been easier to push out a Production-worthy Component anywhere from five to ten times faster in PHP, yet the project stayed with its other infrastructure and ended up with, quite frankly, a half-assed solution. Case in point was when GU² Services was acquired by Probyn Marketing. I lost my job over that stupid crap, because my boss decided to infrastructure jump instead of sticking with what our developers knew and could handle the best.

It’s all in using what you’re comfortable with, of course. But, don’t ever count out the underdog. And most certainly don’t try to beat it down …

Well, I wasn’t talking about you so much. I can agree on the two points you mentioned, though. A lot of projects (the Engine especially) could benefit from real namespaces in PHP. I’ve been watching the internals mailing list for a while now and keeping up specifically with PHP 6 development, and they’ve sacrificed a lot of what would’ve been really good functionality in favor of the “KISS” principle.

And I’m not referring to larger already-established companies. If you’ve already got your infrastructure built with another language, that’s no skin off my back, and I hope it suits your needs quite nicely. Migration is not what I’m looking for. I’m looking for new adopters (like Yahoo!, as you mentioned) that can see what PHP has the potential to bring to the table. IBM has been doing a lot of work with PHP and even Microsoft has formed a partnership with Zend. I think this should be enough to show people that PHP is a considerable player in Enterprise Development. There’s a lot of things you can do in PHP. Granted, it’s not the best for every situation, but oftentimes I find that a language is limited merely by the imagination of the person writing the code.

I would have mentioned something in our convo along the lines of how they dump every function into a global namespace, and how its “KISS” philosophy holds the language back, but since you didn’t want to discuss the subject further, I stopped. :p

At any rate, I won’t bother getting into it, since your brain is probably very sore as it is.

…But just as a closer, the main reason it’s probably not widely adopted is because large companies have already invested millions into their JSP/J2EE-powered web applications, and most Java web developers hate PHP, so it’d be too much work and cost too much money to migrate. Not to mention Java is understood to be more secure (PHP still has a few pesky buffer overflow flaws here and there), so it ends up being the language of choice. However, as shown by Yahoo being coded in PHP (#1 on Alexa), along with GameSpot and GameFAQs, it can be used for large-scale web development, if effort is put into it.

*Stops now* :p