From the ‘you can get satisfaction‘ files:
There are some devs out there that don’t like PHP, then there are those that do.
A new survey from Evans Data of over 500 developers, asked questions in 12 different categories to see which dynamic languages they like best.
The study asked about Ruby, Python, Perl, Java script, Flex and VB script and the overall crown went to PHP. Ruby placed second followed by Python and then Perl.
The 12 categories ranked by Evans data were: Ease of Use, Exception handling, Extensibility, Maintainability / Readability, Cross-platform portability, Community, Availability of tools, Quality of tools, Performance, Memory management, Client side scripting and Security.
Digging into some of the specific categories, JavaScript beat out PHP for top score in terms of client-side scripting, which is no surprise to me personally. Python was the winner in the memory management and extensibility category which is something that also makes sense.
The bottom line though always for developers is to choose the right language for the task at hand. Still this report is a good result for those with PHP sites and apps as it helps to further reinforce the validity of their choice.