Serious alternatives to PHP

[worseisworser]

LISP via CGI

There is certainly no hard link between Lisp and CGI! The same holds for C/C++ of course.

edit: It holds for pretty much any language/environment out there, as most can do FFI which means they can access the native socket API of the environment/OS and thus pretty much do as they please.

[Hellkeepa]

HELLo!

If the only reason for not going with PHP is because "the vast majority of users agree that it is a horrible language", then you should reconsider a bit.

Now, I'm not saying that PHP is the perfect language, nor that it doesn't have its share of weaknesses; Just like any other language out there. PHP has some strengths too, some of which can be abused (and quite often are by people who don't really know what they're doing). These strengths also make PHP one of the most flexible languages you can use, and could be utilized to help you build a web app really fast.
One other advantage of PHP is precisely that it is so widely used (and abused), in that it has a whole boatload of information and documentation. The PHP.net manual is one of the best places to look up information.

Just be very mindful of what you're doing, and secure down your application (don't trust the user), and you should be perfectly fine.

Happy codin'!

[howlingmadhowie]

thinking about php some more, it does have a few interesting reflection shortcuts, which make programming with it a bit easier.

you can do something like this, for example:

class MyClass {

// class definition

}

$myClassname="MyClass";
$myInstance = new $MyClassname();

which is nice.

You can also access functions over strings as well:

function myFunc() { // do stuff }

$myFunctionname="myFunc";
$myFunctionname();

which takes some of the pain out of php not being functional.

[soltanis]

Perl and LISP are gay, because the programs are very unmaintainable. But they can also be good, because very few people actually understand them, so they won't be able to reverse-engineer or even steal the code. The definite advantage of Perl is, that it has many many scripts that you can download, which enables you to write many complex programs very fast (much faster than with Java/asp.net).

Have you ever used Perl or Lisp? With rigid discipline, perl programs can be perfectly maintainable, and many people understand the language. While it's likely that fewer coders out there understand a Lisp dialect, these programs are hardly unmaintainable; in my view, these are actually the simplest programs to understand.

To refer back to the original post, PHP is a frequently-bashed language because of inconsistent naming, the cramming of hundreds of functions into the global namespace (Perl is also guilty of this, but not quite to the same extent), annoying sigils (Perl's are worse, they got a little better in Perl 6) and object-orientation as apparently an afterthought. See, I just bashed it, but this doesn't make it a bad language. Sometimes, it suits your needs perfectly. I find no other language better when I am forced to work with an SQL database, because the integration is very good. As for alternatives, any language is an alternative. Turns out, you can write CGI scripts in any language that can read environment variables and parse strings. Including sh/awk.

[phrostbyte]

I've heard PHP described before by it's author as "a language for people who don't like to program, but who want to solve problems as quickly as possible". This is sacrilege amongst professional software developers these days, where the consensus is maintainability is more important then speed of development. I don't think this is a universal hate for the language, and it is among the most popular languages out there (if not the most popular). Your using a PHP application right now.

[WitchCraft]

the consensus is maintainability is more important then speed of development.

IMHO, actually the opposite is true.
Speed of development (+choice of platform [=volume]) is EVERYTHING !
Nobody gives a damn about maintainablity/quality.

But it's also my opinion that, as Mark Twain once said, whenever you've the same opinion as the majority, it's time to reconsider.

That's why I am an avid fan of maintainability.
I'm a long-term person, not a short-term person.
Because on the long run, being able to extend functionality easily and fast without introducing a lot of bugs in the process, as well as solid unit tests and keeping one solid and well designed and thought-over version of a project/product is far more important than getting out the latest version of your product of questionable quality in n varieties, all of them having some functions but lacking other things another version has, but the project versions are so divergent that you can't reunite them without significant effort [=expenditure].