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Comment by Yver | Hacker News Reader

What they have in common: they deal in Bitcoins, they're not banks, they have a "o" and an "x" in their name.

Now if you're trying to bash PHP (or Ubuntu?) for banking software that does not take an exclusive lock on rows it reads then modifies and a daemon that does not check balances on withdrawal, try again.

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What if you're trying to bash the likely competence of people who, when deciding to write a bank, decide that PHP is the best tool for the job.

To make that decision requires that you be insane, or don't know any other tools.

There's nothing wrong with that decision up to the point where you start handling the money - beyond that point I agree with you.

Setting up a website which is secure and not vulnerable to SQL injection or basic BS is quite doable in PHP.

I'm not bashing PHP. I love PHP.

Many PHP developers, on the other hand...

It's a strawman, though. The problem isn't PHP developers per se, it seems to be a lack of awareness that dealing with money is in any different than dealing with, say, any other CRUD operation (see - Mt.Gox just casting things to floats, it's just numbers, right?.)

Just wait until people start announcing their exchanges and business written in Rails or Python, or "anything but PHP" but still turning out to have been written by webapp developers with no idea how to actually deal with currency transactions or basic security.

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