Matthew Setter has started off a series of posts on the SitePoint PHP blog with the first post interviewing community members to answer one main question, "can great apps be written in PHP?"

I read an old post, circa 2010, on the MailChimp blog a little while ago, about their experience using PHP. It struck a chord with me, because the sentiments they shared I’ve felt myself, and heard echoed many times over the years. [...] Despite its successes, or people’s successes with it (a la Facebook, MailChimp, Hailo, Google, and others), it’s inferred we should use languages which had their foundations as pure languages; not ones which came to be a language, as PHP evolved into over time.

He references some of the other comments in the Mailchimp article about their experience with the language along with mentions of a few others. He wonders if these negative comments are true and, to get some answers, searches out other developers and their opinions. In this first interview he talks with Bobby Deveaux about his background in the language, what he'd like to see added and more.