The Right Tool is an interesting view into programmers’ perception of various programming languages. It appeared last year, and has in the meantime built up quite a lot of data about a lot of different languages.

The results are interesting, to say the least.

Erlang, my flavour of the month, predictably ranks top on both ‘This language is good for distributed computing’ and ‘This language excels at concurrency’. So far so good. At the time of writing, the number #1 most dissimilar to is PHP.

Scala, my other flavour of the month, gets glowing marks on reusable code, and a lovely type system. Surprise surprise, #1 dissimilarity is PHP again.

PHP, the bane of my life, is on top in the lolz-o-meter. Its highest score is ‘I am sometimes embarrassed to admit to my peers that I know this language’. Wow. #4 is ‘The thought that I may be using this language in twenty years time fills me with dead’. I hear that. The ‘Most Similar’ rating include Visual Basic and Cobol – both regularly derided for being made of suck.

So, by the results, people seem to hate PHP – but this is at odds with it being absolutely everywhere. You can’t escape PHP when doing web stuff, as most affordable hosting companies offer it and nothing else. Why aren’t there more options for non-PHP servers, when it’s so widely disliked? And how do we convince hosting companies to provide us with something better, and clients to want their projects written in something better?