Being Arrogantly Ignorant
the.scapegoat.dev
the.scapegoat.dev
If you can add value for your employer or customers and make a living, which language or tools you use to do that makes no difference. Pick any language, tool, style of work and you can find people who criticize it. So what? How does random criticism rise to gatekeeping?
The job market has tightened up because of economic changes and worry that money will get tighter. That affects most sectors, not just tech or programming. If you read HN you know that many companies have hiring freezes, people have or will soon get laid off, and good jobs get scarce with more competition. That has nothing to do with gatekeeping or programmers who look down on PHP. The programming business goes through booms and busts for reasons that have nothing to do with programming languages.
I have used PHP for years, since it came out and offered an alternative to Perl CGI scripts, ASP, and Cold Fusion. It gets the job done. It has some problems. I don't use PHP exclusively, I don't think of or call myself a "PHP programmer," and I don't care that some programmers hate it, whether out of experience or ignorance. My customers don't care about that, they have business problems to solve, a budget and schedule, and don't read language flame wars. Focus on finding work rather than complaining about job ads and PHP haters.
Sifting through job postings online and filling out applications describes one of the least effective and most time-consuming ways to find work.
No one benefits from that kind of thing, and I know it happens a lot in online forums and chats. But I see it as their problem, not mine. I don't feel a need to get included in a fake "community" built around a programming language or framework or editor and I can't understand people who do.
The large group of programmers who use PHP don't qualify as a "community" to me. Programmers can share and learn from each other, and criticize tools and express opinions, and that has some value, but it falls short of what I would call a community. It seems fake in the same sense that the BMW motorcycle rider rallies I used to attend seem fake -- all we had in common was owning a brand of motorcycle. "Contrived" maybe describes the hollowness better than "fake."
I also was referring to users of a language more so than communities, although I am certainly part of php channels and entire php slacks, just as I am part of devops slacks or common lisp and rust and react discords. These certainly feel like communities.
The situations I am referring to more broadly is say, the inevitable onslaught of “PHP is hot garbage” comments on anything mentioning PHP. How does that make people write PHP for a living feel? What’s the point? The only thing I can do as a user is to ignore the troll and feel slightly worse for my day. I wager that people writing those comments don’t lead the most fulfilled lives either.
Please, criticize the latest language RFCs and the performance of the interpreter and the use of globals, criticize the proliferation of copy-paste wordpress plugins, how you dislike a certain CSS style. Show how clojure tackles things differently and what there is to be gained. That is very different, it shows respect to other people, and it opens up a dialogue where both sides can gain something.
If anything, I would say that writing such comments is the author defining their identity as “not a PHP user”, since that is about the entire information contained in such a statement.
I use PHP and have for 20 years. Comments like that don't make me feel anything. Either the person making the comment has something useful to say or they don't. Calling a successful language and its ecosystem "garbage" (which I have seen plenty of times) communicates ignorance or maybe insecurity, but it doesn't affect me emotionally. I don't feel any worse about myself knowing that trolls and ignorant people frequent online forums.
If someone wants to define their identity in terms of a programming language they love, or hate, they can of course go ahead and do that. I don't understand why someone would choose such a trivial thing to hang their identity on so I'm not going to let them get under my skin.
Not everybody has the thick skin and confidence they belong in tech that you have, and it for sure is always nicer to have a constructive exchange than having to face adversity. I want people to be like the person that kindly pointed out SICP to me rather than someone blasting me for using global variables. The first was much more effective.
Of course we would live in a nicer world if no one made ignorant or mean comments but we don't live in that world so we have to adapt and decide how we respond to other people.
That being said, I guess what I'm trying to say is, I think we can all agree that people who don't like Perl are lesser nerds, unworthy of our kinship.
No, we should gatekeep Javascript. It is an annoying trap laid on websites that is sprung just by going there. The profusion of Javascript has made the internet much worse. It used to at least be possible to just turn off Javascript and ignore that whole scene. So we did, it took over the internet, and now we have to either give up or play the annoying selective script blocking game to get 95% of websites to work.
I'm all for not judging others -- Wordpress, Java, PHP, use whatever platform you want, have fun! On your computer.
These kind of takes, where "marginalized" is used to arbitrarily police whatever behaviour the authors doesn't like, contribute to render online discourse the insufferable hell it has become in the last 10 years.
I'm sorry, I won't refrain from criticizing a technology I don't like because a strawman member of a "marginalized community" could get discouraged from learning said technology. That's just... madness.
I notice it where I work to an extreme degree (MAANG).
There is no value in holding religious opinions about any particular tool in the toolbox independent of use. But, there are individuals who throw their weight around with smartaleck negativity and many worship them as a result. I posit that people who cannot backup their claims with data or a survey of concrete experiences are selling their ego over engineering discipline. Arrogance isn't a signal of quality of anything beside arrogance. You'd be surprised how many over-confident people crash into hubris be it a startup product no one wanted or get sloppy with hiring based on trickery or trivia. Get too cocky and the Sword of Damocles of karma, life, or social capital is waiting to chop those who get "too big for their britches". (2022 cross-cultural context: it's an idiom of people who believe themselves to be 3 meters tall. I'm surprised it's recorded as an Australian saying when my 8th generation Irish-American grandfather said it in Texas. Australia is the Commonwealth's "Texas", I guess.).
No, quite the opposite - in most cases a decade later that tool will be an abandoned pile of technological debt.
Also, hopefully you won’t consider this kissing your boots, but I genuinely appreciate what must be the tremendous amount of effort you put into this site. I have gained so much from this site, and the ruthless commitment to quality submissions is a big part of it.
PHP is an awful mess, and the fact that it's a common tool for budding web devs makes that worse, not better. New coders should not have to learn to navigate that pile to get anything done. I feel for them because I've been them.
I think that not wanting to see things from that perspective closes you off from becoming a better programmer.
Approaching others' criticisms with an open mind and trying to disprove them will make you better than trying to hamfist it into a claim of gatekeeping where there is none.
Blindly saying that PHP is a hot mess, in a public setting, is detrimental to I think the community at large. PHP is but one of the many tools I’ve been using, my heart is with Common Lisp, but I’ve really enjoyed Java, golang, C++, Typescript and now rust. Nothing binds me to PHP except I get a tremendous amount of stuff done with it.
I have plenty of hot takes on technology, and love to use strong language when I rant amongst friends. If anything, I am really not attached to any one of them, there is good and bad everywhere, and many decisions have nothing to do with technical merits at all.
So the point is that PHP is no different than say Go or JS or Java. They all have their pros and cons.
My objection is that you're declaring that people who attack a language are actually attacking its users, which makes them bullies, which means you should ignore them. I think you're taking things far too personally and using it as a reason to dismiss criticism.
My takeaway from the article was that when we see someone using a technology we despise, we take action to make their specific life better, rather than hate on the tech. In the case of PHP, that might be asking what issues they run into and suggesting solutions. That could lead to conversations like “you know, Python doesn’t have this issue, you might want to check out X framework to try it out”. But general flaming on PHP isn’t productive.
But really, switching to Java for a bit, a tremendous amount of amazing engineering has gone into making Java the language it is. The Java flaming might have gone down in recent years, but the hot takes from the C/C++ unix crowd in the aughts was impressive.