While python/ruby are arguable better languages in a lot of ways, they're also completely different and lacking in a lot of what PHP offers.
Everyone has their own languages of preference, and personally I really dislike working with python (not too much experience in ruby) while dealing with websites. I cringe each time I'm forced to check the manual for random function behavior, but its not enough to make me move over.
What I'm really looking for is an improved version of PHP. One that keeps most of its style but removing the backwards-compatible crap. It looks like HipHop may go down that path in the near future (they've already added python-style yield generator functions)
Literally the only thing that PHP has over Ruby/Python/whatever is ease of deployment. It is ridiculously easy to deploy a PHP application, whereas you will jump through a lot of hoops with other solutions.
After a lot of thought, I've arrived at the conclusion that this is because PHP has its request handler and template language all baked into the same process. It's pretty great at that - no setup required to start slinging code.
Other than that (which is significant), I'm hard-pressed to find an advantage. It's verbose, inconsistent, lacks features that've been present in other languages for years, and as the article author complains about, has no real vibrant packaging system for leveraging code re-use. Code re-use in PHP is "copy-and-paste". Yikes.
Everyone has their own languages of preference, and personally I really dislike working with python (not too much experience in ruby) while dealing with websites. I cringe each time I'm forced to check the manual for random function behavior, but its not enough to make me move over.
What I'm really looking for is an improved version of PHP. One that keeps most of its style but removing the backwards-compatible crap. It looks like HipHop may go down that path in the near future (they've already added python-style yield generator functions)