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Comment by smsm42 | Hacker News Reader

It's a recurring theme - "we need to rewrite PHP and I know exactly how to do it and PHP maintainers are idiots for not doing it years ago. Oh, btw, I don't know C and have no idea how PHP internals look like, but how hard could it be?" Happens all the time.

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Yeah the old armchair programmer syndrome. It is very easy to just sit back in your armchair and give out advice on how to do stuff without having any knowledge or experience in doing it.

"Ah yeah just rewrite the entire code, you are meatheads for not doing that in the first place, you should have done it years ago. Oh yeah I have no programming experience per se, for example I don't know how to program in C and have no idea what the PHP internals look like, but how hard can it be? I mean you just load your C Code into your IDE and then search and replace all the bad code and write in the good code and then press the compile button and there you go. It works that way when I design HTML web sites in Dreamweaver, so it should also work for C, right?" -Archie Bunker 'Armchair Programmer' and 'Technology Bigot'

I wouldn't say I have no idea, I've looked into it. I know exactly how difficult it is and respect anybody who manages (or even tries to) make PHP better. I certainly at no point in the article called anyone an idiot.

The people who are good programmers and know C well enough aren't the ones who stick with PHP. They moved on.

PHP is from newbies for newbies.

That's the definition of a newb's statement. What are you, 16 years old?

Like the "newbies" at Facebook, Yahoo and tons of major sites using Wordpress, huh?

You created your account just for this?

You would not claim this bullshit if you had any idea who is actually maintaining and using PHP. Unfortunately, somehow it seems fashionable to make broad statements about PHP without bothering to find out a single bit of information.

You don't remember the code examples on Zend Technologies' own website? Teaching PHP with really embarrassing security holes.

Or Rasmus Lerdorf who releases software that doesn't run all unit tests?

Read the source code to MediaWiki some time. You can say a lot about MediaWiki, Wikipedia and PHP, but at least MediaWiki is PHP done right (if such a thing is possible).

Actually the comment is spot on.

It's a stinking shit crock from end to end. Just because it has a few celebrity developers like Rasmus, doesn't mean it doesn't fuck you in the eyeballs the moment you see it.

Just sit down for a couple of hours with tmux fired up, and vim with bits of ZE source code on the left and on thr right, Python.

You will see. It will make you sick looking at the ZE source code.

i bet you think whatever language you use makes your balls bigger , but not your brain obviously, because you dont know what PHP is and how it is used everyday by million of businesses. In fact you must be a noob, only noobs talk like that.

I work as a PHP developer, but for personal projects I create apps with Java on Android, and have also created iPhone apps with Objective C, I disagree with you. PHP has some issues (like the ones presented here), but its also a great language for specific projects. I do prefer Java syntax honestly, but I'll never use JSP for a website, PHP is more adapted for that. PHP is not for newbies, it is easier for newbies yes, but you can be a hardcore programmer and still use PHP.

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