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Comment by dubcanada | Hacker News Reader

Ya?

Can't speak for others but I've worked on many legacy C++ codebases over the years, it has never been a pleasant experience. Even when it's a C++ 17 codebase the same bad practices from C++ 11 and earlier are all present and accounted for. As are the subtle bugs stemming from an inconsistent standard library and C++'s approach to verbose error handling. I'm sure that there's plenty of good C++ code out there, maybe I've just been unlucky.

I can literally copy and paste what you said replacing it with any language and end up being correct.

Every single language on a legacy code base will have good code and bad code. It has NOTHING to do with the language. It has to do with what the code is and who originally developed it.

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> I can literally copy and paste what you said replacing it with any language and end up being correct.

This is the best point in this thread, IMHO.

I think it also is due to the fact that PHP is a fairly easy language for a non-coder to pick up little-by-little. One can easily start using it for doing simple things, like injecting dynamic data into a web page. From there one can learn to scale up to full web apps.

I think this lower barrier of entry makes a lot of developers feel insecure. A lot of coders think they are blessed with some sort of special ability to write code. They seem themselves as elite and they use elite tools. When some kid comes in with some PHP snippets and generates a lot of value from that they complain that their code sucks, the language sucks, the developers suck, blah blah.

In my 20 years of writing code (starting with PHP) I have learned the lesson over and over again that while writing code commercially the fact that the language has feature X or that it forces certain patterns means almost nothing. Sure, your developers might feel better about themselves but that is about it.

Onramp is gentle... to a point. While I'm a fan of PHP for what it is, there are still plenty of footguns. Probably more than modern statically typed languages.

> Probably more than modern statically typed languages.

True, but most people considering PHP probably aren't considering statically typed languages. They're probably comparing it to JavaScript, Ruby, and Python. PHP holds it's own surprisingly well in that comparison. It certainly has it's fair share of quirks, but so do the others.

Most statically typed languages have nothing close to rails/laravel nor the ecosystem surrounding them.

Spring and ASP.Net? Come on.

I haven't used Spring, but I had high hopes for ASP.Net (C# is a very well designed language) and found that not only was the ecosystem around it decidedly lacking, and even the core libraries like EntityFramework were much less flexible and well designed than I am used to in the PHP/JavaScript ecosystems. And they didn't seem be that actively maintained either.

PHP usually has a good library for most things. JavaScript usually has 3-5 good choices (but nothing rails-like). .NET often seemed to have nothing, or only proprietary options.

> I think it also is due to the fact that PHP is a fairly easy language for a non-coder to pick up little-by-little. One can easily start using it for doing simple things, like injecting dynamic data into a web page. From there one can learn to scale up to full web apps.

I personally started using PHP because, at the time, the free hosting servers only had support for it. Otherwise, I could probably have picked python, ruby (or even perl). I wasn't a non-coder, but I think that these languages may be self-taught with the same ease as PHP (well, maybe not perl).

> In my 20 years of writing code (starting with PHP) I have learned the lesson over and over again that while writing code commercially the fact that the language has feature X or that it forces certain patterns means almost nothing. Sure, your developers might feel better about themselves but that is about it.

But, isn't that the whole point of using PHP 7.4 over, say, PHP 3 (besides evaluation speed)? Would you code in PHP 3 today, if PHP had not evolved at all?

No? What you said makes no sense. C++ library is consistent, and the error handling is via exceptions, which means not verbose at all, for most cases.

For C++, you want to complain about unreadable error messages, long compilation times, verbose type declarations, and use-after-free bugs.

Each language is different, and has a different trade off. A good developer can use multiple languages: C++ when you have lots of non-trivial data processing, Python for numeric and complex scripts, bash for bootstrapping and simple scripts, and so on.

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