PHP is not a bad language (or at least not as bad as some may suggest). I had teachers that didn't even know PHP was object oriented until I told them. I've had clients that immediately distrust us when we say we are PHP developers and question us for not using chic languages and frameworks such as Django or RoR, or enterprise and solid languages such as Java and ASP.NET.Facebook is built on PHP. There are plenty of solid projects that power the web like Joomla and Drupal that are used in the enterprise and governments. There are frameworks and libraries that have some of the best architectures I've seen across all languages (Symfony 2, Doctrine). PHP has the best documentation I've seen and a big community of professionals.PHP has advanced OO features such as reflection, interfaces, let alone that PHP now supports horizontal reuse natively and cleanly through traits.There are bad programmers and script kiddies that give PHP a bad reputation, but power the PHP community at the same time, and because it is so easy to get stuff done PHP you can often do things the wrong way, granted, but why blame the language?.Now, to boil this down to an actual answerable question: what would be a good and solid and short and sweet argument to avoid being frowned upon and stop prejudice in one fell swoop and defend your honor when you say you are a PHP developer?.(free cookie with teh whipped cream to those with empirical evidence of convincing someone client or other on the spot)P.S.: We use Symfony, and the code ends being beautiful and maintainableP.P.S.: Facebook is written in PHP, compiled to C++ via HipHop and deployed on Hadoop. Here: http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/04/exclusive-a-behind-the-scenes-look-at-facebook-release-engineering/1/
How to break the php is a bad language paradigm?
php;client relations;enterprise development
The only answer I have is this: everything sucks.You can find tons of arguments against OOP being any good (a quick search will reveal them) versus functional or procedural programming. You seem to indicate that PHP's OO support defends it.Google blank sucks and you will find results for anything.  Python sucks.  Ruby sucks.  Rails sucks.  PHP sucks.  Java sucks.You want to know what really sucks?  Programmers.  Programmers suck.  Any good developer should be able to create an amazing application, front end and back end, regardless of the language -- even if they were not familiar with the language!  (That is to say, a good programmer should be able to learn and work with any language effectively).Also note that the success of an application has nothing to do with its code.  I've heard that Facebook code is awful, but by God is it effective.  Same is probably true of Wikimedia (Wikipedia is built on PHP and is also an extremely popular website).  What really matters is results!PHP is the language that I am personally most familiar with.  I will defend it to the death.  I have worked with PHP frameworks, straight up PHP code, and PHP, python, and ruby (and even Java)  all for web development.  I can't say that one is particularly better than the other.  What matters more is the developers and the algorithms.  I have seen amazingly good and completely awful code in many languages (especially PHP since I have so much exposure).Now for your question: it depends on who you're dealing withBusinessmenThey care mostly about results and cost-effectiveness.  The fact that the very successful Facebook, Wikipedia, and Wordpress use PHP should be more than enough to convince them that it's an effective language for building successful applications.ProgrammersLet your code speak for itself.  If a developer says that PHP is inferior in some way, show them some PHP code that you believe to be effective.  The proof of the pudding is in the eating.