Pointing out "giant" flaws which don't really matter and can't be fixed for 1000th time is very useful for... remind me please, what exactly purpose?
This is quite harsh sarcasm, but if it isn't true for the GP, it's true for so many people. Well said.
Programming language critic come up every now and then in HN, this is nothing new. If you got a point, why not refute it?
Are you saying language design don't matter and not worth discussing?
No one in this comment section is saying to you "stop using php on this project you're doing because it's badly designed". No one is in your business.
That is, we're not telling people to stop after they've gone into McDonalds, we're decrying the fact that so-called health experts are telling people that McDonalds is actually just fine for you. That's a better analogy.
Who are you to advocate that? Or to advocate anything?
I despise people who presume to know what's in the best interest of others. You only know what's in your best interest. You have no idea what is good for anyone else.
You want to share your experience? Great. Do it when it's asked for. Nobody asked for a hit piece on PHP.
> we're decrying the fact that so-called health experts are telling people that McDonalds is actually just fine for you.
Exactly which maven and luminary of computer science has advocated the use of PHP?
That is outright nonsense. At no point has that happened. PHP grew organically, without a single endorsement.
Wow. Are you seriously advocating the equivalent of moral relativism in programming? You have no idea if, say, Brainfuck is good for anyone else?
I didn't say that they were luminaries per se. Programmers telling non-programmers that PHP is OK for them is what I'm referring to. That would match the analogy--someone who's studying health science telling someone who hasn't studied health science that McDonalds is perfectly healthy.
Programmers need to stop telling non-programmers that it's perfectly OK to use PHP. Frankly, they need to be blunt that programming is hard. That you either have to willing to put in the investment or don't do it at all. This soft runway into developing applications is exactly the reason why so much poor software exists in the common market.
PHP has some wrong design decisions, however many of them don't really matter (like function called strpos instead of str_pos - really, that's your problem?). Some do, and people are welcome to propose solutions for them. People also welcome to write rants about "PHP sucks, nobody should use it, anybody who uses it is an idiot" but they shouldn't expect this will be taken seriously.
When did the original article ever suggest that? I got the impression that he had looked it up in the docs, and found the docs seriously broken. That fits my recollection of PHP's docs - there are a lot of them, but they often don't tell you what you need to know, so you have to go trawl through the comments. Of course, most of the code in the comments is crap, full of errors, has security holes or all three.
> function called strpos instead of str_pos - really, that's your problem?
Yes, that's a problem. Ditto for arguments in random order. It means that it's much harder to remember the function without having the docs open in another window.
"PHP sucks, nobody should use it, anybody who uses it is an idiot"? Sounds about right. I know people who are security consultants, who've worked with PHP for years and years - I even know a guy who works at Wordpress. None of them think that you should be using PHP...