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At a glance, it looks like all languages are reasonably well loved except PHP and Node.js (shouldn't this just be Javascript? Does having a different standard l

At a glance, it looks like all languages are reasonably well loved except PHP and Node.js (shouldn't this just be Javascript? Does having a different standard lib make it a different language?) I think that's due to people having flash backs to terribly written code in both languages. For example, PHP apps pre-2005 rarely if ever used frontend controllers, preferring instead to twine in configuration and helper functions into isolated pages that were directly served by Apache. This meant that there was no single obvious place to put things like caching. Additionally, once upon a time, PHP didn't really have well developed ORMS, so everyone just wrote queries and hopefully parameterised queries---but not always. So if you had a hobby project that took off, then within 3 years it'd be a roiling ball of mud where it's difficult to do basic things like tracing which calls happen per page. PHP came to prominence early in the web, and it was easy to use so everyone had a hobby project that took off, or had to work within something like that. Hence the hate. To compare it to Javascript, I think the disdain for both languages is due to their initial nature---they were both written over an short period of time, and evolved in spurts rather than being carefully designed from day one or designed to overcome the shortcomings of another language. The quality of the above really shows up in the inconsistency of the standard libraries, and the fact that certain semantics were inconsistent or danger zones in practice but couldn't be changed. --- I do remember though when everyone hated C, and loved C++, then went back to loving C... so maybe programmers are just fickle and none of what I said makes sense. :)

kayoone 10y ago
just to chime in on this, modern PHP is nothing like what people remember from the pre ROR days, i still use it to this day and the major frameworks and libs are really well written to the point i feel some are even over engineered and almost looking like Java (just take a look at the latest Guzzle PHP Library)
- collyw 10y ago
  As my PHP fluent colleague said to me - don't bother learning PHP or you will end up having to fix (our) Wordpress sites and thats a nightmare. We have a Python application, and while its not written well, the PHP sites we have seem to be a fair bit worse even the ones not done in Wordpress.
  - dreistdreist 10y ago
    Wordpress is horrible. Never going to touch that again (Senior PHP Dev myself) or anything else like it (Magento, Drupal,...). And yes there is a lot of horrible PHP code out there, writting by bad developers. I guess newer or not as accessible languages don't have as many bad devs as PHP/JS. But if you have good devs, I prefer a good PHP codebase to any other language that I have come across (I tried a lot of them).
    - pthreadses 10y ago
      Could you elaborate a bit on what you prefer about it? I've heard this from a few people and would be curious to hear it fleshed out a bit.
      - dreistdreist 10y ago
        It has most of the OOP things that I want in a language (interfaces for one, looking at you python), few things still missing but hopefully coming soon (generics, nullable typehints). And it has sane nulls in my opinion, compared to Java at least. In the end good PHP code ends up looking like good Java code I think. But you don't have to worry about everything being nullable. But then horrible PHP code is something else... Luckily I don't really have to touch that very often.
    - TheLarch 10y ago
      Around 2001 I felt jaded with the industry and determined to do whatever was expedient to earn money. That meant using PHP, because that was purportedly the place to be at the time. I have never felt so uninspired by a language. My overwhelming feeling from the get-go was that it was a collection of libraries, which would be fine -- but why create a new language? PHP has the rare distinction among languages of not containing any novel features or ideas. Not only that, but it borrows liberally from several other languages, resulting in an overabundance of syntax. Instead of a tool for attacking problems, it's a reheated leftover. There is not suggestion of a better or worse way to accomplish some goal. Finally, the original premise of PHP, interspersed functional code and HTML, is high on my list of really bad ideas. Code written in this style is doubly-challenged in terms of reuse and maintainability. Again, there is again no semblance of better or worse with this approach. If you had Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds produce the same website with PHP, there would be very little in common between their approaches. Given the success of Facebook et al, I presume that the interspersed code/html thing has been superseded, and further that the egregious security issues in PHP have been fixed. But the picture in my mind's eye is something that lumbers along despite its thorough mediocrity. I will allow that making PHP adequately consistent and secure are impressive feats. Sincere question: how am I wrong here? ====== edit ====== Drop extra 'the'
- sotojuan 10y ago
  My understanding is that the majority of PHP jobs out there are maintaining old, outdated, and bad codebases using an old version of PHP so a lot of people just don't bother.
  - levelist_com 10y ago
    There is probably some truth to this. Every single contract I have been offered in the past 2 years including the one I am currently working required PHP5.6 & 7 knowledge, git, composer, JS, the latest JS frameworks, etc. Start the job... PHP5.3 codebase w/ some old jQuery. Its an absolute nightmare. I have to go home at night and write in PHP7 just to maintain some level of sanity or I'd have to cry myself to sleep. The only thing that makes the job tolerable is that I was able to load xdebug on the dev environments (though it doesn't always work b/c of all the redirects - it still is good enough to get me 90% of the way there).
- SmellTheGlove 10y ago
  My day job is no longer to write code, but I have a couple of projects I work on at night, so take my opinion for what it's worth. I have one project that's mostly static content and a couple of calculator forms. On submit, I an ajax call to post to a PHP script, it returns a json object with some data, and I display it. When I see PHP getting ripped, I always wonder, what am I supposed to use if not this? I know this is relatively simple, but my choices were to do the calculations in javascript or let PHP handle it - and PHP seemed to me as the right choice because I eventually may want to capture some of the input data, send it to a db, etc.
  - mod 10y ago
    Basically any other backend is equivalent. Javascript (on the backend), python, ruby, anything. Not a knock on php on my part, PHP is equally suited. I would have personally probably chosen Flask (python).
- dismantlethesun 10y ago
  > over engineered and almost looking like Java (just take a look at the latest Guzzle PHP Library) Guzzle doesn't look that bad. It looks like requests from Python, but you have to create a client first. > $client = new Client(['base_uri' => 'http://httpbin.org']); http://httpbin.org']); > $response = $client->get('http://httpbin.org/get'); http://httpbin.org/get'); Or in Python > response = requests.get('http://httpbin.org/get' http://httpbin.org/get')
TeMPOraL 10y ago
With PHP, I'll agree, though with JS I think it's the reverse. At least my personal dislike for the language and the ecosystem grows with every new hot framework, build system, or other weird "must-have" link for the toolchain that Node people seem to create almost daily.
- FilterSweep 10y ago
  I have to agree. As a hobbyist Node developer (day job is not in Node), I find it hard to talk with other Node developers as there is some build-tool or even full framework that sits on top of Express that I "should" be using but I'm not. But maybe it's just me.
- nilliams 10y ago
  The JS community is considerably larger than all other programming communities, and better at promoting (and documenting) its tools/libraries/frameworks (a lot of these tools come with beautiful landing pages, docs and demos). That shouldn't be seen as a mark against the technology. Nobody is forcing you to switch tools.
  - throway21312 10y ago
    > That shouldn't be seen as a mark against the technology. Nobody is forcing you to switch tools. Except when they do because they're the front end team. :P
    - nilliams 10y ago
      Well you should really have that out with them! If you feel they're needlessly switching and putting your project at risk, have them justify it. (Or just have a rule that as a team you try e.g. '1 new thing' per project). Again this shouldn't be a reason to hate on the JS community.
cel1ne 10y ago
> Node.js (shouldn't this just be Javascript? Does having a different standard lib make it a different language?) I think the dislike comes from the idea that JavaScript-development can be or at least was very messy and that "the JS-people" now try to carry that over to the server-side. npm also has many issues and node as a server-side VM wasn't very dev-ops friendly in the beginning, if I'm not mistaken. Note: This doesn't mean I don't like JS or node, I use them daily, though I have never used a production node-server. I'd rather run my JS on the JVM.

kayoone 10y ago

just to chime in on this, modern PHP is nothing like what people remember from the pre ROR days, i still use it to this day and the major frameworks and libs are really well written to the point i feel some are even over engineered and almost looking like Java (just take a look at the latest Guzzle PHP Library)

collyw 10y ago
As my PHP fluent colleague said to me - don't bother learning PHP or you will end up having to fix (our) Wordpress sites and thats a nightmare. We have a Python application, and while its not written well, the PHP sites we have seem to be a fair bit worse even the ones not done in Wordpress.
- dreistdreist 10y ago
  Wordpress is horrible. Never going to touch that again (Senior PHP Dev myself) or anything else like it (Magento, Drupal,...). And yes there is a lot of horrible PHP code out there, writting by bad developers. I guess newer or not as accessible languages don't have as many bad devs as PHP/JS. But if you have good devs, I prefer a good PHP codebase to any other language that I have come across (I tried a lot of them).
  - pthreadses 10y ago
    Could you elaborate a bit on what you prefer about it? I've heard this from a few people and would be curious to hear it fleshed out a bit.
    - dreistdreist 10y ago
      It has most of the OOP things that I want in a language (interfaces for one, looking at you python), few things still missing but hopefully coming soon (generics, nullable typehints). And it has sane nulls in my opinion, compared to Java at least. In the end good PHP code ends up looking like good Java code I think. But you don't have to worry about everything being nullable. But then horrible PHP code is something else... Luckily I don't really have to touch that very often.
  - TheLarch 10y ago
    Around 2001 I felt jaded with the industry and determined to do whatever was expedient to earn money. That meant using PHP, because that was purportedly the place to be at the time. I have never felt so uninspired by a language. My overwhelming feeling from the get-go was that it was a collection of libraries, which would be fine -- but why create a new language? PHP has the rare distinction among languages of not containing any novel features or ideas. Not only that, but it borrows liberally from several other languages, resulting in an overabundance of syntax. Instead of a tool for attacking problems, it's a reheated leftover. There is not suggestion of a better or worse way to accomplish some goal. Finally, the original premise of PHP, interspersed functional code and HTML, is high on my list of really bad ideas. Code written in this style is doubly-challenged in terms of reuse and maintainability. Again, there is again no semblance of better or worse with this approach. If you had Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds produce the same website with PHP, there would be very little in common between their approaches. Given the success of Facebook et al, I presume that the interspersed code/html thing has been superseded, and further that the egregious security issues in PHP have been fixed. But the picture in my mind's eye is something that lumbers along despite its thorough mediocrity. I will allow that making PHP adequately consistent and secure are impressive feats. Sincere question: how am I wrong here? ====== edit ====== Drop extra 'the'
sotojuan 10y ago
My understanding is that the majority of PHP jobs out there are maintaining old, outdated, and bad codebases using an old version of PHP so a lot of people just don't bother.
- levelist_com 10y ago
  There is probably some truth to this. Every single contract I have been offered in the past 2 years including the one I am currently working required PHP5.6 & 7 knowledge, git, composer, JS, the latest JS frameworks, etc. Start the job... PHP5.3 codebase w/ some old jQuery. Its an absolute nightmare. I have to go home at night and write in PHP7 just to maintain some level of sanity or I'd have to cry myself to sleep. The only thing that makes the job tolerable is that I was able to load xdebug on the dev environments (though it doesn't always work b/c of all the redirects - it still is good enough to get me 90% of the way there).
SmellTheGlove 10y ago
My day job is no longer to write code, but I have a couple of projects I work on at night, so take my opinion for what it's worth. I have one project that's mostly static content and a couple of calculator forms. On submit, I an ajax call to post to a PHP script, it returns a json object with some data, and I display it. When I see PHP getting ripped, I always wonder, what am I supposed to use if not this? I know this is relatively simple, but my choices were to do the calculations in javascript or let PHP handle it - and PHP seemed to me as the right choice because I eventually may want to capture some of the input data, send it to a db, etc.
- mod 10y ago
  Basically any other backend is equivalent. Javascript (on the backend), python, ruby, anything. Not a knock on php on my part, PHP is equally suited. I would have personally probably chosen Flask (python).
dismantlethesun 10y ago
> over engineered and almost looking like Java (just take a look at the latest Guzzle PHP Library) Guzzle doesn't look that bad. It looks like requests from Python, but you have to create a client first. > $client = new Client(['base_uri' => 'http://httpbin.org']); http://httpbin.org']); > $response = $client->get('http://httpbin.org/get'); http://httpbin.org/get'); Or in Python > response = requests.get('http://httpbin.org/get' http://httpbin.org/get')

TeMPOraL 10y ago

With PHP, I'll agree, though with JS I think it's the reverse. At least my personal dislike for the language and the ecosystem grows with every new hot framework, build system, or other weird "must-have" link for the toolchain that Node people seem to create almost daily.

FilterSweep 10y ago
I have to agree. As a hobbyist Node developer (day job is not in Node), I find it hard to talk with other Node developers as there is some build-tool or even full framework that sits on top of Express that I "should" be using but I'm not. But maybe it's just me.
nilliams 10y ago
The JS community is considerably larger than all other programming communities, and better at promoting (and documenting) its tools/libraries/frameworks (a lot of these tools come with beautiful landing pages, docs and demos). That shouldn't be seen as a mark against the technology. Nobody is forcing you to switch tools.
- throway21312 10y ago
  > That shouldn't be seen as a mark against the technology. Nobody is forcing you to switch tools. Except when they do because they're the front end team. :P
  - nilliams 10y ago
    Well you should really have that out with them! If you feel they're needlessly switching and putting your project at risk, have them justify it. (Or just have a rule that as a team you try e.g. '1 new thing' per project). Again this shouldn't be a reason to hate on the JS community.

cel1ne 10y ago

> Node.js (shouldn't this just be Javascript? Does having a different standard lib make it a different language?) I think the dislike comes from the idea that JavaScript-development can be or at least was very messy and that "the JS-people" now try to carry that over to the server-side. npm also has many issues and node as a server-side VM wasn't very dev-ops friendly in the beginning, if I'm not mistaken. Note: This doesn't mean I don't like JS or node, I use them daily, though I have never used a production node-server. I'd rather run my JS on the JVM.