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Comment by tedivm | Hacker News Reader

This is just another example of someone beating a dead horse (which has already been beaten) for page views. Next week we'll have another "bash php" post, and the week after that another.

I wish people spent as much time creating new things as they did bitching. As well written as this article is, it contains absolutely nothing that hasn't been said ten thousand times already- in fact, most of this seems to be regurgitated from those other articles rather than being actual original thought. Some of the issues brought up have been depreciated and removed a long time ago- too bad the author didn't limit his google search to the last year when looking for other people's examples to post.

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Until people stop using PHP I welcome detailed critiques of the language. There are still enough PHP apologists out there that we can use all the ammunition we can get.

Why do you care so much about what other people use to get a job done? Care about what you use.

Because it's not good for the web if more newbies are using such a woefully insecure language.

Why is it not good for the web? Unless an insecure website is leaking personal information, I don't see how that affects you. Besides, how many websites designed by newbies reach hundreds of thousands of daily visitors (or even tens of thousands for that matter)? If said website is so terribly designed, no one would visit it because it would load slowly and be ridden with bugs; no fun.

HA! The LANGUAGE insecure? Yet another one who blaims the tool. Good luck with your career.

It doesn't help if the tool and its documentation encourages bad practices. I don't blame the tool really, I just don't think it helps.

1. It reflects poorly on my profession as a whole if practitioners are too lazy to fix or abandon obviously broken methodologies.

2. It's symptomatic of a general "good enough" mentality that makes software development much more difficult than it needs to be.

3. It breeds bad habits in novice developers that are likely to be my colleagues one day.

4. It steals mindshare and time that might much better be spent improving better alternatives.

5. It provides LAMP detractors with ammunition to shoot at the entire open source web stack.

6. I may one day have a half-assed PHP mess dumped in my lap to clean up.

Because it's bad for the industry as a whole. Clueless managers are looking exclusively for PHP developers because all they know is that there are a ton of them around. Meanwhile, people who've mastered more powerful tools and can produce more work of higher quality are being excluded from contracts for trivial reasons.

Make your mind up—should I have spent less time on this or more? :)

Like I said, I wrote it to get this /out/ of my system; I am now impervious to PHP arguments. Either this will convince someone or it will not. Done.

The analogy alone was AWESOME :)

Well done. Nice to get it out.

I think you should have spent less time on this and more time on something else. I thought that was pretty clear.

You probably also shit after a bad meal to get it out of your system, but although you may have convinced someone to not eat the chicken, the rest of the office has to deal with the terrible stench you left behind, when you could have just gone home and taken care of things in private.

Even if it's a dried up subject, the blog is comprehensive and concise enough to almost be reference material. Everyone knows PHP sucks but this is a damn good illustration of why.

What I'm saying is disregard that guy.

People have been writing murder mysteries for the past hundred years, and some people are still writing murder mysteries, and some people write them in the hope of selling millions of copies. There’s nothing wrong, in itself, with writing about a topic that has been written about before.

For someone coming from other language background, including C#, JavaScript, Ruby, I find PHP absolutely unconventional, odd, unexpected, and inconsistent.

This is not a language, where you expect intuitively on what method to call unless you do a StackOverFlow search on existing problems, raised by others like me.

Yet, I currently develop a web app on PHP. Certainly, I can't wait to move over to Ruby or other languages in my next project.

The author is stating the obvious. But he/she has every right to do so, because PHP is simply not user friendly enough to programmer. If PHP truly targets non-programmer, they totally succeed in their goal.

I'm not defending PHP, and I'm not claiming the author "has no right" to make their post. What I am saying is that this post has no value, as it's simply a summary of the same posts we see here week after week. This isn't just stating the obvious, this is literally rehashing the posts (he even cites the sources, which I do commend him on) that have already been made.

The point is the PHP circle jerk is getting old. I don't see the value in repeating the same discussions every day, and most of these posts just reek of exploitation- these authors know php bashing will get upvoted, so they write an article, submit it here, and wait for the traffic to pour into their otherwise unknown blog. I just think we'd all be better off if they actually wrote something useful.

To be fair, while the author is a friend of mine, he's not the one who submitted it, nor did I consult him before doing so. So if anyone can be claimed to be exploiting this for upvotes, it's myself, not him.

What I am saying is that this post has no value, as it's simply a summary of the same posts we see here week after week.

Actually, I would state that, "a summary of the same posts we see here week after week," does indeed have value. Now you can bludgeon the next guy who posts a PHP rant with a link to this one.

Yeah, I'm tired of PHP bashing too -- BUT! -- this is probably the best written article on what's wrong with PHP that I've ever seen. So... kudos to the author for a good argument.

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