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Comment by cheald | Hacker News Reader

I'm not much a fan of that sentiment. It's the same sentiment espoused by people who don't have time to design software properly, or test it, or do exception handling. The tool is an important part of solving problems, but having an elegant tool helps keep the tool itself from becoming a problem. There seems to be subtext in that rant which says "prettier languages are inferior because they're written by academic snobs who don't have any experience actually writing real software", which is just patently false.

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Seconded.

Also, people who usually have that sentiment are not the same people who have to maintain the code. They're usually long gone by then. I have personally suffered many sleepless nights having to maintain projects like that.

I think it's healthy to avoid extremes. Neither a "whatever works" nor a "write everything in lisp because it's beautiful" sentiment. It's up to the good programmer to decide when to be a pragmatist and when to be a purist.

My takeaway was that you should use what you're most productive in; even if there happens to be some inconsequential warts.

I hear you, but the way he expresses what he does has the net effect of making excuses for PHP and saying "Hey, it's okay that it's an entirely inconsistent language without fundamental features of other real languages because it's just a tool to solve a problem I had at one point, and I hack in new features as the problem-of-the-minute requires them". That's not a well-designed tool. That's a hammer glued to a screwdriver duct taped to a torque wrench welded onto a lawnmower. You can probably properly tension a timing belt with such a monster, but just because you can doesn't mean that it's the right (or most productive) tool.

I'm very productive in PHP; that doesn't change the fact that I discovered I could be more productive in other languages that didn't actively frustrate my development progress due to being well-designed.

Agreed. Noone calls a builder fancy for wanting working tools.

You are missing the point. The end user does not need to know, and more importantly, doesnt even care what language you use. Just solve their problem.

I may not care, but I end up knowing every time I see one of those PHP/MySQL error traces in a website. Apparently one of their problems isn't proper exception handling.

So writing my app in <your preferred language> automatically ensures my database will be up and all exceptions are handled correctly?

No, it does, however, ensure that my errors don't randomly get dumped on the page, and that instead an exception is raised and a proper 500 page can be returned.

I'm not a coder, and I wouldn't be building stuff today if I didn't have PHP. I think a lot of people probably feel that way.

Programma hatas gon hate.

The end user doesn't directly care, but if you solve their problem in a hacky unmaintainable way, they'll care when it takes you days to do what should take hours, weeks to do what should take days.

So writing my app in <your preferred language> automatically makes it elegant?

No. I didn't say that. The language you write in doesn't matter nearly as much as your attitude about writing the software. If you don't design for maintainability and readability, then modifying the code later will take much longer.

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