PHP has only one feature going for it: it already exists. As soon as you introduce a new programming language, you lose what PHP has to offer. Another success is the lack of a library culture -- just copy-and-paste code into your app, and you never have to worry about installing dependencies on your shared host.

If you want a better version of PHP, try Perl / Python / Ruby. If you want a language that can check your code for safety at compile-time, use Haskell. But if you invent your own language, it will have three problem: nobody will know how to use it, it won't be installed on any three-dollars-a-month shared host, and it won't have any libraries.

If you can't solve the "I want to use it for $3 a month" problem, your programming language is a failure compared to PHP. If you can afford more than $3 a month for hosting, then you're not using PHP anyway. Most people learn to program because they want to share something with their friends. They choose PHP because it lets them do that, and they don't have the experience to know that They Are Doing It Wrong. By the time you introduce a PHP "reboot", you're not going to get that "Don't Know That I'm Doing It Wrong" crowd anymore, and then who's your audience?

Writing a new programming language is fun, but don't expect it to replace PHP. That's going to be impossible unless your rewrite is shipped from php.net and replaces what exists now.

Actually they didn't: https://twitter.com/bizweekdesign/status/121871973688160256 and https://twitter.com/bizweekdesign/status/121918276459696129

I'm running both chef and puppet in production, so I will add my (slightly cynic) comparison here:

When comparing Chef to puppet then Chef comes out as the pragmatist. Once up and running most common every-day tasks are less painful in chef. Apart from that its main advantage over puppet (to me) is that it allows to semi-sanely manage transient hosts (cloud/EC2) that enter/exit a cluster ad hoc. Puppet can also do that in theory, in practice you'd rather want to fork your eyes out with a spoon.

However, the pragmatism comes at a price: The chef-implementation is an absolute and unmitigated disaster.

You'll spend quite a bit of quality time initially to get the six dozen components to play ball and to fix up basics that shouldn't need fixing (i.e. you'll want to ensure that everything is under version control and not just the parts that chef deems worth versioning).

Over the first couple months you'll also see the odd server-crash while you figure out the peculiarities of your particular installation. Chef is very heavy on dependencies and the exact software-versions depend on when and how you install (pkgs vs source-code).

However, once you're over that hump and if you're not too worried about standing on the shoulders of 'a one-eyed amongst the blind' then the whole cookbooks/roles/runlists arrangement is quite comfortable to work with.

Just don't expect features like dry-run, real idempotency or clean dependency tracking that some would consider "basic" for such a tool. Also don't expect a security-model at all; to my knowledge all hosts that are authorized to talk to a chef-server can see all cookbooks and databags on that server.

If you care a lot about those latter minor quibbles then perhaps Puppet might be more your thing.

Puppet is conceptually much cleaner (night/day difference), which sadly and ironically is also its biggest drawback; they took it too far. Puppet made a bad decision early on by inventing their own language. This decision will be your personal ball on a chain for the lifetime of your puppet deployment.

But, is it really that bad? Well. Yes.

After the initial (steep) learning curve there's only a small plateau of reward before you begin to run into the more subtle issues. The most commonly heard complaints about the language are the ass-backwards class/variable-inheritance and the blurry (and effectively undocumented) divide between what should go into the manifests (sorta like chefs "cookbooks") and what into a storage layer called "extdata" (sorta somewhat like chefs "databags"). But rest assured, there's plenty more, I don't want to spoil it all at once here.

So, yes, you will hate puppet every time you have to make a complex change.

Yet for some it might still be worth it, here's some of my reasons: Once you finally have something up and running puppet feels much more predictable and "solid" than chef. You can actually dry-run and test (most) changes before rolling them out. Puppet will provide meaningful error messages in most situations (unlike the esoteric chef stack-traces). The puppet daemon is just that; one daemon (unlike the conglomerate of moving parts that comprises a chef deployment). Generally speaking there is much less "magic" in puppet than in chef. You will almost always know precisely what went wrong - a pretty important attribute that chef unfortunately doesn't share.

Oh, and no least: the puppet documentation is heads and shoulders above chef (although the latter has improved recently).

So, if you're in the market, good luck making your choice. I'm not making a recommendation here because, quite frankly, I wouldn't recommend either to anyone other than my worst enemy. ;-)