> PHP developers are makers at heart.
What is the difference between a PHP developer and any other developer? If they tried to stick this in the middle, I could swallow it but opening sentence is just ridiculous.
> What is the difference between a PHP developer and any other developer?
It's exactly the type of response I was hoping for. In early drafts we got a common "big whup" response from some readers. Most posts on PHP these days only do well when they bash the language, very few focus on __why__ they use PHP: which is to create things. Yes, all developers create things, and PHP developers do as well. This sentence serves to validate PHP and their developers. So to answer your question:
> What is the difference between a PHP developer and any other developer?
Nothing.
Even if you still don't buy my explanation. Maybe you can stomach some non-wordsmithed docs: https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/getting-started-with-p...
Either way - thanks for taking the time to explain.
Some hooks are better than others. I'm an engineer before a writer. It sucks that we have to market tech things, but the sad truth is most announcements that have no "hype" get no hype. I do a bunch of open source work, and some projects I promote and they do well, others I don't promote and they don't do as well.
Generally at Heroku I try to only put one or two flashy sentences in. The rest should be direct substance delivery, though that's not always the case. Thanks for taking the time to click the link, read, and comment!
The Ruby community is for Ruby. Period. A company can't dictate their own policies based on ideas of just one community.
The sentence just sounds as if you paid $5 someone to write you an intro to a technical matter because you didn't know what to to use.
The sentence is general and without point. Because it is coming from a technical company and is aimed towards technical people, yes, I find it ridiculous.
If the Ruby on Rails blog made a post saying "Rubyists are makers at heart." would you complain?
Last:
Heroku != blog of a random startup
Lead sentence != middle of post
I won't continue as this leads nowhere.
My bias: 80% hate, 18% apathy, and 2% curiosity into what facebook is doing with the language.
In this context, I think disclosing my emotions towards the language tells others that while I dislike PHP the way Heroku phrased their "makers at heart" was a positive sentiment that I could agree with. It seemed relevant.
Why do I hate it at 80%?
Because it burned me in the past. Because it makes doing things right hard. Because other people make the same mistakes over and over and yet I still have to use it on occasion.
It's an emotion built up after years of negative experiences. My emotional experience with PHP went from Interested to Excited to Cautious to Wary to Hateful.
For me, PHP was the friend that promised the moon and when he did show up he came with week-old dried out cheese instead of the moon that he promised.
Cumulative bad experiences, especially when larger factors (legacy decisions, inertia, switching costs, etc) force you to continue having those bad experiences, leads to negative emotions.
Call it extreme dislike if you want, but for me it is a lesser form of hate.
Note that this is all personal description. Perhaps it was the timing (04-08) perhaps it was my level of experience, perhaps it was bad luck. I realize that some people have unanimously or mostly positive experiences with PHP and I'm not trying to diminish their experiences.
It actually doesn't. It makes doing things wrong easy. And no, those are not equivalent.
PHP has a unique combination of terribleness and popularity, though, and that's a bad mixture.
I've read similar arguments made against C, and C++, and Java, and Ruby here, so I don't think that bias is unique.
PHP is a mix of C (apis like mysql_fetch_assoc ), C++ (:: ->) and java (class and interface ) with javascript weak typing.
It is a mess. I'm a PHP dev, the problem is when i have to maintain other's people mess too. Ruby and Java messes are far more easier to maintain than any PHP one.
There is also the PHP culture and community ,which quite toxic.
For all these reasons,while PHP is my bread winner I have no love for it.
Playing devil's advocate, perhaps it's even noble to hate a non-sentient thing which one believes impedes the progress of sentient things.
Not putting much actual stuff out there, but always preaching about Monads, purity, laziness, Typeclasses, etc.
(Joking, but only half)