I hate PHP too, but I write it almost every day at work. There's something to be said for how stable it is. I spent a large amount of my career doing .net development and deployed very rarely. It was a big day when I deployed. I would say to my wife, probably going to late tonight, we're deploying. Because something always went wrong when deploying.
Here, I deploy every other morning. Usually, while my coffee is getting to the right temp. The ability to just "throw it on the server", and to take it back if you need to make it great. There's a bunch of devs here, and that deploy all day long every day is one of the main reasons we move "so much faster" than our competition.
So as much as I hate how weird it is, and how frustrating it is not to have strong typing... i respect the heck out of it.
The thing is different languages lend themselves to different processes. Let's say you have the exact same bug in a web app, maybe you need to modify the where clause in the data layer of the app (or something small like that). In the C# version, you'll have to compile it and then push it. Maybe recycle the pool depending on factors in the architecture. In PHP, you just modify the file and throw it out there. Because of the slight differences, the nature of the way work is done leads to companies designing processes around it.
Same. It took us awhile at our company to wrap Octopus around our existing workflow (we don't do some things the way Octopus expects, but over time I found workarounds), but once a project gets set up, it's so super easy and just works, so much so that it's made deployment fast and predictable.
Once we switched over to Octopus we no longer had to bring several people on the team in and expect them to work 6+ hours on the weekend to do a deploy anymore, catch mistakes made during the deploy, etc. Now it's just done with a netops team clicking 'start' for each project, my boss on standby, and the whole thing done in about an hour, usually.
I understand what you are saying about easy-deployment. I work in PHP and .NET, and the difference I think comes down to deploying a few updated files to a PHP environment versus having to deploy your whole compiled application in .NET. Tools like Octopus and Visual Studio features mitigate the problem in .NET, but I totally know what you mean when I have to work without those tools and spend an hour trying to find some missing dependency or web.config entry in our project that often happens in .NET.
I still prefer .NET and C# for the cleanliness, correctness, and the fact that it's easy to write code that works the first time, but it is nice when I just need to update one PHP file and drop it on the server without any downtime to recompile on our WAMP server.
Here, I deploy every other morning. Usually, while my coffee is getting to the right temp. The ability to just "throw it on the server", and to take it back if you need to make it great. There's a bunch of devs here, and that deploy all day long every day is one of the main reasons we move "so much faster" than our competition.
So as much as I hate how weird it is, and how frustrating it is not to have strong typing... i respect the heck out of it.