Learning PHP, reluctantly, for a lisp hacker
mechanical_fish: using HaXe and compiling to PHP - is it a mature technology and the cure-all it appears?There are three reasons to use PHP. One is that it's very simple to deploy because there aren't a lot of layers between you and Apache's C code, and those layers have been exhaustively tested.The second is that it is very easy to learn and there are lots of people who can tinker with it. It's generally easy for another PHP programmer to get your code running. It's generally easy for them to read and understand your code. It's a standard, and it's a simple standard. (A bit too simple, for problems far outside its sweet spot -- but that's what other platforms are for.)The third is that you want to integrate closely with one of the toolkits or frameworks that have already been written in PHP.HaXe breaks all of these features. I see no reason to use it on a production project. If your problem is truly unsuitable for PHP you should use something else. (You have a choice; this is server-side code.) If you can't bring yourself to write code without fancy language features that are missing from PHP you should find another project or another job. You are doing yourself no favors by trying to paper over the issue, whatever it is.