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Comment by phlyingpenguin | Hacker News Reader

> over the years PHP has managed to get itself a reputation of messy codebases, inexperienced developers, insecure code, an inconsistent core library, and what not.

RTFA? My sentiment is not about the language so much as the culture around it. You can certainly write great code in it, but I also have worked plenty of PHP dev shops and have no desire to ever go back to that life. It's clear you're hurt that the language you know has a bad reputation. My condolences on that. I don't need to list off languages that I like to know that I don't want to use PHP or work with PHP developers.

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I mean there is probably no point in saying anything to you since you seem to have made up your mind and don't care about anything else.

But how exactly is a "PHP developer" equal to being a negative/bad programmer?

To answer your question, I'll once again just paste the same quote. Sure, there are good programmers out there. But PHP is a pretty good heuristic for this class of programmer.

> over the years PHP has managed to get itself a reputation of messy codebases, inexperienced developers, insecure code, an inconsistent core library, and what not.

There's no point in having a conversation if we all need to cheer on the article. Yeah, I've made up my mind. I think this article is misguided. No amount of technical changes to PHP changes legacy codebases or exactly the opening paragraph of the article that everybody seems to be ignoring.

Yeah, but you still haven't answered the question of how being a PHP developer means being a bad programmer. All you've done is say they have a bad reputation, but reputations can easily be based on false or outdated data.

Java was known for being so slow as to be absolutely worthless 20 years ago, and it still has a reputation for being slow despite many benchmarks proving otherwise.

Yeah, sure, if you take a PHP project from a legacy code base and run a server with it, it'll probably get hacked within minutes, but that says nothing about current-gen PHP.

Haters gonna hate I guess, it's your opinion. The world around any stack evolves and you apparently want to keep your old opinion about PHP. You failed to show us why this reputation is still valid today.

Fan clubs gonna fan. Until then, people are identifying so hard with a language that they can't accept that being a bad sign. Claim it's an old opinion if you like. Does that help you invalidate it? It's based on current usage, but it's also reenforced by comment sections like this.

I've seen a million dollar java project (which started as scala) crash and burn because the team couldn't code its way out of a box. Ruby / Rails, python, php, heck even chef and vagrant setups that made me question my sanity. Crack open the code for most games and you see an unholy mess of c/++. I also know brilliant people who write excellent code in all of those (except maybe python, it's not too popular in my immediate circle). Golang is probably the hardest to tell good from bad since copy-paste is a virtue.

I have long given up on "language choice" as a marker that automatically says anything about a developer at all.

Nah, I'm not hurt by people bad mouthing PHP...

For me code is like a vehicle type. A truck is not fast, but it can haul more than a car can... If you get rid of trucks, some jobs don't get done. A bus can haul lots of people that would not all be comfortable riding on a truck. That still does not mean we should get rid of cars, because they have a purpose too.

The logic is simple, saying PHP is old and useless is like saying we need to get rid of trucks. Not saying what's better and why it's better is like saying "Get rid of all those trucks we use right now, we won't ever need them". That kind of talk is driven by arrogance and not reason.

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