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All good points. As a PHP-only hacker (wouldn't say fan), I am always amused with the PHP bashing. It's missing this or that. It does x wrong. Yet it only powe

All good points. As a PHP-only hacker (wouldn't say fan), I am always amused with the PHP bashing. It's missing this or that. It does x wrong. Yet it only powers Facebook. It is the only language where I can be up and coding in no time to produce complex web apps quickly. Language users always underestimate the second point: personal familiarity is a great productivity boom that no other language can match. Better the devil you know... And a similar argument holds for databases, but it's a bit more complicated for that one.

nostrademons 17y ago
"As a PHP-only hacker...personal familiarity is a great productivity boom that no other language can match. Better the devil you know..." It's possible to become personally familiar with more than one language. Get to know many devils. ;-) Learning a new language always feels like a pain when you're doing it, because everything's 10x slower than with your old language. But then you become familiar with the new one, and can write two languages at full speed instead of one, and the pain of learning it is quickly forgotten. Moreover, it gives you perspective on both the old and the new that can be quite valuable. Do this enough and eventually you realize that there're some languages that are just bad. But it's very much worth examining their history and understanding how they became bad. Because I can guarantee that it wasn't because their designers were stupid, and the same forces that make a language go bad tend to make any software project go bad. If you're aware of them, you might keep your software project from going bad, at least for a while.
- pierrefar 17y ago
  I do learn other languages. Right now I'm focusing on the non-alphanumeric soup we call Erlang. I can also (just) barely do some Python, and Node.js is next on the list. For PHP, it's best to think of it as an inconsistent wrapper around lots of other libraries. In most instances, I know there is a function to do what I want, and a quick lookup gets me the right syntax.
  - jacquesm 17y ago
    Cool! Learning clojure on this end, slow progress but one day I'll get it :) How is Erlang working out for you?
    - pierrefar 17y ago
      I should have been more explicit in how it's going for me: slowly. Very very slowly. I think it's a function of the amount of time I am dedicating to it and the book is written in a very intense dump-everything-in-one-go kind of way. But I'm slowly getting there.

nostrademons 17y ago

"As a PHP-only hacker...personal familiarity is a great productivity boom that no other language can match. Better the devil you know..." It's possible to become personally familiar with more than one language. Get to know many devils. ;-) Learning a new language always feels like a pain when you're doing it, because everything's 10x slower than with your old language. But then you become familiar with the new one, and can write two languages at full speed instead of one, and the pain of learning it is quickly forgotten. Moreover, it gives you perspective on both the old and the new that can be quite valuable. Do this enough and eventually you realize that there're some languages that are just bad. But it's very much worth examining their history and understanding how they became bad. Because I can guarantee that it wasn't because their designers were stupid, and the same forces that make a language go bad tend to make any software project go bad. If you're aware of them, you might keep your software project from going bad, at least for a while.

pierrefar 17y ago
I do learn other languages. Right now I'm focusing on the non-alphanumeric soup we call Erlang. I can also (just) barely do some Python, and Node.js is next on the list. For PHP, it's best to think of it as an inconsistent wrapper around lots of other libraries. In most instances, I know there is a function to do what I want, and a quick lookup gets me the right syntax.
- jacquesm 17y ago
  Cool! Learning clojure on this end, slow progress but one day I'll get it :) How is Erlang working out for you?
  - pierrefar 17y ago
    I should have been more explicit in how it's going for me: slowly. Very very slowly. I think it's a function of the amount of time I am dedicating to it and the book is written in a very intense dump-everything-in-one-go kind of way. But I'm slowly getting there.