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Comment by kbenson | Hacker News Reader

Interesting PHP rant[1] included in the roundup of articles, which is worth reading just for this gem:

  What this means is that if you are a PHP developer and not
  part of the problem, you are basically stuck in a world 
  where you will struggle to find any decent reusable software 
  that you can trust, or any decent developers to incorporate 
  in your team. Sure, there are crappy programmers making use 
  of other languages as well, but you can easily find good 
  programmers for those, whereas in PHP the really good ones 
  are like drops in an ocean of sulphuric acid - and like 
  anyone in an ocean of sulphuric acid, they usually prefer to 
  be somewhere else.

  [1]: http://www.borfast.com/blog/i-hate-php

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Cue the obligatory PHP-bashing whenever the word 'PHP' appears in a post.

Honestly, isn't there something more productive people can do besides come up with even more arguments about PHP being the lame stepchild of programming languages?

PHP has warts, more so than many other languages, and has a heritage that is in many ways the cause of it's crippled nature. But recent versions of PHP, and especially the frameworks and applications built on top of it, are actually not so bad. Really.

Plus, since there is so much chaff in the ocean of PHP developers, good developers really do stand out in most organizations—these devs are usually also the ones who are good in any language, and probably prefer working in other languages as well... but they also see the upsides to using PHP for certain things.

I think you are being a bit thin-skinned. I only mentioned it because it was included in a round-up of articles at PHP Weekly, so it caught my attention. I assume if they include it then it's because either it has traction, or it's from someone notable (which I wouldn't know). It's notable for appearing to be an outlier. The quote was included because I thought it humorous.

I'm not talking about your initial post—I enjoy a good PHP-bashing session :)

However, most of the people who join in the party with nothing either (a) humorous or (b) insightful are annoying, and don't contribute anything to the discussion.

I don't understand what you're objecting to. Do you object to something called "PHP Weekly" containing an article that talks about the problems with PHP? Do you object to commenting on such an article in the comments for a link to a PHP Weekly issue that contains it?

> whereas in PHP the really good ones are like drops in an ocean of sulphuric acid

Which is a good thing. Once a client finds you, they will hold on to you for dear life. Why should I care about the level of difficulty of finding me, if that level of difficulty is in my favor?

> and like anyone in an ocean of sulphuric acid, they usually prefer to be somewhere else.

What? No. I like being in that ocean. I charge extra whenever I have to touch anyone else's code-base, because I know it'll be garbage. Is it fun cleaning up garbage? No. But it pays well and it is challenging. You don't know challenging until you forced yourself to think like a moron.

And the thing is, the person who wrote it knows it's garbage too, so they'll never publish it. Quite a bit of the open-source stuff recently has been of high quality.

clogged potties

surely smell like money

to plumbers

(and this is written in appreciation not scorn for those that fix the old things that many would rather not touch)

I doubt that 'you can easily find good programmers' for other languages than PHP, depending on the location and the language and your definition of 'good'. PHP is widespread, making it easy to find developers while a lot of the more 'sophisticated' languages are not and I seriously doubt that all developers coming to Ruby or Python are immediately 'good' at it. (There are enough companies which are sticking to PHP because it just works and they can't find good developers for other languages in their region.)

Besides that, it's just really tiresome to see PHP bashing on HN again and again. Don't even get me started on the actual article.

> Don't even get me started on the actual article

Why not? Isn't that the point, to discuss? If you think he's wrong or factually incorrect, here's a place to say so.

"PHP rant [1]" makes it seem as though there is an array of PHP rants, possibly containing the frequent complaints devs have about PHP and its occasionally poor implementation.

God do I ever want to get out of this ocean of sulphuric acid I work in every day :/

PHP is crap ,i use it everyday but come on , it is in 2013 , nobody is forcing no-one to use that . If you can use python,go,java or ruby go for it.

The only thing that saves PHP is type hinting with methods and functions. Otherwise i prefer nodejs personnaly.

I believe PHP can be saved , the maintainers just dont want to do it ( remove 90% of its crappy features , move APIs out of the core ,etc ... ).

>I believe PHP can be saved , the maintainers just dont want to do it ( remove 90% of its crappy features , move APIs out of the core ,etc ... ).

They've done a lot to improve it. Were you around in the PHP 4 days? They simply have their work cut out for them. There's too much gross in there!

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