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Comment by ptero | Hacker News Reader

PHP allows folks without a strong background to solve some simple business problems which, in general, is a good thing. But once the project exceeds a certain complexity threshold (which I admit many business problems never do), this approach hits a wall: things break and fixing it breaks more things and it is an uphill battle to move in the right direction. Adding a significant new capability -- forget it.

To make things worse, this cannot easily be fixed because the implementation is a hodge-podge of ideas and functions. You cannot find good architecture people who want to work in PHP to clean it. It cannot easily be re-architected because it captures a lot of business wisdom. And business people (rightly) suspect pitches for a new built-from-scratch solution: sure, it will be fast and maybe it will be reliable; but will it solve their problem? will employees need to be re-trained? etc.

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One could swap PHP for any possible language and your comment could still be true, because you're describing project management and software architecture failures.

It reads like you're talking about a specific project and trying to generalize?

Facebook ($750B), Slack ($15B), and Etsy ($15B) would beg to differ. But whatever, your arrogant, gatekeeping and elitist mentality is primarily a roadblock for your own career growth.

Wow, chill. I do not know what part of my post you reacted to, but to clarify, I do not mean that professional software engineers working on PHP are unskilled. What I meant was that PHP and its frameworks allow business person to solve simple problems without hiring a good software developer. Which is OK in many cases, but when this fails to work, it fails hard in a way that is both painful and difficult to quickly address.

You just reiterated it. Your view is that PHP is only used by non-educated simpletons and who are only capable of solving the most mundane of business problems. This sort of elitist attitude is really frustrating on a forum that's supposed to embody the "hacker" spirit, that is, building things and getting shit done without worrying about whether or not someone is going to come along and criticize the correctness of their code while blissfully ignoring their innovative idea, or the fact that it works, and the impact on the world. It's pure gatekeeping garbage.

This of course is coming, like usual, from someone who spent a significant portion of their life in academia and then moved to R&D and still has yet to make a dent in the world, or likely their student loans.

Mate, I will try one more time. (A implies B) does not mean (not A implies not B). Those are unrelated logical statements.

As an unrelated example, almost anyone can now do their own accurate temperature and blood pressure measurements, so the vast majority of temperature measurements is done by those with no medical training. This does not mean that nurses and doctors who do the same measurement (that a middle school student can do) are any less skilled in medicine, let alone "non-educated simpletons".

FWIW I've interpreted your posts in the same way as the other person. They come across as deliberately inflammatory.

"What I meant was that PHP and its frameworks allow business person to solve simple problems without hiring a good software developer..."

There seems to be an implication that an org using PHP has not also hired good software developers. Or that a good software developer would not use PHP.

My logic skills may be a bit rusty at this point, but I suspect that's what altdatathrow was reacting to.

That’s not how I read it.

My take of the GP was more that they believe the _strength_ of PHP is that businesses that don’t have an existing pool of SWE talent can start solving problems with more or less whoever they can get their hands on (I’m trying to be careful not to imply that the “whoever” here is a poor engineer - just that they might not necessarily need to be experts).

Then when those projects get traction and start to grow and an engineering org starts to grow and mature around it (with plenty of “good” engineers, whatever that means), the _weaknesses_ of PHP may come to the forefront, making maintaining & expanding the PHP project difficult.

Thank you, this is what I meant. I probably could have made my original post clearer.

Facebook didn’t make its money because of innovative PHP uses. And it based on this (somewhat old) discussion the quality of code at Facebook is universally terrible:

https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/3r90iy/faceboo...

Which I am not blaming PHP for specifically, but rather that “you say PHP sucks but Facebook made a lot of money” is not an argument and is particularly dumb for Facebook specifically.

And the personal attacks are really not ok.

That's not the languages fault, it's the incompetence of the people trying to use it.

Ah, “you’re holding it wrong.” Good languages make it easy to build and maintain robust, scalable, and secure solutions to problems.

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