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I use PHP often for non-web things all the time… I write shell utilities all the time in PHP because it just makes sense: a simple interpreted language, with full access to my app's configuration, database access, dead simple file IO…

The one-liner's are quite nice too… Just today at work I needed to come up with a base64 encoded json string from a data set in an ini file to pass into my Java app via stdin. It was something like:

    php -r 'echo base64_encode(json_encode(parse_ini_file("app.ini")));' | java -classpath Foo.jar com.example.foo.App 
So… yeah. I don't think it's fair to say that "PHP is terrible at being a general purpose language". You just haven't done enough of it yet to appreciate it.


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