Have you ever worked on a piece of software that just made you give up on using a certain programming language?

After spending almost a year working on some forum software in PHP, I just recently said fuck it and started anew in Perl--a language which (I'll admit) I had turned away from previously. The last straw for me was trying to deal with Unicode in PHP, which was just terrible. And I was also becoming just sick of magic quotes and some of the other hassles of the language in general.

It's called practicing. Musicians do it all the time, as do graphic artists.

Art and music is fun, though.

Right, but PHP is a crock of shit.

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Someone can practice an instrument long enough and realize they don't like it, but there's a difference between, "Well this isn't for me," and, "This shit is just objectively awful." I don't think people would say the later about a piano, but they might about PHP.

PHP is the kazoo of programming languages.

Zope3 came very close from turning me off from Python permanently. It's only recently that I've begun tentatively prod that language again, mainly due to Django and Pylons. I still dislike the syntax intensely, but I can overlook that.

Also, trolling Python fanboys on reddit is fun. It borders on a religion for some of them.

PHP is the "client" programming language. The language is not extendable in the language itself without going to Java-style pains or dealing with string eval.

Contrast with Perl, where you can pretty much define your own syntax features in the language. This came in handy when developing a database transaction helper package, particularly when we realized that automatic restart on serialization failure or deadlock would be a really nice thing to have. Also transaction nesting, PostgreSQL having savepoints since 8.0 and all.

Perhaps someone who'd been using PHP for 10 years could replicate that. But, I wouldn't want to have that conversation with him.