>So [only] language designers can be critical of other languages?
Yes. Or rather, other people can be critical too, but language designer' opinions have far more validity.
In other words, anybody can say whatever uninformed BS he wants (it's a free country). But that's no replacement for being an expert in what you're discussing.
>Since programmers can vote with their feet and gravitate towards better languages (is it miraculous that almost all programmers have a distaste for PHP?)
You'd be surprised. PHP is one of the most popular languages and one of the most used languages, so far from "all programmers have a distaste for PHP". So if we were to use that "voting" argument alone (which I find wrong), PHP should be considered a very good language. Not the intention you had, I guess.
While PHP has it warts, it's mainly the less pragmatic and more fad prone programmers that have issues with PHP, those who look for silver bullets and like to feel superior by choice of programming language, editor and the like.
As for programmers "voting with their feet", well, they don't do quite a good job at it. The best languages (like LISP, Smalltalk, OcamL, Haskell, to name but a few etc) are seldom the most popular too.
> but language designers' opinions have far more validity
Here's the case we're talking about the work of a language designer. By the way, not all people capable of creating a programming language have created one yet. Marc-André Cournoyer, who wrote the book that Jeremy Ashkenas learnt language design from to write CoffeeScript, has not created a language himself.
Yes. Or rather, other people can be critical too, but language designer' opinions have far more validity.
In other words, anybody can say whatever uninformed BS he wants (it's a free country). But that's no replacement for being an expert in what you're discussing.
>Since programmers can vote with their feet and gravitate towards better languages (is it miraculous that almost all programmers have a distaste for PHP?)
You'd be surprised. PHP is one of the most popular languages and one of the most used languages, so far from "all programmers have a distaste for PHP". So if we were to use that "voting" argument alone (which I find wrong), PHP should be considered a very good language. Not the intention you had, I guess.
While PHP has it warts, it's mainly the less pragmatic and more fad prone programmers that have issues with PHP, those who look for silver bullets and like to feel superior by choice of programming language, editor and the like.
As for programmers "voting with their feet", well, they don't do quite a good job at it. The best languages (like LISP, Smalltalk, OcamL, Haskell, to name but a few etc) are seldom the most popular too.