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Comment by greenlblue | Hacker News Reader

Is there any point to this kind of discussion? These kinds of questions have maximum entropy, i.e. if you put a monkey at a keyboard and let it bash the keyboard I bet these are the kinds of questions you would get. One can type up questions of the form "What is horrible about X?" ad museum and not be any closer to creating any kind of value in any form whatsoever.

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There are no value to the discussion unless they come with the reason WHY x is a bad thing, and WHAT you can do to with the language to get rid of/fix x. They don't seem to do so here. (And some features they consider as "bad" things, I consider as good things. Lack of WHY makes me wonder why x is such a bad thing.)

As a note, they complaints seems to mostly be about the lack of standards and conventions. I can agree with that issue, if they find a way to make the standards and convention better.

Yup, I tend to agree. Via that post I ended up on a post by Terry Chay with some much more interesting quantitive analysis of PHP usage at Facebook:

http://terrychay.com/article/hiphop-for-faster-php.shtml/4

One of the things that really surprised me was the observation that PHP has a much higher CPU utilization for comparable operations than other higher level languages.

It's not the question that's relevant, it's the answers.

And as usual it'll end up with the same old list of reasonable problems, 'unforgivable' omissions and miles upon miles of ridiculous hyperbole. It's started already. Is abuse of includes or goto an inherent problem of PHP? I was abusing includes 15 years ago when I messed with C and my earliest BASIC was the code equivalent of snakes & ladders.

All this kind of thing tends to do is embolden the snobs, put the backs up of the faithful and be of no practical use to any reasonable person looking for honest answers. It doesn't even have the virtue of being a humourous discussion since it's been flogged to death over the whole internet for a decade.

Just to pick on the includes example, I think it's fair to point it out as a deficiency if there exist other languages and environments which enable/encourage/force you to get it right. It's not a defence that other languages also get it wrong.

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