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"Just do stuff."

Along the years I have come to admire more and more those who take what they do know and put the effort into just that: building something.

The idea of purpose is key here.

Once you have a purpose, a goal, finding the right tool for the job is no longer that difficult and you will suddenly realise that a lot the languages/frameworks people have been evangelising to you may make no sense at all.

"If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there." - Lewis Carroll

Somehow this turned into a thread of people debating the merits and faults of PHP. There's a place for that, to be sure, but that's not really the point.

The point is that getting started is the most important thing, and moving forward is the next most important thing. I'm not saying if someone comes to you and says, "I want to build a web app" one should say, "Do it in PHP." But if someone says, "I'm building my first web app in PHP" the most damaging thing you could say is, "lol you're coding like a noob. You should be doing that in {language x}."

I see happening all the time. Coding in PHP is better than not coding because you're terrified of not doing things "the right way," and that often is the alternative. Let him or her finish a project in PHP before you try to turn the ship around and make him or her learn Rails. Or JavaScript or Python, or Java or whatever. Just start.

Or as a friend says: "the worst dancer in the world is better than the best non-dancer"

Exactly. For me the real art of programming lies in the getting stuff done. KISS, YAGNI ... the smartest programmers I've ever worked with - the ones I'd want to work with again - were masters of getting results on-time or even before-time with clever, minimalistic solutions.

I think its a double-edged sword.

On one hand, it does have the disastrous effects described in the article. On the other, those kind of comments from some FP programmers did turn my attention to FP languages. Turns out, there is this amazing group of people that are trying to build an entire ecosystem that stands on solid mathematical foundations. That was really exciting stuff for me. For years I've been watching our profession struggle with brilliant but ad-hoc creations, every single time being crushed by its accumulating weight of crutches and of the impossibility to reason about things once they grow to a certain size. Now it seems like we're really close to fixing this (that is, even outside of academia).

But maybe there is a way of getting people's attention without causing unnecessary extra damage. We (as a profession) ought to be able to do better than that...

Haskell us perfectly fine to start with. It's just Haskell + zsh + git + archlinux + vim + cool-tech aren't things you should learn all at once. Heck, 12 years in, and I'm still lot fluent in all of those.

We can still tell people about cool stuff, just encourage them to take one step at a time, in their own time.

Haskell may not be the wisest language to start with. It's different from almost everything out there.

I feel learning one Algol derived language such as Python followed by Haskell is a good solution. Perhaps even better (of not more painful) would be to learn C followed by Haskell.

Advice to start learning programming from Haskell or Lisp or C++ is arrogance.

Pefectly fine I one takes full responsibility for own advice.

How so? I'd appreciate you expanding on it, as well as responding to the existence of these:

Teaching Haskell to a 10 year old[0]

Realm of Racket[1]

Land of lisp[2]

0: https://superginbaby.wordpress.com/2015/04/08/teaching-haske...

1: http://realmofracket.com/

2: http://landoflisp.com/

I know Haskell is the introductory programming language of choice at many British universities like Oxford and Cambridge. In the US C, C++ and Scheme (functional) are all in the top 6 most common ( http://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm/176450-python-is-now-the... ) so I don't see at all why those shouldn't be good choices.

The conveyor belt metaphor is one of the best that I have ever heard.

It's fine to start out with anything, I did pascal/visual basic in high school. Then did Java/PHP in college. First year of college I did contract work in PHP and in WordPress. It was fun the first year or so and I love that I could have that "instant gratification" moments that PHP is famous for. Then as I grew and learned about things like concurrency, algorithms, HTTP, networking I found myself wondering off to other languages such as Ruby. Then I learned Ruby and now for a year already am doing Rails and Angular and truly enjoy it.

The thing to note here is back in a day when I was doing PHP , I heard a lot from community members and other software engineers saying something like "PHP SUCKS" and stuff like that, but I did not care because everything I wanted to build in that time I could do with procedural PHP or some OOP php or some Wordpress magic. When I realized and knew `why` I want to learn other stuff everything became clear.

The hatred of PHP amongst a certain type is hilarious, they automatically assume that if you chose PHP (or worse program in it because it was what you inherited as well) you are a "lesser programmer".

I choose to use PHP despite been capable of using most any language I wanted, over the years I've used and forgotten many languages and for the requirements I have PHP was a good fit.

Also modern PHP really isn't like old PHP, composer, PSR's, The FIG folks, decent frameworks (Symfony in particular along with Laravel), huge numbers of usable libraries.

Yeah the language has issues but then a) what language doesn't b) with experience you can avoid them.

When you get down to it I only care about providing value whether that is to myself or my customers and they really don't care what language was used as long as it works.

> if you chose PHP (or worse program in it because it was what you inherited as well) you are a "lesser programmer".

If you choose php, I will assume that you.

1. Either is not aware of that php has a million gotchas that you need to avoid at every step. Take a look at the ever growing (!) list at /r/lolphp.

2. You don't see the significance of the aforementioned gotchas. For eg, you can show things like php's registerglobals to a newbie, and he will be impressed by how convenient it is. He won't see how bad it actually can be. This is not because he is a "lesser programmer", but due to a case of "unknown unknowns". Note that you can have 10 years of PHP experience and can still be like this.

> Also modern PHP really isn't like old PHP, composer, PSR's, The FIG....

These things does make a difference. But only on the surface, not deep down where it is really rotten.

You can assume whatever the hell you want it doesn't really matter to me since I'm well aware of 1 and 2.

Your post is a perfect example of what the author is referring to: stupid people in the community trying to make others feel inferior for programming in a certain technology. When it comes to PHP, such posts are inevitable (that's how I know PHP is actually a good, useful language). About the people who post them, I will assume that you:

1. Are incredibly stupid (register globals has been deprecated for years) 2. Are incredibly closed minded because you make comments like "These things does make a difference. But only on the surface, not deep down where it is really rotten" 3. Can't actually program in PHP and have not written large production apps in it 4. Probably can't actually program any language because you don't realize every single language has a million gotchas

My assumptions may be wrong, but it really doesn't matter. That's the problem with assumptions ... the damage is already done.

FWIW, PHP 4.x was completely awful for large and/or OOP codebases due to the totally insane copy-by-default semantics, the need to use &= perfectly at every call site that returned an instance of a class, and a handful of reference-counting bugs that caused interpreter crashes and still weren't fixed when 5.x matured.

It's definitely gotten better; I feel like a lot of people who swore off PHP forever are remembering version four.

> I feel like a lot of people who swore off PHP forever are remembering version four.

I think that's a valid point however I'm not sure if that is better or worse when they are attacking something.

Oh, almost certainly worse, unless Rasmus Lerdorf is going on another mailing list tirade and flaming them directly.

There are objective differences between programming languages and it's reasonable to have strong opinions about the relative merits and demerits of each. Yes, it's toxic when people who have no real-world experience with a language or platform rant about it, because this tends to be useless bile. But that does't mean PHP is just as good as anything else.

If you only know a single programming language, you should have some inner doubts, no matter what that language is. This is healthy.

Of course languages are different. Some are better for some things than others. Choosing a language without knowledge of its tradeoffs is not a vary good idea.

The issue the parent is comments is judging someone based on their use of a language without knowing if that person has any knowledge of the tradeoffs is doing them a disservice. Spewing that judgement on the internet is actively harmful.

Calm down about "gotchas", please, it's already annoying . Every language has gotchas and trade offs. Modern PHP is really much superior than even early versions of PHP 5, not even talking about PHP 4. You can write very clean code in PHP and very smelly in C - it's all up to you.

I totally agree, and this is why I am quite angry with the "basic is bad for your brain" statement from Djiktra. I understand the sentiment, but the idea that starting with very basic "non-rigorous" language is not only a waste of time but will even hold you back make me lost several years on my programming career.

I see where he was coming from but I initially learnt BASIC (on a ZX-81) then moved to Pascal (Turbo Pascal on DOS) then Delphi with side branches into C and a some other languages.

These days I'm a web dev mostly using PHP and a lot of Python, I feel no need to justify my choices anymore, I could write a HTTP stack in C if I wanted to but I choose not to.

Ruby looks interesting, Go looks interesting, all this stuff is good stuff, I hate the attitude of "because X exists I must defend my choice of Y to the death", nothing is lost personally when someone else uses another language.

> it doesn't matter if it's vim or emacs or notepad

Yes! it matters if it's plain vanilla notepad, notepad++ would be better, you don't want to see someone else code opened in notepad, tabs and spaces and newlines will mixed like spaghetti.

I think they meant "at first". Later, of course, it will matter.

Momentum is the thing that truly matters.

That's certainly true. You learn by doing stuff. But PHP actually is a bad language, and the guy would be better off starting with something else.

Why use PHP for X years until you realize you need to move on, when you could start out with something you can still use even after that point? Even worse, he could get stuck using PHP because it's comfortable and he's used to dealing with its brokenness.

> why use php for x years?

You don't have to use it for years. It doesn't take that long to grasp, then you can start learning other stuff. The important thing is to get moving.

Alright, why use it for even five days, when you could be using something that's not a dead-end (or detrimental) for your development as a programmer?

You can get moving with a good language instead, which was my point.

Well, now you know one who started out writing machine code. And I'll tell you, don't learn PHP and Rails is a joke and doesn't scale well. But any noob switching to Haskell to do a simple web app is equally insane.

Rails may not scale well, but it's incredibly fast for pumping out CRUD apps. I've seen noobies in Rails move much faster than Node.js projects. Likewise I'm sure someone has seen the opposite.

I'm not here to tell you Rails is better than alternatives, but as programmers we need stop being so scathing in our opinions about other languages or frameworks.

Has it ever occurred to you that somebody may have started learning PHP, or Ruby/Rails, or Perl, or Java, simply because that was the only viable option available to them within the trajectories of their lives that would allow them to make a living? I know people learning Ruby who out of economic necessity had to switch to PHP to land a good paying job. This is particulary true in smaller cities where opportunities are far more scarce.

Switching to PHP is not a choice that I would personally want to make, but I do not judge or think less of programmers who end up doing this when they're first starting out because they have to.

I find that those who start out with PHP cause they have to are working for companies who presume you need PHP and a database for anything related to the web but could never explain to you a technical reason for it.

The point is that for your first project it just doesn't matter.

What's your favorite web language, then?

We don't use a "web language" unless you include our use of javascript. We make custom sites using C cause we can and it does everything any other language does. We just might switch to Go cause it already contains the libraries we wrote for C years ago but Go makes it more universal to those outside our company.

Well... Why not assembly for custom sites? (C is a joke, etc)

>The "language hate" in programming is truly cancerous.

I agree with you... except when it comes to PHP. PHP is more toxic than language wars are. (I am aware of the irony in that statement.)

I love PHP. I really do. Everyone knows about its flaws in syntax, function names, argument order, and so on, but as someone who learned PHP and used only it for years certain paradigms and programming styles it uses really messed me (and I think others) up when switching languages:

- arrays are hashmaps/multi-dimensional aka one-size fits all (no need for more complicated data structures)

- everything is single-request and single-process (no lifetime management or persistent state, lower need to worry about memory leaks, no threads or processes, no real timers or async)

- copy on write