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Comment by gw99 | Hacker News Reader

I'm sure I'll get downvoted for this one but quite frankly it's where the PHP developers all slithered off to. It was inevitable.

I avoid to the point of refuse to work with any JavaScript platform at all. They are a universal shit show.

Edit: honestly I stand by this comment. I literally have spent hours this year dealing with fucked up messes in nodejs, package security issues after repos were hacked and code made it into NPM that displayed banners on commercial sites. My comment is toxic yes but quite frankly both communities are as well (PHP and NodeJS) and utterly earned that ire and discontent. The fact people lean on the stack and produce stuff that handles critical aspects of people's lives is utterly frightening. So yeah toxic, I don't care. Feel free to be annoyed. It's still a turd, just been rolled in glitter.

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> quite frankly it's where the PHP developers all slithered off to

PHP isn't my favorite language but using phrasing like "slither" to describe an entire community of developers is frankly shitty. Every language has its problems including whatever you use.

Unless Python, then slither is fine.

Dammit. You have my upvote.

I always say the reason PHP is still so hated is because rather than arguing about it on the internet to defend the language, PHP programmers are going home to their spouse, kids, and hobbies at the end of the work day.

That's the Visual Basic guys who do that.

The PHP developers spend most of their time outside smoking.

I spent most of 2005-2013 doing contract work getting people out of near business ending buckets of shit thanks to the PHP community's inability to produce a product that was fit for purpose and the awful staff contracting building on top of the wobbly pillars of excrement. Slither is exactly the word because they were the first people to slither away and point fingers elsewhere when something was wrong. Now ten years after that I am in regular contact with people actively getting rid of it and it's the same problems. And here I am now on Sunday evening eviscerating another failed nodejs stack left by the same slithering fiends.

Oh no it's exactly right. Slithering is the word.

I don't get anywhere near this level of sheer incompetence on a daily basis in the Python, .Net or Go ecosystems. Nor do I have problems sleeping wondering what shit show am I going to face on a Monday morning with them.

8 years of contracting work and this bad of an outlook on the community, maybe you didn’t charge enough?

I was being paid large amounts of danger money to undo damage.

You sound like a fun guy. Enjoy.

Not sure about the developers, but PHP and Javascript have a problem in common:

PHP has some sort of standard library but it's not intuitive (the function naming is a mess), sometimes outdated, wrong or broken (but the broken behavior has now ossified and will never be removed for backwards-compatibility reasons).

JS has basically no standard library at all.

Both of these issues mean everyone has to use third-party packages to make up for that, of which there are tons, each with their own issues, breaking changes, upgrades, etc.

PHP changes behaviour of core functions all the time now (and subsequently breaks old programs with every release). In every release stuff is deprecated and deprecated stuff removed. Look at https://www.php.net/manual/de/function.implode.php for a telling example and check the 8.1 changelog at https://www.php.net/releases/8.1/en.php for a list of bc breaking changes.

Only about two decades too late.

Don’t move the goalposts.

I never set a goalpost, so certainly didn't move it... but one very reasonable goalpost I might have set would have been "Don't let your language stagnate in a hole of bad practices on top of bad design for a decade or more while the internet fills up with content memorializing and perpetuating that state."

I'm not a PHP hater, and I'm the first to admit that what I've seen of recent work on the language is a breath of fresh air. Even in its "fractal of bad design" days, the language had its merits and has paid my bills before. But I'm also the first to admit it absolutely dug its own way into that aforementioned hole, and personally I think it is now way too late to climb back out to a point of regaining significant mindshare.

JavaScript has a ton built in but developers get in a habit of using libraries that introduce their own api and polyfills on top. I blame awful browser support of years past. Today most new features are available pretty quickly across all the major versions.

The irony of this comment is that Composer & packagist is one of the sanest and most well-thought-through package management systems. PHP actually fares better than the vast majority of language ecosystems on the specific topic being discussed in this comment thread.

Although Composer was incredibly slow. No idea if that’s still true, but I believe it was partially a consequence of its approach to dependency constraints, which is what made it actually quite robust.

Composer 2 isn't bad, I have had comical situations in the past where it got very confused and ended up gobbling 32GB of RAM before crashing, but that hasn't happened in a very long time.

PHP's dependency management is actually quite nice. The community developed a standard [0], a client [1] and repository [2] that pretty much deal with everything I've had to do with PHP dependencies without issues.

[0] https://www.php-fig.org/psr/psr-4/

[1] https://getcomposer.org/

[2] https://packagist.org/

So you can use nice tools to bake a poop cake :)

That's not particularly pointed at PHP that. There is a big problem in this industry about where we get our software from and how it's built and managed but that's well outside the topic of this thread. Fundamentally everything is fundamentally broken with dependency management, trust and competence.

Those might not be the same people, but for many people JS is the door to the world of software development - the same way PHP was (also for me).

> I'm sure I'll get downvoted for this one...

Rightfully so. Your comment is utterly toxic.

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