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Comment by JonnieCache | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand why "low-skilled people can use it" is constantly trumpeted as an upside. If you can't work out how to set up the DB by hand (for example), there's little chance you're going to be able to get through the rest of the job without making a horrible mess which you (more likely your client) will come to regret.

Imagine if we took this attitude in civil engineering, or medical science. Not good. Obviously not every web project is as important as those two things, but "the barrier to entry for foot-shooting is low!" should never be a plus point for a technology. Especially when it's not your foot.

There's obviously a need for a tool for low(er) skilled people to make websites, but perhaps it should be less powerful to match? It should at least have abstractions that don't leak so much.

I'm happy to be lectured to about why this is wrong.

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I think you may have missed the main point of this article. As an example, I can code to a reasonable standard in Ruby, C and PHP but I mainly work in PHP because if time or budget is low I can speed up development by writing horrible procedural code or other hack-jobs. I'd love to build MVC applications with well-structured architecture all day but many clients just won't pay for backend nicety. From an engineering perspective this is a horrible trade off but from a business point of view it's just what needs to be done sometimes, and I don't believe any other platform offers this.

PHP generally allows developers to just get up and go, both in terms of installing it on a server and building an application, and requires minimal learning. Unfortunately that does mean you end up with a large number of substandard developers, but at least they're getting things done.

EDIT: it's also perfectly possible to clean PHP up using e.g. autoloaders and the builtin interfaces and spl classes, if you want to work cleanly - this capability seems wholly underused outside of frameworks and I hope it gains more attention soon.

You're right, if we took this attitude in civil engineering or medical science then it'd be a problem, but hey, it's not those things, so why waste the time, money and effort that it would need?

You say "obviously not every web project is as important" as civil engineering, but I'd put it the other way "Almost every web project is not anywhere near as important" as civil engineering.

People build Ikea shelving units in their home all the time, without a civil engineer being involved.

Let's torture this analogy some more.

Ikea shelves often break, and thus commonly need replacing every couple of years. This might end up with a higher total cost/kg/year for holding your stuff up in the air, compared to hand building your shelves out of oak or whatever.

Of course, many people move apartments each year anyway, and the old shelves will not fit in their new apartment. So it makes sense to use ikea shelves in this case. Unless of course, the handmade oak shelves were modular and could be easily reconfigured in a way that the pressed-fibre ikea shelves couldn't.

The real problem comes when your ikea shelves fall down, breaking all your stuff. In which case, you were an idiot for putting your important stuff on ikea shelves. In this scenario, you may wish to hunt down and disembowel the interior decorator who told you the ikea shelves would be fine.

So yeah, the right tool for the job. Who'd have thought it? ;)

Personally I won't be giving up my life as a designer of premium bespoke home storage solutions for a job on the checkout at ikea.

God I hate analogies.

I don't think it's so much that it's considered an upside, but rather that it's basically impossible to displace PHP with something better unless the thing you want to replace it with is equally easy, or easier, to implement.

If building websites is like building bridges, you're right.

I think it may be more like communicating. In that sense, English is "better" than Esperanto, even though it's not as well thought out, simply because more people can use it at some level.

Very much agree, particularly as it seems to be the case that "low-skilled people can use it" rather than "low skilled people can use it well."

I'd argue while it's very easy to get started with PHP, it's very hard to build some of good quality with any significant functionality compared to say rails/ django (ignoring framework != language).

Not at all suggesting it's impossible to build good quality apps in PHP but that it's very easy to build bad ones so to build a good one, the programmer already has to be pretty good, making it a poor choice for low skilled people use imo.

Low(er) skilled or people with not a lot of computer language experience as I see it, should be using the language that makes them the most productive, in most cases this is PHP thats the simple truth, I have a programming assignment due in my college data structures in java class, if you really want to see a horrible mess

The question is, are we defining productivity as "the developer can bill and move on as quickly and easily as possible" or is it "the client's business needs are served as well as possible"?

Neither, because if you're using the latter there's only ever one correct way to go about a project, and if you're using the former you get festering piles of shit but hey at least the work got done!

Maybe "low-skilled people" can just stick to Wordpress?

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