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Comment by zxcdw | Hacker News Reader

He did explain why PHP is disgusting mess.

And hell, the fact that people have that opinion stems from somewhere. And that is a fact we should all take a note of -- to build better tools. You see, PHP is nothing but a tool, and as a tool, it's not very liked one due to it's flaws. Solution? Abandon it! Build new, better tools instead of feeling threathened.

Le PHP sink and die it's well deserved death and make way for better tools, because professionals shouldn't feel attached to their tools, instead they should be critical towards them and look to find better ones.

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And that is precisely what Tim is saying. He happens to work mostly with the new tool named Go but he does recognize that there are others like Rust and Dart that are also trying to do things better.

But we need to actually move away from using bad tools (and this has happened with PERL) and start using the newer, better tools more often. Every software developer should learn some Erlang (or Elixir), some Clojure, some Go, etc.

If you don't try these tools out and kick the tires for a while, then you end up stuck in the past like all those COBOL programmers.

I might be wrong, but COBOL isn't being actively developed as a language anymore .. PHP however is still solving problems and under constant development and improving all the time.

> PHP however is still solving problems

But is it solving more problems than it creates?

PHP is great for developers and firms because they are always required to stay and make sure things blow up. Most of the PHP I've worked with was also very hard to decipher by anyone except the original developer.

Oh god. It's Perl. And no need to drag it through the mud here. It's pretty much the only language that gets Unicode right. It has nothing in common with the abject misery that is PHP. Perl came out in '87. Erlang came out in '86. I don't know what you're high on, other than trends and trendwhores.

Clojure isn't new. Not to take a dig at Rich Hickey, but everything he is doing with immutable objects was done more than a decade ago by the likes of Henry Baker (http://home.pipeline.com/~hbaker1/home.html). Of course, everything that has ever been tried at all has been tried in some variant of Lisp/Scheme at one point in time.

Stop while you're behind. Nobody believes that Henry Baker's papers are equal to what Rich Hickey has done with immutable objects. Geez, get a grip on reality man.

Hi memracom,

Where will Perl 6 sit when/if it becomes something you could realistically use? Would you classify it as one of the bad tools or a newer, better one?

"haphazardly accumulated features" is not an explanation, it's a subjective point of view.

"it's not very liked one due to it's flaws", PHP is very well liked, just not by everyone .. which goes for most things in life.

"haphazardly accumulated features" is not an explanation, it's a subjective point of view.

If you really need it, here's a very good write-up which should cover that in an impressively detailed manner:

http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-de...

This was hotly debated, by myself included, right here on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3820431

He has updated the article over time which is good of him, but much of it is still subjective and from a quick glance there are points that no longer hold true.

Here's one rebuttal to that:

http://forums.devshed.com/php-development-5/php-is-a-fractal...

It was a long one, and I'll admit I only skimmed it.

But from a glance, it looks like the one writing the rebuttal didn't really understand the criticism, and is himself 100% captured by the exact mindset which the original article criticized PHP for having.

This guy is the one who will be standing at the door complaining that you just broke his house. He is what is wrong with PHP.

And naturally, however much sense he thinks his argument makes, it will still be wrong. It's in the very nature of this situation.

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