"Hello World" by any other name - Part #1

PHP, it wasn't the first, oh no,  I did the regular routine, academic for the most part, most long forgotten :

• Basic (o the Q, QW and Visual types),
• the Pascal ( the Turbo and the Delphi types),
• the ASM,
• the C,
• the C++ (I could point all the fun we had,but all I have are pointers to pointers and I left my deferring stick in my other pants),
• the PL/SQL,
• the ActionScript (the bleargh, 3 and Flex oriented),
• Ruby (oh my darling),
• Clipper,
• Javascript
• Java

But PHP as been my traveling companion, for no particular reason, from 3, to 4, to the very much welcomed 5 series. I enjoyed the wide support, the magnificent documentation, the easy entry level, it's ubiquity, it's presence in hosting services everywhere and having stick with it for so long I saw it evolve over time, bringing new constructs and features to the language (even if never doing away with all of it's garbage) and while I can't evaluate how fast or how intensively other languages changed, I was never truly let down by new PHP releases and what they brought along, or will continue to bring.

But still, I had other experiences, Ruby still plagues my PHP experience with it's 100% oop approach to everything, I love the fact that you can write

"what, a string?".methods.sort

and know exactly what you can do with a string, alphabetically ordered just for my viewing pleasure :) , I loved how well the mixins worked and how gem's coming in from everywhere and anywhere would just immediately mingle and turbocharge existing classes (yes, hello PHP 5.4 traits, I know you're coming) . I used RoR - a bit after the "OMG It's magic" hype went down, that sort of impossible-to-happen hype really brings out the irrational hate in me - and liked it a lot - I mean, when push came to shove, and complexity came into play, upgrading Rails became less and less easy / possible, without major rewrites (ohh 2.0,2.1,2.2 series), and it was always exciting too see Ruby apps panting with 400MB of used RAM while the equivalent PHP app was flying with 50MB .. but those are infra-structural details that have many strategies in how to overcome .

Anyway, while PHP will continue to play the lead role in my money making abilities, truth is I need to see what's out there again, I have nagging friends who troll away with ease for my PHP choice of language, not that I put much faith into generalist trolling of the friendly kind, all languages have their ups and downs, and they're not even bothering to use radically different languages, so I know it's just PHP punkin' around :) , but still, my synapses need the change, I need to experiment with different approaches and so, I need to learn a new language :)

But what should I choose ..........

(to be continued)