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Comment by PonyGumbo | Hacker News Reader

I'm completely stunned that PHP is on the bottom here.

PHP is very international - I wonder if it would rank higher if, say, German swearing was counted?

That's the most intellectual point anybody has made in this anti-php thread.

A small child doesn't think a crayon is badly designed until he has used a pencil or a pen. Without a frame of reference, a PHP developer has little reason to swear at the code.

That's assuming that most profanity is directed at the language. It might be the case, but one may also be annoyed by a codebase, by an algorithm, by a bug, by a co-worker, by the business reason for the commit, or by something totally unrelated.

There can also be humourous swearing, and swearing for emphasis (see DHH), neither of which convey annoyance at all.

Hypothesis A: PHP projects tend to be smaller and simpler, with fewer interactions with other code/requirements/people, and therefore fewer opportunities for annoyance.

Hypothesis B: PHP is actually a very simple and close fit to its use-case, of unambitious webapps, and so often the tool just does its job, and disappears. There's no space to swear at a tool that you don't notice.

They could be swearing in joy.

    # This new PHP library is fucking awesome!

At what point does a webapp become "ambitious" and not suited for PHP? What about PHP with a framework such as, e.g., Cake? I'm curious because I'm embarking on a project and probably choosing Rails over Cake, but only because the other developer is a Rails guy.

I observe lots of groups in this situation. It took me eight years from first contact to first real project in C++ because I learned Smalltalk first. Hadn't I seen Smalltalk before, I would have thought C++ was just fine, instead of the abomination, the gigantic leap backwards it really is, and would happily use it like so many people do.

A lot of people love their tools just because they don't know better ones.

Your point holds true for all languages in the graph.

Am I the only one on HN that's about sick to death of the "PHP developers are children/idiots/bad programmers" meme? I can (and have) been paid to code in all of the following languages:

C Perl JavaScript PHP

I also occasionally code in Python and assembly for fun.

When it comes to web projects PHP is my goto language because it works in all web environments without a bunch of bullshit surrounding installation, versioning or deployment. It's 2011 people, are you telling me developers are still trying to establish some sense of shiny self importance based on language choice? Sad.

> Am I the only one on HN that's about sick to death of the "PHP developers are children/idiots/bad programmers" meme?

Most of the developers are bad. Assuming a normal distribution, pretty much half of them are below the average and average is not usually something to brag about.

That said, languages that stand a higher chance of generating employment should attract those that don't want to learn new programming languages (something good programmers tend to do) and want to make their bets on sure technologies. I expect programmers interested in Lisp, Haskel, Erlang, Python, Ruby, Lua, Scala, Forth, Smalltalk to be, on average, better than those who choose Java, C#, PHP or Visual Basic. Of course, not all of those who choose these languages are bad programmers (and the opposite is also true), but I bet you will find more mediocre programmers on the second-group.

(burn, karma, burn)

I'm sorry but you're full of shit. "Most of the developers are bad" is a faith-based unquantifiable statement. In all the project work I've done (open source and proprietary) over the last four years I've encountered two (2) truly miserable PHP developers. One works for a newspaper company (I guess they couldn't afford talent), the other is so new he's still learning the implications of for() vs while() and since the guy's actually really smart just a smidge of mentoring and some experience and he'll train up nicely.

"languages that stand a higher chance of generating employment should attract those that don't want to learn a new programming language" I think you're confusing PHP and Visual Basic/.NET here. Based on hit counts of job posts there are way more job opportunities for MS developers than PHP developers and based on median salary data coding .NET is worth about 20k a year more, so if they're rational actors the "just in it for a paycheck" crowd should be migrating to Windows development.

Your language salad comparisons are likewise faith-based. How about we trade anecdotes instead? I've met a total of six Ruby developers during my professional career. To a man they were immature, arrogant and totally in love with the hype surrounding their language of choice. Four of the six could be fingered for running multi-million dollar projects into the ground courtesy of a year and a half long series of hipster love-in's masquerading as a SCRUM meetings. Meanwhile during the same time period myself and one other developer launched 65 sites on four platforms with a combined total of around 1 million in annual ad revenue generated for the company. You just keep singing your song, man. I'll keep shipping shit.

Edited to add: just keep on downvoting, truth hurts.

Calm down. I agree with your anecdotes and have observed similar events and people.

Still, if the highly abstract programmer competency follows a normal distribution (and I admit a leap of faith there), you'll agree with me that half of the programmers out there will end up below the average. You'll also agree with me that just above the average doesn't make a good programmer, so, most of the programmers around us will be bad ones.

I don't believe you were downvoted for saying painful truths (which I don't think you did), but more on the form of your statement. I believe most downvoters didn't pass the first sentence. I believe this is a good thing - poor form is bad for discussion. We shouldn't get emotional.

> Calm down.

It's hard to remember this is HN when walking into threads like these. As I mentioned elsewhere, if PHP is mentioned, HN maturity takes a nose dive as people make what amounts to dick and fart jokes. It's embarrassing.

> I don't believe you were downvoted for saying painful truths (which I don't think you did), but more on the form of your statement. I believe most downvoters didn't pass the first sentence. I believe this is a good thing - poor form is bad for discussion. We shouldn't get emotional.

It's not because of his tone. It's because he's defending PHP. Look at other posts in this thread. Look at the bitches thread. Littered with immaturity and a far worse tone than the parent here. Sure, the tone didn't help here, but if his tone had been the same, but defending Ruby, or Lisp, or some other fashionable language, he wouldn't have been. Even your post smells like this.

One more thing...

> I expect programmers interested in Lisp, Haskel, Erlang, Python, Ruby, Lua, Scala, Forth, Smalltalk to be, on average, better than those who choose Java, C#, PHP or Visual Basic.

Ruby is the language people go to for work now. Why? Because it's the in language, especially in the context of HN. And its' not just Ruby, but RoR specifically.

> Ruby is the language people go to for work now

There are more jobs about Java and C# and PHP than on RoR. RoR jobs may be more frequent on sexy startups (the type that appears here).

Which is why I remarked about HN. =)

I'm not suggesting RoR has a lot of jobs compared to the Java or C#, but rather, it's not exactly devoid of job offers either. Especially within the context of HN.

So, apologies for not being clear about the context.

yawn

Speaking of frame of reference, people belittling PHP devs are mostly showing their own ignorance.

The only PHP devs using git are all super professional with the patience of saints?

Perhaps they don't write meaningful commit messages?

How is swearing more meaningful than not swearing in a commit message? Perhaps some developers don't like the idea of the entire world seeing them swear at - basically - text.

Naah. My joke - you got it was a joke, right? - was:

They don't write meaningful comments at all. Including those with swears, meaning at least something.

Joke #2: What would they have to put into commit messages, if you consider so much of PHP code is not written but copypasted? What to write then - "I copypasted it from X"?

I didn't get it.

But your point being that php code doesn't get commented much is right on.

There is not much PHP on Github.

It's the same reason there is no profanity it FORTRAN or COBOL in this graph.

The author makes a terrible mistake: he does not normalize the graph relative to the total amount of code in each language.

There's a lot of Ruby on Github, which is why you can find plenty of Ruby profanity.

The graph is just about useless without this normalization.

The author said he ripped the same number of commits from each language, so it's naturally normalized.

The number of different projects ripped, on the other hand, could help skew the results of the unpopular languages.

There are maybe 10 to 15 ways the normalization doesn't manage to do what it's supposed to. Certain committers happen to use profanity more, for instance. Commit style and frequency. Tendency of programmers of language X to be acculturated somewhere that dampens their natural tendency to curse when frustrated.

For instance, my style of coding means I branch off, commit early and often, with flippant and meaningless messages, and then I squash and rewrite my entire change as a single, formal entity before releasing it for coworker consumption. I curse up a storm in my commit messages, but you won't see any of them unless you look inside my computer before I delete the working branch.

This is fun and funny. Nothing about it even starts approaching validity except for one statistic: "210 out of 929857", and even that gets shot down. The entire thing would have been better if he had included "hate" as a curse word.

I think you've forgotten what was being discussed, because your objection isn't relevant. The claim in dispute is: "he does not normalize the graph relative to the total amount of code in each language".

That's rendered irrelevant by the author using a sample with the same number of commits in each language.

Although I think it's fair to say the proportion of beginners and casual projects using source control and Github is probably lower for PHP than, say, Ruby.

Yep, my bad, I did not carefully read the article. :-(

Gaming companies, start-ups, anyone looking for a "Ninja" or "Rock Star" all seem more likely to tolerate swearing and less likely to be using PHP. Additionally, I'd wager that PHP projects on GitHub tend to get fewer commits from hobbyists and other non-professionals.

My interpretation is that anyone still working in PHP is long resigned to its frustrations.

While it's fun to mock PHP for the uninitiated, it's actually probably something a bit more mundane.

Those working on pubic GitHub projects are probably doing so willingly. After all, if you hate PHP and are forced to use it at your day job, do you really want to go home and commit to PHP projects? Probably not.

So, what you're seeing are people not merely resigned, but who enjoy working in PHP, for all it's warts. They aren't just resigned.

But that should apply equally to all languages. One would expect the same to be true of, say, Ruby or C++, but PHP's slice of the pie is minuscule by comparison. So your mundane answer is probably correct, but it's answering the wrong question. The question isn't, "Why don't PHP developers swear at their language all the time?" It's actually, "Why do PHP developers swear at their language less than most others?"

And I posit that it's because PHP programmers at that level are less likely to be surprised or scandalized by the language's well-known quirks than somebody working with Ruby or C++ (i.e. they are resigned to its frustrations).

Good point. Good question.

Honestly, and I don't meant to stereotype here, but I think it's because the quality of PHP developer proportionate to the number of PHP developers on github is higher than in other languages. Granted, their are fewer total. But the reason for this is pretty simple. PHP is not the popular language, so most new developers taking up programming in the past 2-3 years see a different landscape then a decade ago. Github is SourceForge and Ruby is PHP. Poor PHP developers aren't flocking to github. They are still on SourceForge (not suggesting that all SF users are bad).

Basically, the PHP developer's on github are probably the more experience developers that have been doing this for a while. On the flip side, most Ruby developer's are still comparatively new to the language.

This is a lot of assuming, and I don't mean to disparage anyone.

That all being said, while I equated the quality of the programmer with the amount of swearing being done, I fully realize it's not a fair comparison. Granted, this entire thing is based on numbers that, I feel, are fairly meaningless.

Finally, what I find more interesting is how HN's quality takes a nose dive when the population is allowed to bash a particular population: in this case, people who enjoy using PHP.

Still, good follow up. =)

I hope it didn't look like I was bashing anyone. I think for the most part we're violently in agreement here.

Besides PHP Githubbers maybe being at a higher level on average, I think PHP's gotchas are just generally better known, so people go into it with eyes open. It doesn't take as high a level of experience to realize, say, that the standard library has wonky argument ordering as it does to find all the weird edge cases that will bite you in Ruby and horrific error messages that await in C++. Ask anyone with a decent knowledge of a few languages to criticize PHP and he'll have something memorized. Ask a Ruby programmer with five years' experience to compare and contrast "reduce(&:+)", "reduce(:+)" and "reduce('+')" and it's 50/50 whether he'll even get two right (even though the truth is that there's no difference!).

> I hope it didn't look like I was bashing anyone.

No, not you. It's why you got a reply from me that at least tried to sound intelligent. =)

But it does get tiring hearing the same useless tripe repeated, especially here on HN. PHP's worst quality is whenever it's mentioned, a bunch of know-nothing's start making what amounts to the technical equivalent of dick and fart jokes. I'll just stop there though. =)

If you're not deep into complex projects, PHP isn't very frustrating. It's pretty simple and to-the-point.

There are a lot of people out there who think it's truly fabulous, also. Usually, PHP is their first language and they've never seriously tried anything else. They like the accomplishment of programming, and connect that with PHP.

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