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Comment by imakesnowflakes | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

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

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.

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