"I am simply arguing that the most important thing in a project is the quality of the developers, not the language they chose"
I agree with the first part, but I think the language choice is integral to just how good those good developers can be.
I don't believe for a minute that a great developer can develop in PHP without being seriously crippled by it.
Functional programming has a tremendous amount of value outside of async/multi-threaded environments that cannot simply be replaced by other means. There are real limits to the amount of modularity one can achieve without functional programming, and modularity is key to great programming. I'd point you again to this paper: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1482797
The state and history of the software industry at large only demonstrates that the majority of software developers in key technical positions within the industry are and have been less than great.
But if your argument is that PHP is "good enough" given a bunch of average developers... well then, yes, probably. Certainly plenty of good software has been written in PHP. I'd just argue that with the right developers it's far less than optimal, and that the choice of language could easily be the difference between the success and failure of a complex project.
"Functional programming has a tremendous amount of value outside of async/multi-threaded environments that cannot simply be replaced by other means."
Functional programming, or closures? I said:
"Closures in particular are a very powerful tool in async/multi-threaded environments, but in the stateless/sync environment of a web application environment, they collapse down to syntactical sugar, and solve nothing that cannot be solved in other ways."
I made absolutely no statement regarding functional programming in general, and the label 'functional programming' applies to a much broader set of topics than just closures, so I am entirely at a loss as to why you think it makes sense to 'rebut' my statement about closures with something about functional programming?
"There are real limits to the amount of modularity one can achieve without functional programming, and modularity is key to great programming."
I entirely agree, modularity is good.
"The state and history of the software industry at large only demonstrates that the majority of software developers in key technical positions within the industry are and have been less than great."
indeed.
"But if your argument is that PHP is "good enough" given a bunch of average developers..."
LOL.
It really wasn't.
Im glad you like functional languages and closures, you really should check out Scheme - its even MORE functional than Python.
I agree with the first part, but I think the language choice is integral to just how good those good developers can be.
I don't believe for a minute that a great developer can develop in PHP without being seriously crippled by it.
Functional programming has a tremendous amount of value outside of async/multi-threaded environments that cannot simply be replaced by other means. There are real limits to the amount of modularity one can achieve without functional programming, and modularity is key to great programming. I'd point you again to this paper: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1482797
The state and history of the software industry at large only demonstrates that the majority of software developers in key technical positions within the industry are and have been less than great.
But if your argument is that PHP is "good enough" given a bunch of average developers... well then, yes, probably. Certainly plenty of good software has been written in PHP. I'd just argue that with the right developers it's far less than optimal, and that the choice of language could easily be the difference between the success and failure of a complex project.