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Comment by oafitupa | Hacker News Reader

That's not what he's saying. He's basically saying that it's 0K to use PHP if you can't use anything else because you are not smart enough. And you won't even achieve great things, you will barely be able to build something.

PHPers like me know very well this kind of trolling (after years of suffering it), but we are also way above it already. Sometimes we want to reply, but then we remember that this trolling is born from bitterness and lack of success, so we just let it be.

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> not smart enough

That's not what I said.

I was trying to point out a good side of a language that I do not particularly care for.

Think about it this way: there are plenty of smart people with good ideas who, however, are not programmers. Doctors, accountants, architects, physicists... whatever. A system that has a low barrier to entry so that these people can create something is a positive thing to have.

And if programming PHP floats your boat, that's fine too.

With respect, I'm a proud PHP developer who does crazy things like use a Lisp that compiles to PHP to build services; I am working on some awesome stuff to take advantage of Composer and the new modular PHP Library systems, and all sorts of other stuff. I love working in PHP, and I'm not ashamed to admit that, despite having written my own languages, and being partial to C. My current favourite to work with is nimrod...

Anyway, the point is: you completely read the OP wrong, in my opinion, and I'm the person that would be most offended if it was a dig...

I'm not sure you'll be able to read his post properly while you do it through the chip on your shoulder.

Or maybe it's you the one who can't read it properly? Else explain to me what he meant by this: "PHP made it very easy for a lot of people to do something with the web, something that otherwise they might not have been able to do"

  a lot of people != all php users.

Actually

  a lot of people != the majority of php users.

You're reading a bit too much in what OP wrote. I have beern an avid php programmer several years ago, and still like it very much by the way.

> we are also way above it already

Are you sure about that?

I do python and scala at work yet I love php, it's made a ton of difference to the web (think wordpress for example) - it's perfectly possible to write killer php and do everything from machine learning to webapps. PHP has the best date extractor of any language that i've seen.

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