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Comment by kyriakos | Hacker News Reader

I love and use php but this article feels more like propaganda.

There's a lot and hate of criticism of PHP out there, so some praise and sane opinions are nice to balance it out.

Hate almost always comes from people who haven't used PHP in a very long time or touched it briefly at some point. Fanboyism serves no purpose. Experienced developers understand that programming languages are just tools each with their own trade-offs.

A good programmer doesn't really care about the langage itself, but rather whether the language is the right tool for the job.

For example, Erlang is painful to adapt to, but in some cases (example: if you build a Messenger app) it will be the best.

It doesn't mean that Erlang is a bad language at all, it is designed for a main purpose in mind.

It's normal to see junior developers and low-quality packages in PHP, JavaScript, Java or Python, it's because these languages are well-documented and rather accessible.

There is no point in making a language needlessly complex.

It's not any different to my point. You can use a hammer to hammer in a screw it doesn't make it fit for the job but it will work up to a certain extend. Similarly you can make a messenger app in PHP but you are better off using Erlang or maybe Node.

Absolutely agree.

> Experienced developers understand that programming languages are just tools each with their own trade-offs.

Which is literally what the article said.

This doesn't make sense as a criticism. What do you think a blog post or an essay is?

To declare that blog posts, essays and propaganda are functionally the same thing is wickedly cynical, don't you think?

No i don't. Perhaps we have a different definition of the word propaganda?

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