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Comment by paganel | Hacker News Reader

> The opposite of this is the windows effect (aka the php effect), where you get disrepected for using a particular technology regardless of how talented or productive you actually are with it.

Just wanted to add my related $0.02 rant: Everybody bashes PHP for its associative arrays, but when Python finally implemented the same data-structure (ordered dicts I think they are called) a long, long time after PHP first got them, then everybody started congratulated themselves and saying "what a nice idea the Python guys implemented!".

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Sorry to go down that road, but the reason people rag on PHP's associative arrays, is that its the only array that PHP has.

A hashmap with mixed keys is hardly the most practical choice for an all purpose primitive data structure.

Python already has proper arrays where you might have some chance of fast sequential access. The ordered dict or whatever is just another tool in the box.

Basically, PHP makes you do shit like this: http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.is-array.php#102652

The same people don't seem to bash Lua's tables.

They've probably never _used_ Lua's tables.

Hmmmm. I feel I may be proving the OPs entire point rather too well with this line of enquiry. I don't think I've ever trolled myself before. How embarrassing.

This kind of thing is trickier in places like HN though, because a statement is only showing off to people who already have the knowledge. There are millions(?) of people reading here, so statistically most of them probably wont know some obscure piece of knowledge about the problems of the key hashing function under random access in numerical PHP arrays. It may be showing off to the couple of people actively engaged in the debate, but to everyone else its educational.

That's most of the reason I come here, to be honest. Crumbs of insight casually discarded during the debates of much cleverer people.

Fine, s/Python/JavaScript/ then. Nobody applauds JS for it but neither is it derided as PHP is for this reason.

Despite my worries that this is turning into offtopic, I'll note that I haven't noticed that this particular PHP feature gets bashed. I've seen the opposite, people remarking that one of the things that is pleasant in PHP is working with associative arrays.

I agree with all of these points, and I completely agree that it's not unique to the software industry. Much to our surprise, we're human after all.

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