In the PHP world, sometimes we put our blinders on and forget that there's an entire world of people out there that either haven't heard of PHP or have given it a shot and just didn't find it to their liking. Jens is one of the second type. His new post over on his blog today talks about a few reasons why he's "not enamored with PHP anymore".

They laughed at me when, about a year or so, I said I thought PHP was neat. Oh, I never had illusions about it being a great language: it's clearly a pidgin C designed by amateurs. But the learning curve is so shallow, which is important for me since I work in [Objective-]C all day and only have a little bit of time for puttering around writing web-apps. I tried Ruby, but every time I started using it, it took me too long to switch into Ruby Mode from C Mode. PHP was quick-n-dirty and got things done, you could embed it right in web pages, and it had APIs and libraries to do almost anything. I got some cool hacks running in no time at all. PHP rocketh!

I'm not enamored with PHP anymore. What went wrong?

He backs up his claim with a few issues, including: "Pass-by-value arrays", "Nasty backward-compatibility problems", "Nasty installation-dependent differences in behavior", "Poor Unicode support", and "Crappy extension libraries". His next stop? Ruby on Rails, or maybe Lua...