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Comment by pippy | Hacker News Reader

    "PHP Should Be Implementation Neutral, and Support All Paradigms Equally".

This is what I like about PHP. When you want a 4 page site, you can use procedural and functional programming. When you're working on an enterprise level CMS you can whip out the OO paradigm and you're set. PHP is a messy soup but it does web better than most other languages.

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One nice side affect of this is that PHP can suit both novice and experienced programmers. Newbies don't have to learn OO before they write Hello World.

Yeah, and thanks to this, you end up with a "beast" like Magento, written by "experienced" programmers, and then you have novices tasked with writing themes and components for it, but it doesn't work that way because the "beast" is not "black boxed" well enough for the novices to ignore it. (I keep quoting "experienced" here because the example Magento is just "Java written in PHP" and I'd fire anyone turning up this type of code.)

Having had the unfortunate experience to work with Magento recently, I completely agree with your evaluation. My reoccurring thoughts were exactly "this is Java written in PHP!".

Then please spread the word and stop clients/managers from choosing it! Let's stop others from falling into the "look, it even has ebay integration!" trap!

Unless you can offer any real alternatives to Magento I have to call bullshit, yes the framework is far from perfect and PHP is not the prettiest language.

But calling Magento "Java written in PHP" without offering alternatives, specific criticism or any backing of the argument is just childish.

That's also a problem because anyone with a day experience in PHP can claim to be PHP developer, and often companies can't really tell the difference between an experienced and non-experienced programmer. If they can do PHP, they can build our website and we end up with horrible unmaintainable code. I think that's why PHP has such a bad reputation.

...naah, any kid can learn Brainfuck in a weekend ..."real" programmers don't even need a 100% Turing complete language to get the job done: choose Malbolge instead! (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malbolge)

maybe we should all switch to brainfuck for web development then so we can weed out the stupids [/sarcasm]

I get your point, but being easy to pick up AND easy to make dangerous mistakes is a bad combination. The goal isn't necessarily to "weed out the stupids", but rather to prevent bad practices from propagating. "Too easy", in my view, means having a rotary saw with no guard and a hair trigger.

PHP suit "experienced programmers"?

In a way this means nothing: experienced programmer can program in any language.

In another way it is wrong: experienced programmer know how so well that building a solid application on rotten grounds is a pain, and would prefer a more solid ground to build their application upon.

Do I need to list again all the mess in PHP?

No. No it doesn't. It does it easier. That's not the same thing.

When it comes to the web, lower barrier of entry is actually a value in itself.

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