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Comment by F_J_H | Hacker News Reader

I think one needs to be careful of the reasoning that goes something like "X makes it easy for people to do things poorly, which makes my job harder, and therefore X is bad." I've heard the same argument against PHP. "PHP is so easy to use that anyone can hack together crap, which is difficult to maintain. Therefore, PHP is bad."

I love this quote:

UNIX was not designed to stop people from doing stupid things, because that would also stop them from doing clever things. - D. Gwyn

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"PHP is so easy to use that anyone can hack together crap, which is difficult to maintain. Therefore, PHP is bad."

I know you are attempting to highlight a weakness in my argument by highlighting how my reservations are fairly generic, but by the same token, I have never been lucky enough to see high quality PHP code. I don't think PHP encourages best practices, just like Stored Procedures. Either that, or PHP is just such a large community that the number of bad coders, even though it might be a constant percentage across all languages, but because PHP is so large I've run into a lot of them. Who knows?

While I have no doubt that there are some real superstars that can make beautiful PHP code and write wonderful stored procedures, there is still the 99% of programmers who can't and end up making unmaintainable nightmares.

I think that is the wrong argument, though. Trying to develop a language that tries to not let you do bad things gives you something like Java instead, where doing anything is cumbersome (and still doesn't succeed in preventing bad things from being written).

There is a lot of bad PHP code because there are a lot of people who start hacking using PHP. However, any language somebody first starts hacking in will result in ugly code (you should have seen my Scheme code when I first started with that in college! :).

Unfortunately, the idea of "teaching languages" doesn't really work, because people want to continue using what they've already learned.

(BTW, I don't think you deserved downvotes. You are continuing the conversation, after all, not trolling. I really think we need to make downvoting more painful.)

The problem with PHP isn't that it lets you do dumb things. It's that doing dumb things is idiomatic.

Yes to this:

"(BTW, I don't think you deserved downvotes. You are continuing the conversation, after all, not trolling. I really think we need to make downvoting more painful.)"

It would help if the voting was non-anonymous.

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