Comment by olavgg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by olavgg | Hacker News Reader

I started with PHP 15 years ago, but after 5 years I just moved to Java.

The worst thing with PHP was people and standards, everything was a mess, there was no right way to do stuff and larger projects had like 100 different implementations for the same thing. PHP was really challenging to work with as coming to a shared agreement for how one should implement stuff was a recipe for personal conflicts.

So after a few years, I just started to code web applications with Java. A completely different, but much more enjoyable environment and much more friendly people.

I guess PHP is much more fun today, it was really fun to code in PHP as it was really simple and you feel productive and powerful. But in the old days, bad defaults often caused issues in production. And some of the documentation/knowledge sharing was dangerous(tutorials lacked warnings and information about preventing SQL injections).

Symfony really paved the way for quality PHP code. Excellent Web framework which is a lot of fun.

I could never buy a screen wide enough to display a full path with Symfony. Not quite as bad as its predecessor - Zend Framework - but finding the end of a file path was like jumping down a rabbit hole.

> A completely different, but much more enjoyable environment and much more friendly people.

You must have found a neat subculture in Java - not been my experience at all.

The "shared agreement" thing - I've moved between multiple Java environments over the years, and there's never any agreement between companies on the 'right' way to do Java.

Open communities in Java - I've often felt they require a huge amount of tribal knowledge of their 'ways' before they'll deign to answer questions in helpful ways. Mention that you can do X in perl or php or ruby, and you're often dismissed out of hand.

All communities are defensive, when someone comes in with "this is shit, why can't I do it like I do it in X".

Are you not aware of the flamewars between RoR and Enterprise Java people, when RoR was being pushed into the enterprise?

I'm aware, and coming in with "this is shit" - yeah, that ain't cool, and I'd never expect that to 'work'. Coming in with questions people consider "too basic" is another problem.

Reading this comment it seems JS is the new PHP, culturewise.

"When the world becomes standard, I will start caring about standards." — Rasmus Lerdorf

The fish rots from the head down.

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