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Comment by proxyon | Hacker News Reader

How about the fact that most of us are experienced and can attest that PHP is the worst language we've ever used in our careers?

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I don't think so, i've used PHP at work for more than 10 years till 7.4 point mostly Symfony, it has it's own quirks but i still feel PHP really pragmatic. I don't have any strong feelings against it.

Nowadays im on django/python because im in a python shop and I like python too.

Yeah, I feel like PHP is a massive hiring risk. I personally wouldn't want to touch any PHP code unless I'm paid a massive premium for it.

(I mostly write Python professionally, and use Python, Swift and Rust in personal projects in case anyone is wondering.)

I can think of far worse fates

Some people write whole-ass applications in bash, the psychopaths

Ok that's even worse

That is actually better, but you have to be a pervert. Source: wrote some fully featured applications using own bash framework.

> Some people write whole-ass applications in bash, the psychopaths

*giggles nervously, then changes the subject.

I disagree; it's not the language that's bad, it's the community. Too much tech debt that was never removed, too many people that profess to be experts on the internet and give bad examples, and too many people full of themselves building and rebuilding their own frameworks. That was the issue 10, 15 years ago anyway, things have improved but it means people have to pick established frameworks like Laravel.

You can't really separate a language from its community, though.

You're getting paid to deliver business logic, which means most work is going to be gluing together libraries. This inherently means relying on community-written code, and related stuff like documentation and StackOverflow answers.

If the community is bad, the language isn't worth using.

Genuine question, when was the last time you wrote PHP?

5 years ago and I wish I hadn't.

It was fine in the late 90s. Very adequate for the hosting landscape. I have not touched it since that time

Spoken like someone who's never used Matlab :)

> indexes start at 1

- no one

-- Matlab

Pascal had indexes starting at 1 too.

Starting indexes at 0 makes sense when you want to enable the developer to manipulate memory (for example, C)

Indexes starting at 1 matches with a more natural ordinal sequencing.

> indexes starting at...

"I don't understand the word 'index'".

- a functional programmer

The most evil was Visual Basic where you could configure the default starting index (OPTION BASE 1), leading to weird bugs when multiple people worked on the same codebase.

I don’t understand. Either your saying adding or removing elements to an array doesn’t manipulate memory, or you’re saying adding or removing elements in an array does manipulate memory, but the developer doesn’t care due to the GC.

If it’s the second option, why has (almost) every other language chosen with a GC to start arrays with 0?

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