This article was inspirited by an interesting conversation that happened between me and my colleague during the lunch break. I’m not going to talk about what’s wrong with PHP here. Too many spears have been broken on this battlefield. If you want to know my opinion, you will have to read the article “PHP: a fractal of bad design.” I agree with every single word. What I’m going to do now is answer the following question: “Why does every former PHP developer blame it?”

You know, every time there is a discussion about PHP a guy appears and says: “OK. You are cool. You have learned something else. You don’t use PHP anymore. So what’s your problem? Why don’t you shut up and get off my lawn?” Actually, I don’t care about PHP developers who are lazy to learn anything else. It is their business. IT industry has improved so fast that every lazy bum will go down very soon. Again, if you don’t want to learn anything new, you will go down and find yourself unemployed. My real problem is the customers who want me to use PHP because they believe that it will be easier and cheaper to find developers for support in future. And that is total bullshit which I want to discuss.

Why are PHP developers cheap? Why are there so many of those ready to be hired? The answer is in the article “Finding Great Developers” by Joel Spolsky (Everyone loves and reads Joel, don’t they?): because there is a lot of unqualified amateurs in the market. Most of good developers work somewhere. And they learn something new. Every day. And if they know, for example Ruby or Python, you will never make them use PHP. As a result, the market is overflowed by laymen. And most of them are PHP guys. So are you ready to hire them for the support of you brilliant startup? Think about it. Each of them has drowned a couple of projects already. Are you? No? Then stop using PHP and let it die.

Because it must. Because every time you start a new project using PHP, I will kill a little puppy. You have been warned.