Personally I find nothing much 'general purpose' about PHP. The language has configuration files! That alone prohibits me from doing anything generic with it.
So all that's left for me is 'focus on web development'. And to be honest: I think today it is not even so good at that. We have server side JS (Node), Ruby, Python and Java -- all freely available with huge communities. Does PHP stack up against these today?
I sure see that back in the days, when cgi scripts in Perl were the norm, PHP had huge advantages over its direct competition in open source web dev land.
To me Rasmus merely underlines the lack of vision, or ability to act on one.
So all that's left for me is 'focus on web development'. And to be honest: I think today it is not even so good at that. We have server side JS (Node), Ruby, Python and Java -- all freely available with huge communities. Does PHP stack up against these today?
I sure see that back in the days, when cgi scripts in Perl were the norm, PHP had huge advantages over its direct competition in open source web dev land.
To me Rasmus merely underlines the lack of vision, or ability to act on one.