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Is there a PHP modding squad in Hacker News? Legitimate, non-offensive anecdotes are getting downvoted in this thread while all positive comments are being upvo

by vesak 9y ago

Is there a PHP modding squad in Hacker News? Legitimate, non-offensive anecdotes are getting downvoted in this thread while all positive comments are being upvoted. I think I've seen such a trend rising in the past few years, but I wasn't sure: every thread covering PHP in some way gathered a crowd that defended "how PHP is much better since 5.x" or referred to PHP being hated by people without any good reason. And yes. This very comment got downvoted to 0 in less than a minute from its submission.

olalonde 9y ago
My guess is there isn't and non constructive criticism just tends to get down voted.
Yokohiii 9y ago
tl;dr PHP has an identity crisis PHP folks are a perfect case of the blub paradox and they are sadly always looking up. PHP isn't treated with the respect it deserves. PHP powers large parts of the internet, from tiny to huge projects. But there isn't even an attempt to understand what it made/make work so well. PHP is quite different from other languages but instead of curiosity from the competitors, there is just bad reputation and ignorance. The community and language itself constantly leans and evolves towards other languages. Ruby, Java, Javascript and whatever. The shortcomings in contrast to other languages are often drawing much attention in the community and in my opinion is overshadowing PHP's strengthes. Much of the recent changes in PHP have been a kind of fanservice to appeal the users of other languages. While this isn't particularly a wrong strategy to stay around, it caused an addiction to be more similar to the competitors. PHP lost it's identity and got unknowingly angry about it. This is just my opinion and there are some wrongs here, but thats how I would currently explain the sub par PHP community behaviour.
- concede_pluto 9y ago
  $x == $y should guarantee that $a[$x] == $a[$y]. In PHP, it doesn't. That's not different, that's just broken, and the language design makes dozens of elementary mistakes like that where getting it right wouldn't have sacrificed the only strength (streamlined deployable server integration) in any way.

by vesak 9y ago

olalonde 9y ago

My guess is there isn't and non constructive criticism just tends to get down voted.

Yokohiii 9y ago

tl;dr PHP has an identity crisis PHP folks are a perfect case of the blub paradox and they are sadly always looking up. PHP isn't treated with the respect it deserves. PHP powers large parts of the internet, from tiny to huge projects. But there isn't even an attempt to understand what it made/make work so well. PHP is quite different from other languages but instead of curiosity from the competitors, there is just bad reputation and ignorance. The community and language itself constantly leans and evolves towards other languages. Ruby, Java, Javascript and whatever. The shortcomings in contrast to other languages are often drawing much attention in the community and in my opinion is overshadowing PHP's strengthes. Much of the recent changes in PHP have been a kind of fanservice to appeal the users of other languages. While this isn't particularly a wrong strategy to stay around, it caused an addiction to be more similar to the competitors. PHP lost it's identity and got unknowingly angry about it. This is just my opinion and there are some wrongs here, but thats how I would currently explain the sub par PHP community behaviour.

concede_pluto 9y ago
$x == $y should guarantee that $a[$x] == $a[$y]. In PHP, it doesn't. That's not different, that's just broken, and the language design makes dozens of elementary mistakes like that where getting it right wouldn't have sacrificed the only strength (streamlined deployable server integration) in any way.