Tell HN: "Ruby vs. PHP" is not of interest to good hackers. | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: "Ruby vs. PHP" is not of interest to good hackers.

54 pointsjon_dahl21 comments

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On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Good hackers do not find PHP bashing interesting (or Ruby/MySQL/Java/Python/.NET bashing).

If you do find this sort of thing interesting, please respect the site guidelines and don't submit or upmod it. There are many other places on the web that specialize in this sort of thing.

EDIT: This isn't specifically directed at today's ironic "PHP vs. Ruby" post. That's a relatively mild instance of a more general trend.

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Good hackers do not find PHP bashing interesting

Well, let's not go over the top here. Many of the most famous hacker writings are passionate critiques of computer languages.

I work with PHP every day. But if I were not allowed to use rude words to describe PHP I'd never get through the day without biting through my tongue.

I think what you mean to say is: "Good hackers find interesting criticism of PHP to be interesting."

(It also helps to be constructive, and polite, although those are not hard-and-fast rules provided you are interesting enough. Have you read Steve Yegge's Kingdom of Nouns article? Have you heard Paul Graham's hilarious line about recruiting Python programmers vs recruiting Java programmers? They are good writers, and funny, but they are also scathing.)

This is fair. For what it's worth, I think PHP kind of sucks, and interesting criticism of any language is worthwhile. I love Steve Yegge's Tour de Babel article (http://steve.yegge.googlepages.com/tour-de-babel), and I even generally enjoy Zed's loud criticism of my day-to-day language.

What I don't like is language trolling, which often comes in the form of claiming that one language is better than another. Unless you're looking at a narrow slice of the language (performance, documentation, expressiveness), you can't just say that one language is better than another.

Unless you're looking at a narrow slice of the language[...] you can't just say that one language is better than another.

http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html

I'm not sure if PHP vs. Ruby is of interest to hackers. I do know that I have a vote for that article and I have a vote for your opinion, and that mechanism allows me to express my thoughts on what I'd like to see on the front page.

You don't need to tell me why you feel that PHP vs. Ruby does to belong on the front page, you need simply vote. On the other hand, if there is some reason why you feel the existing voting mechanism is broken in some way such that PHP vs. Ruby keeps making it to the front page despite the fact that "Good hackers do not find PHP bashing interesting," that is an "interesting new phenomena" that I would like to understand.

Disclosure: My two most recent homoiconic posts could be described as "Ruby bashing."

Disclosure: My two most recent homoiconic posts could be described as "Ruby bashing."

I disagree with you here.

First, your criticism is interesting and well-reasoned.

Second, you aren't making categorical claims (e.g. metaprogramming sucks/rocks).

Third, you're criticizing Ruby from the right position: as someone who has used it in depth, and isn't religiously for or against it.

Good hackers do not find PHP bashing interesting ...

Why don't we let the votes decide that?

If you do find this sort of thing interesting, please respect the site guidelines and don't submit or upmod it.

As a hacker, I definitely find language debate a lot more interesting than this sort of navel gazing about what should and shouldn't be posted here.

Ok, I'll grant you that it's not strictly in the guidelines of the site here, but... I found it funny. Hackers are people too, and not everything needs to read like a textbook. We should certainly discourage these sorts of posts, but I think that it's not a real crisis if this sort of article gets through every now and then. There is a reason that HN has voting, and it's this exactly. The people found it interesting, and they voted it up. Oh well. To be honest, posts like this seem like more of a distraction to me. Do we really need meta-reminders of the site rules?

Actually, I have more trouble with the non-humorous X vs. Y articles. At least this one tried to be funny (successfully or unsuccessfully). Worse are the myriad posts that say "Here is why my technology is good and yours is bad."

Unfortunately, even humor doesn't play well on the internet when it is seen as criticism. "5 joking reasons why your technology sucks" brings the trolls out in full force.

I feel like this meta-reminder was warranted. This article in particular was submitted, voted to the front page, deleted, re-submitted, and hit the front page again in an hour or two.

Besides, all it takes is 2 votes to hit the front page, and that certainly does not indicate community interest. That's where the mods and members are expected to come in and set the tone.

From the same guidelines:

Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or egregiously offtopic, you can flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.) If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did.

Perhaps these are of interest?

PHP in Erlang: http://github.com/blog/354-php-in-erlang

Erlang / Ruby Bridge: http://www.rubyinside.com/erlang-ruby-bridge-its-erlectricit...

As a comparative newbie programmer, I find the occasional piece like today's "PHP vs. Ruby" to be useful. It's hard to grasp all the nuances of a subject by simply reading the documentation, so seeing different viewpoints, spaced out over time, is quite useful.

Language bashing for geeks is like ball scratching for baseball players. It's one of our ways of being social. Not everyone likes it, but it can be fun.

It's fun only the first 10 or so times you hear "PHP sucks, ROR is the greatest language in the world!" As with any joke, it tends to get old pretty quickly. Move on, find another joke to tell.

As a disclaimer, I don't take sides. I use both PHP and ROR. Use a language that works for YOUR project, but don't harass other people because of the languages they choose to use on theirs.

I certainly think HN is the wrong place for such articles. However they will continue to exist regardless.

I hold the opinion that good hackers should be able to use the most appropriate tool for the job, not debunk one language over another. Twitter was always used as the big example of "Ruby doesn't scale", but I think it showed more to the point that languages don't scale and not that one was better than the other.

I agree. It doesn't matter! I prefer stories that has something to do with Start-ups. That said, I did find the Ruby / Scala Twitter story interesting.

I am an advocate of open markets. One of the cornerstones of such a system is the ability for the customers to talk and discuss the interesting qualities and deficiencies of the various products. We all know about this economic model: If I can only buy one product but have 2 to chose from, I try to figure out which is better and spend my resources wisely.

When it comes to technologies, frequently the only cost is our time. And since our time is so valuable, we like to spend a bit of it discussing the merits and problems with the tools we use. Of course, there can be an emotional connection to these tools (I <3 Perl) that can interfere with discussions. But on the whole, I think these discussions can be insightful and interesting, and can even introduce me to new ideas. That's what hacking is all about after all, isn't it?

That other article was a joke. Did you even read it?

I thought it was funny and interesting, and it certainly gratified my intellectual curiosity. I liked the stats on Ruby vs. Perl vs. PHP.

Lighten up, dude..

The 10 reasons why PHP is still better than Ruby was a funny piece as seen from the viewpoint of a Rubyist who was just waking up for the day yet. When I clicked to read it, it had 3 vote points. The content was not what I was expecting and yet I wanted to congratulate the author on coming up with it so I up voted it and went on with my life. Upon a second consideration perhaps I should have skipped voting on it and I do appreciate the moderators tendering to keep some quality on this forum.

I don't mind reading language comparison articles if they make significant, detailed comparisons of the languages. Typical language partisanship posts don't contribute much.

I use PHP and Ruby all the time, but I'm tired of reading about how shitty PHP is.

I'll take PHP over VB any day!! /hypocrisy :)

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