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Comment by altdatathrow | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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