blah blah blah rant rant rant
Although PHP 5.3 has some cool new additions I still feel it will suffer from years of bad development already out there. It's exciting that the programming language that I use at work is finally getting real lambdas, but I still ask myself "why would I want to use it"? I look at what PHP has to offer in terms of CMS platforms and frameworks and cringe. Anyone who has had to truck through the Joomla source code will know what I'm talking about. The best I have seen as far as frameworks for PHP is Codeigniter, but it's lack of a real Model as well as some other things still puts me off. This might be rectified by using something like Propel in conjunction with Codeigniter.
Lately I have been doing a lot of work in Django. I have dabbled in Django before, but forgot how much I really like it. The model system is awesome, the template system is simple and makes sense, the documentation is great and makes things easy to find, and the online tutorial is easy to follow and actually makes you learn something useful. Everything is really simple. The biggest advantage of PHP was a simple starting environment. I have had no trouble installing Django with apache and getting up and running, which takes the simplicity of PHP as an advantage down a notch. There is still somewhat a barrier for the newbie. You can't just get cheap hosting and have it work automatically like you can with PHP (or at least you have to jump through more hoops). But I don't think this will be a problem with most people. Setting it up on your local machine is pretty damn simple, and if you are a newbie this is all you really need for the time being.
The biggest gain I have seen over Django in comparison to anything that PHP has to offer is the reusability of applications. Take for example a project like Pinax. I couldn't even fathom what this would look like in PHP. Probably a big mess. If you thought Python was weird and don't really want to leave PHP I would urge you to try it again. Go through the Django tutorial and see how easy it is.
