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Comment by tangue | Hacker News Reader

You're right. This is a supply-and-demand problem : which choices does non-programmers or casual programmers have when they want to create an app ? How can someone who's working or studying 40+ hours a week find the time to learn the basics of MVC, inheritance etc ... There is a demand for easy to create template-based websites and PHP is the only kid in town for this kind of things.

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This is no excuse. If you want to learn how to do something, effort is required. How much time will that person waste in the long run battling all of the problems and traps PHP brings with it?

I contend that learning a proper language will be of greater benefit to a person just starting web-development, and putting in just a few extra hours at the beginning to get a solid foundation will in fact save them time in the long-run.

Also, giving complete amateurs this loaded, rusty .44 magnum and pointing them at the battlefield is bad for web security and the web in general, they will inevitably lose all the plaintext usernames and passwords they have in their database.

PHP is a blight on the web.

I agree, but lets say your car breaks down somewhere in the middle of the road.

Now you have two options. One is to learn the entirety of automobile engineering before touching your car, second is to learn enough fix the problem for the moment. Needless to say any normal person will prefer the second approach.

Now some mechanical engineer may make an argument that this small quick fixes are harmful for long term mechanical engineering practices. But for the guy who does this quick fixes, none of this matters or is even relevant.

The effort required to learn something better than PHP is not equivalent to learning everything about automobile engineering, its more like reading a maintenance manual. Sooner or later, the guy who fixes his car in the middle of the road without knowing anything is going to replace his brake-pads with bits of wood he found on the sidewalk (Not really his fault, someone on a PHP forum has already labeled all the bits of wood as "brake pads")...

A better analog than fixing a literal car might be changing the tire of a car which doesn't have any tires when it is parked but which instantiates some with the help of an instance of ITireFactory. Obviously it makes no sense for a car to use a tire factory instead of just having tires. That is exactly how everyone who prefers PHP feels about everything.

There are far better solutions to this ITireFactory problem than PHP, which puts the tires directly onto the car, but forces you to buy a new car as soon every time you get a flat.

Also, the tires are likely to explode every 16 left turns unless you know about the secret tire fixing button under the dash.

It is true that PHP may save people a few hours in the beginning, but at what expense? How longer does it really take to get a noob running a Sinatra, web.py, dancer or something similar?

"Everything else" does not resolve to "Java" or "C++"

While I'm sitting on the side of the road waiting for the PHP maintence truck to come and tow my car away -- I'll read a book...

http://djangobook.com/

Don't, it's outdated and the official docs are just fine.

>This is no excuse. If you want to learn how to do something, effort is required.

Some people doesn't want to learn web programming. They want to get things done. Think of PHP as an equivalent of Bootstrap on the server side. People don't use Bootstrap because it's beautiful but because they can't design and in fact don't need anything fancier.

The difference between getting it done NOW and getting it done properly is very small in terms of time and huge in terms of safety.

There really needs to be a "good" version of PHP.

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