Regardless of the fact that y2 started at 0.5, fully half of what y1 started at, at some point y2 overtakes y1. It's impotent to whine endlessly that a language used to be bad.
So PHP 5 years ago was terrible. PHP today is 'nearly as good' as Python (I'd argue it's better). In 5 years PHP is going to blow Python out of the water.
These languages that are 'better than PHP' have no appreciable market share, and it's not a vast conspiracy and it's not because PHP caters to the lowest common denominator. It's because they suck, fundamentally, at getting things done. WordPress doesn't exist in Python. Symfony doesn't exist in Python. Doctrine does, but PHP has more database drivers than Python so Doctrine is better.
You can be terse, elegant, and beautiful in Python. That's great, but no one I know has ever cared about what the code they're paying for looks like. They care about stability, agility, and testability - things you've been able to get in PHP since 2005.
I think your graph is accurate when it comes to the amount of effort put into polishing each language -- but as to actual quality, I'd firstly say y=1 is the goal (the language is basically complete; you can add more around the edges, but the core is solid and needs no more changes), and it doesn't account for the fact that with a constant large amount of effort as input, progress as output slows down exponentially due to backwards compatibility concerns. As such, I still think that starting off good and evolving slowly is better than starting off awful and rapidly turning into a giant blob of band-aids :P
Again with the scales, I agree that PHP is great for getting things done to start with, and once you've started with something then carrying on using it is easier than changing. That's why my biggest and most successful project still uses PHP, even though experience has taught me that everything else is more productive after the initial setup hurdle~
Stability, agility, and testability have been in other languages for decades, and in all three cases other languages have done them better, so I'm not sure why PHP having them since 2005 is supposed to be a good sign...
> I'd firstly say y=1 is the goal (the language is basically complete; you can add more around the edges,
Not your functions, not your plane, you don't get to define parameters.
> starting off awful and rapidly turning into a giant blob of band-aids :P
PHP has been completely rewritten at least twice.
> everything else is more productive after the initial setup hurdle~
Can you give a single example of something in Python that introduces greater productivity than PHP?
> and in all three cases other languages have done them better
> so I'm not sure why PHP having them since 2005 is supposed to be a good sign...
Now you're just being a pedant. The point is that it isn't 2005 and it's not 1978. It's 2012. Talking about what the capabilities of a language were almost a decade ago is useless.
y1 = 0.02x + 1
y2 = 0.10x + 0.5
Regardless of the fact that y2 started at 0.5, fully half of what y1 started at, at some point y2 overtakes y1. It's impotent to whine endlessly that a language used to be bad.
So PHP 5 years ago was terrible. PHP today is 'nearly as good' as Python (I'd argue it's better). In 5 years PHP is going to blow Python out of the water.
These languages that are 'better than PHP' have no appreciable market share, and it's not a vast conspiracy and it's not because PHP caters to the lowest common denominator. It's because they suck, fundamentally, at getting things done. WordPress doesn't exist in Python. Symfony doesn't exist in Python. Doctrine does, but PHP has more database drivers than Python so Doctrine is better.
You can be terse, elegant, and beautiful in Python. That's great, but no one I know has ever cared about what the code they're paying for looks like. They care about stability, agility, and testability - things you've been able to get in PHP since 2005.