Contempt Culture | Hacker News Reader

Contempt Culture

blog.aurynn.com

19 pointscoryfklein8 comments

I guess I never understood the elitism and strong feelings around programming languages. It's such a strange thing to stake one's _identity_ to.

It's like getting upset that Dostoyevsky wrote _Crime and Punishment_ in Russian. The language is irrelevant - he got his point across regardless. Would the novel be any less important and valuable if it was written in German, or Portuguese, Latin, or Mandarin? Of course not.

I think extending the analogy to spoken languages can reveal some biases we have. If Dostoyevsky lived in Africa and wrote Crime and Punishment in Swahili, would it ever have gained the notoriety it has?

There are valid reasons to not like a language, PHP being the easiest to pick on: https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/

As for the people using the language, I have inherited a few PHP projects, and without exception, they are a mess. The code quality and readability is usually garbage, simple stuff like tabbing and consistent variable names. SQL Injection vulnerabilities, and XSS issues abound.

This is exactly the attitude that the author is taking issue with.

Many inexperienced developers use PHP and make a mess. But try to remember that there are also many brilliant engineers at Facebook and other companies using PHP and doing amazing things with it.

By valid reasons, I mean other than the developers, read the link in my post.

You may also appreciate this viewpoint: https://blog.codinghorror.com/php-sucks-but-it-doesnt-matter...

I believe it's tied to nebulous feelings of relative freedom or control over one's environment: once adopted, it's important to make sure your chosen technology stack wins and keeps winning so that you're still praised and employed. As a consequence the rationalization part of your brain will jump ahead and find all the reasons why the language is good.

Cosmopolitanism takes a bigger effort, and it needs a more general confidence in one's abilities. It's easier to focus on building a tribe.

>It's like getting upset that Dostoyevsky wrote _Crime and Punishment_ in Russian. The language is irrelevant - he got his point across regardless. Would the novel be any less important and valuable if it was written in German, or Portuguese, Latin, or Mandarin? Of course not.

Seeing that is inherently tied with Russia, the Russian mindset, and Russian tradition, then of course yes.

(But I get your point).

This is really important. Even if you think that PHP is the worst thing humankind has ever inflicted upon itself, you are not making the world a better place by denigrating the work done in it with this spirit of contempt. If it is terrible, then speak positively about what can be done. If it is painful, then speak positively about how projects / devs can migrate. There are things within tech that deserve to be spoken about negatively, including within language design and software engineering practices, but when everything devolves into tribal signifying you are not making anything better.

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