8 ms·

Used PHP in a Hackathon was made fun of and it made me feel really shitty

73 points by jocoda 8y ago

jrockway 8y ago
I feel like the kind of people that go to a hackathon are the kinds of people that are looking for some sort of in-group/out-group dynamic, and programming language choice is the easiest way to decide who is in and who is out. When they get older they'll realize it's not worth the effort.
jstanley 8y ago
Isn't the whole point of a hackathon meant to be getting something quick and dirty up and running in limited time? I think using PHP warrants extra points for style.
- realusername 8y ago
  I would also add that people clearly got stuck in the past regarding their point of view of programing languages, PHP is a decent language nowadays, it's not PHP3 anymore... The same way JS evolved a lot since the days of IE6.
- gaius 8y ago
  Isn't the whole point of a hackathon meant to be getting something quick and dirty up and running in limited time? No, the point of a hackathon is to condition the Workers that unpaid overtime is not only normal and expected but also fun!
- gyaru 8y ago
  >I think using PHP warrants extra points for style. Especially if literally everyone else is just using node + MongoDB.
  - chriswarbo 8y ago
    > Especially if literally everyone else is just using node + MongoDB. There's definitely a "narccissism of small differences" going on in programming languages. PHP, JS, Python, Ruby, Perl are all basically the same (dynamically typed, imperative, interpreted, optional class-based-OOP, etc.). If a decision's been made to use one of these, then things like library availability and developer experience are probably much more important than particular language features or quality. Yet there's a whole bunch of fighting and in-group/out-group between these. Likewise Java and C# are essentially the same thing (I think the lawsuit banning Microsoft from bundling Java had a big influence on their push for C#, rather than actual features of the language). There also seems to be a certain level of incests among languages. I remember PHP had an RFC (request for comments) for adding generators to the language, seemingly because Python has them. I commented that it would be better to go with delimited continuations, since they're more powerful and could also use the same implementation as exception handling. My comment was not well received, presumably because delimited continuations would actually make PHP different from its kin, rather than even closer. > I think using PHP warrants extra points for style. I always feel like a "real" programming language debate should throw in the occasional curveball, like a Prolog interpreter embedded in Smalltalk or something. At least it would break the monotony. On a related note, why shouldn't a mars rover be programmed in TeX? http://sdh33b.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/icfp-contest-2008.html http://sdh33b.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/icfp-contest-2008.html
rwnspace 8y ago
Matthew 7:5, "You hypocrite! First remove the beam out of your own eye, and then you can see clearly to remove the speck out of your brother’s eye." These particular people truly do lack self-awareness, to criticise PHP as JS users.
- palemoon 8y ago
  > to criticise PHP as JS users. and as JS users using MongoDB as a data store.
- dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago
  Frankly, modern JS is roughly at the same level as PHP as far as language is concerned. What is messy is the variety of frameworks and the quality of some of them. The well-known PHP frameworks are by definition mature and stable. I can't say the same about JS frameworks though. The point is you create code using frameworks, not just the language itself.
  - Yaa101 8y ago
    It is not at the same level, you need a bignum library to make JS do even correct math, which is something a programming language should be able to do on its own. JS shouldn't be called a programming language but a scripting anomaly.
    - RaleyField 8y ago
      This passes for closures in PHP: function ($arg) use ($capturedVariable) { return 1; } I rest my case.
cztomsik 8y ago
PHP is great platform for prototyping, even better if you're experienced. I actually used PHP a lot for general purpose scripting and code generation because it was so easy and fast. Now I'm at node-land (I had no issues with PHP I just needed something with concurrency and PHP didn't have it at the time) for a few years but I still have great memories. Do what you want (and what makes you most productive) and don't care about others :-) BTW: What I especially love about PHP is its documentation, or sort of integrated stackoverflow. I can't remember any other platform having "recipes" integrated directly in the documentation (which in my opinion, is brilliant idea)
- viraptor 8y ago
  > I can't remember any other platform having "recipes" integrated directly in the documentation This has good sides and bad sides unfortunately. There are some really questionable ideas in those comments and they're not always downvoted to death. Presenting them to the beginners on the same page as the official docs makes them trust and copy-paste solutions sometimes.
  - cztomsik 8y ago
    Yeah but I also believe it's important for beginners to learn by doing, even if it means doing wrong. There is no universal "good way" of doing software anyway and best practices and patterns can be harmful too. Take java spring or ruby on rails for example, those are opinionated ways of doing SW but they are also big pile of complexity and sometimes you really need just read a file, transform it a little and output the result. I think those awkward examples and hacks are valuable too because you get involved in internals and you know then how the entire thing works under the hood.
- mercer 8y ago
  I still find myself using PHP for really quick and dirty mostly-static stuff. It's still so liberating to write HTML with some snippets of code, FTP that shit somewhere, and have it just work.
- maxk42 8y ago
icebraining 8y ago
So it's a thread in which people criticize tribalist behavior by engaging in their own tribalist behavior. Sounds ironic, I say from my self-satisfied position of detached superiority.
bryanrasmussen 8y ago
I guess I've made fun of php in the past, due to having felt pain in using it at a project, but I don't think even I would be a big enough jerk to do it to someone I didn't know in the a public space.
dexen 8y ago
Nothing's wrong with the good old PHP. In fact, it reminds me of my 2012 comment[0]. The website[1] proclaiming PHP as "most likely to be a fad" is, of course, long gone by now[2], while PHP thrives. -- the old comment -- Particularly ironic is PHP ranking high for ``This language is likely to be a passing fad''. Given its 17 years of history and recent the recent progress with versions 5.3 and newer... whoever voted on this position either wasn't aware of PHP's actual situation and outlook, or was just being thinking wishful. > Why does almost everyone know the language? If anything, it is that almost everyone can dabble in PHP and ^C^V some code. IMHO real knowledge of PHP and its ecosystem seem to be quite rare -- judging by reading some published code, which was as generic and un-PHP as possible, and by [many clueless] comments [posted on] the official docs. -- the old comment -- [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4929143 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4929143 [1] http://hammerprinciple.com:80/therighttool/items/php http://hammerprinciple.com:80/therighttool/items/php [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20170913184701/http://hammerprinciple.com:80/therighttool/items/php https://web.archive.org/web/20170913184701/http://hammerprin...
- icebraining 8y ago
  long gone by now The snapshot you linked in from September 2017...
- dkns 8y ago
  How can you predict that language is a fad when it's powering wikipedia, facebook and wordpress, which accounts for a huge amount of total internet traffic, is beyond me.
nukeop 8y ago
People's allegiances are tribal, and this kind of juvenile gatekeeping is probably only prevalent among teenagers and young college students. I've never identified with a particular technology so strongly as to feel attacked when its flaws are pointed out, and vice versa, I have never felt the need to attack anyone personally based on the technologies they use. Some might be better for some tasks but not others, and that's the only thing that matters. Experience shows that people who lack broad knowledge of several programming languages tend to identify as "language X developers" instead of developers as such. This enhances tribalism and creates pointless language wars. Any time somebody says that some particular language is the best choice for everything, or some other language is never the best choice for anything, they're just inexperienced and are trying to mask it with fake confidence. Except for Java of course, it's the worst.
- placebo 8y ago
  I assume that last sentence is misunderstood humor.
helpme420 8y ago
In my personal experience, people use PHP because it is the only thing that they were taught. NOT because they have considered options and have consciously decided to settle on PHP.
- legostormtroopr 8y ago
  The same can be said for JavaScript. Even worse can be said of JavaScript, a PHP developer will have to learn JavaScript for any client side behaviour, whereas the entire JavaScript community has rebuilt large code bases to not have to learn anything else.
  - TrickyRick 8y ago
    Not true, I started off with Java, learned Objective-C, then PHP and finally JS (And by JS I mean Node) and today I still settle on Node for all my hobby project simply because it's so easy to get something up and running. However I wouldn't use it for a larger-scale project with a big team - but I wouldn't use PHP for that either. ;)
  - AmericanChopper 8y ago
    Node is pretty much the new PHP. JS is pretty easy to pick up, a lot of people know it, and then node was invented so that people could just write their whole stack in it. Apart from ‘I already know it’, most people would be hard pressed to come up with a reason why node was the best choice for their project. You can say the same about PHP, except... PHP is infinitely more fucked and nonsensical than JS. There’s no project where PHP is the best choice, or even a realistically defensible choice. It is also an enduring blight upon the internet. PHP apps are riddled with bugs and vulnerabilities.
- realPubkey 8y ago
  This is so true. I used PHP for 4 years just because I didn't knew anything else. Now I know python, java, javascript, rust and my decision to stick at javascript was clear and prudent. Today I would never devil anyone for using php or whatever feels good for them.
- 8y ago
draw_down 8y ago
If you don’t like people shitting on the language you use, DO NOT become a JS developer.
vincengomes 8y ago
The best programming language is the one which can get the job done. PHP is a well established backend stack and in no way inferior to the latest sexy stacks
mikedd 8y ago
I always made fun of php. No reason, I've never truly worked with it in depth and I'm also not the best JS dev. I never attacked a person for writing php I just mocked php itself. Even so, this made me feel bad and I'm going to change my attitude. Nobody should feel bad for doing something they enjoy. <3
- sirclueless 8y ago
  I've used PHP and I too make fun of it. It's a silly language made years ago without a lot of attention paid to normal software development practices and it shows. There is a laundry list of facepalm-worthy things the language does. But it's just a language. Good software is made in bad languages all the time. And making fun of PHP is not the same thing as making fun of someone who is using PHP. I'm sure Rasmus Lerdorf will happily tell you PHP is full of expedient design choices that would be different in hindsight, but that doesn't make it OK to poke fun at people trying to get work done.
  - robryan 8y ago
    There is plenty of activity within frameworks and on internals from people who are absolutely concerned with good software development practices. Obviously it does suffer from some design issues due to backwards compatibility but is moving in the right direction.
- giancarlostoro 8y ago
  Heck I make fun of PHP as much as I've made fun of JavaScript (maybe less actually) but now I'm heavily investing my resources at becoming a fine grained JavaScript developer, and I'm looking back at PHP all these years later because if I wanna "hack up something" in PHP I don't have to think about where to host it, you are totally spoiled by the offerings. Have fun trying to say the same about any other web framework / stack.
- sneak 8y ago
  What if they enjoy writing non tokenized SQL statements with user input and without an ORM? Some practices are bad. PHP was my first working language and I used it for years. I’ve since used a dozen other stacks in the intervening fifteen years. PHP is objectively a poor choice, an impediment to its user. Someone who is told this, who doubles down on ignorance of better, more efficient, more predictable, consistent, safe, and useful languages, is worthy of ridicule—not because of their ignorance, but because of their will to remain ignorant.
Promarged 8y ago
In my experience people making fun of technology X (for all X) only reveal their own lack of understanding of not only X but their own tools too. Every tool has its own advantages and disadvantages. Fanatics of any kind always remind of this fragment of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: > You are never dedicated to something you have complete confidence in. No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. They know it's going to rise tomorrow. When people are fanatically dedicated to political or religious faiths or any other kinds of dogmas or goals, it's always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt.
- rootlocus 8y ago
  > In my experience people making fun of technology X (for all X) only reveal their own lack of understanding of not only X but their own tools too. I find mocking X (for any X) to be occasionally educational https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGkIsUBfanQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGkIsUBfanQ
  - mercer 8y ago
    I love that talk, but for some reason I never found it to be mocking in a 'bad' way. Perhaps it's because all these bad things are so obviously bad that they're like 'the sun rising'.
- icebraining 8y ago
  Having doubt in one's dogmas sounds healthy.
- chriswarbo 8y ago
  > Every tool has its own advantages and disadvantages. I agree with this, but only as a conversation starter, not a rebuttal-killer. When I was a PHP dev I had a colleage who liked to say "the only tool nobody complains about is the one that nobody uses", as if that somehow makes all tools equal. Yes, all languages have flaws; no, not all languages will set the font colour to 33200000000000 because they guess that the string "332e11" should actually be treated as an integer written in exponential notation. Looking back, I guess it's a form whataboutism (although without any specific examples). PS: I absolutely agree with (almost) everyone that personal attacks are absolutely unjustified.
ZgjimDida 8y ago
This is quite an interesting way of thinking. I saw somewhere that from the different thinks that you can be a snob about, one of them is a programming snob. Thinking that when you use one programming language, framework you are way superior than others. (I'm not saying that languages don't have superiority over each other). But I think this is the same mindset that makes people think that they need to use ML to solve every problem, when actually you can solve it without it just fine. As has been discussed in an earlier post.
gregoriol 8y ago
Well, a hackathon's goal (and a life's goal, if you think about it) is to get things done. Just beat them at that. With any thing you might like and enjoy. It's not because everyone gets crazy about those new Nike shoes that you should wear them too, just enjoy running.
roryisok 8y ago
Reddit won't load for me, I'm guessing the end of that sentence is "and it won"?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- Eupolemos 8y ago
  Nope, just made him feel really shitty.
- giancarlostoro 8y ago
  "Used PHP in a Hackathon was made fun of and it made me feel really shitty." I'm not liking this new reddit, I can't even fold comments.
  - bartl 8y ago
    Really? There's no "[-]" in front of the user name?
    - giancarlostoro 8y ago
      I don't see it on my personal laptop on Firefox (Linux Mint), or on my workstation at work also using Firefox (Ubuntu 14 - no plugins). Edit: WOW I can't believe this, I opened it up in Chrome and it works / shows the comment folding option. It astounds me how much Chrome is becoming the new IE in regards to functioning websites where I wont be surprised to see (or not see) more cross-browser issues when using Firefox instead of Chrome. Can I have the web where everyone wanted to be backward compatible with all browsers back? Edit 2: Also wondering how this got published by Reddit and nobody noticed some basic site functionality missing?
yulapshun 8y ago
As much as I hate PHP, I'll never judge people simply because they use PHP. I know some very good programmer who code in PHP.
julienfr112 8y ago
Your best response ? Win the hackathon !
RutZap 8y ago
I have been using PHP professionally for 7 years now and I absolutely love it. The community grew up from the old days when I started playing with it (almost 15 years ago). There are incredible pieces of software built with it, and nowadays the language is unrecognisable from the state it was in when it gained the bad reputation. i think Symfony 4 is a wonderful framework and it allows us to use PHP to build things that most would think it's impossible in the language of spaghetti code. Yes, there are still a lot o people out there that hack some very questionable code together in PHP but we shouldn't dismiss it like this. I've tried multiple languages (C#, Java, javascript) and I have to say PHP is my favourite so far (you guys can comment on this as much as you like, I still like it a lot). It's disheartening to hear that in a hackathon people got "bullied" for using a programming language. You would never pick upon a mechanic for using a screwdriver instead of a chisel or something similar, as long as he can achieve the same thing. Also, I can't help to notice a trend of ..."brogramming", where if you don't use the newest and coolest tech you're treated as an outcast, bullied and made fun of; it's quite sad if you ask me.
- ert23 8y ago
  Completely agree with you. In the last 5 years I wrote a lot of Javascript code in Node. For sure I can say that there is no great framework that give you the "completeness" that Laravel, Symfony or CakePHP give you.
- sneak 8y ago
  > nowadays the language is unrecognisable from the state it was in when it gained the bad reputation I used it then (3.x, 4.x) and I recognize many of the terrible warts are still front and center. PHP isn’t bad because it’s not new and shiny, it’s bad because it does opaque and wrong things and demands a user of the language know all sorts of inconsistent PHP-specific nonsense that does not benefit the language authors, the language users, or serve the solving of the problem of the language user. It’s not prejudice or signaling, it’s objectively deficient in ways that haven’t been acceptable in decades.
  - tjoff 8y ago
    And then we have javascript, somehow people seem to think that is ok. I much prefer PHP, also the warts are serverside which makes a huge difference.
ert23 8y ago
PHP until version 5 was not great. PHP jokes and hate are always been lingering around. Part of the reason is that PHP started as a hack and that Rasmus, the "inventor" of PHP, has always been a bad frontman. You can read some of his quotes here: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Rasmus_Lerdorf https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Rasmus_Lerdorf Almost every person that is a good SW engineer and like to code has problem with that philosophy. The truth is that today PHP is a pretty good language. CakePHP, Laravel and Symphony have been pretty good frameworks from a SW engineering point of view. I haven't written PHP code in the last 5 years but I miss the development experience. Everything is by default stateless. Accessing a page always starts from a blank state. You edit and save a file and you can reload instantly the page with the new code. Of course "re-execute everything" can become quite expensive at runtime... In general I think the modern PHP is hated without a reason. Its bad rep will be hard to overcome.
jackweirdy 8y ago
Wikipedia, openstreetmap, Facebook - lots of world changing projects were started by hacking something together in PHP.
- sneak 8y ago
  ...started in a vastly different landscape than today. Lots of world-changing projects were written in FORTRAN or APL but that doesn’t make them suitable for new apps today. Also, many world-changing projects that did succeed would have been rendered total failures had they chosen this pathological language early on. Your examples do not support your point.
  - jackweirdy 8y ago
    “Suitable” is a subjective term. The best tool for a job is the simplest one that gets the job done and the one you know best. Would I start a startup in PHP tomorrow? Probably not (not least because I don’t know PHP). But that doesn’t make it unsuitable for everything.
tallanvor 8y ago
PHP started out as a personal project, not with some grand design to be one of the most used languages powering websites. So yes, there were things about the language that were objectively bad, and it'll never be completely on par with a language that was truly designed from the ground up, but so what? Your knowledge and the requirements of the job should dictate the tools you use - not what's hot. If it works, scales to the extent you need it to, and can be secured, then great!
guru4consulting 8y ago
Slack was built with PHP. And here's the article from Slack engineering https://slack.engineering/taking-php-seriously-cf7a60065329 https://slack.engineering/taking-php-seriously-cf7a60065329 I guess building quicker is more important than building better, especially in hackathons or in startups where you are testing the product-market-fit. That means, one can use whatever language/tool they are most productive with. Of course, if you are lucky and if you gain momentum, then you will have the resources to re-engineer it with the right language/tool.
spacemanmatt 8y ago
I have been cleaning up after horrible PHP programmers for years. It is a good living. I do internally debate whether MySQL is a worse choice than PHP, but it's moot because they are almost always found together in the wild.
philippz 8y ago
PHP is awesome. We love it. Always flexible & fast and professional and structured on demand - totally depends on you what you make of it.
krembo 8y ago
It's basically gets to the point that you either get your shit done, or you don't. I've seen a handful super smart developers starting to code in the newly Xish language, and don't getting to the finish line, either in time or at all. So, you should be proud of yourself for delivering MVP in a hackathon, assuming that that's what you did. When people make fun of you you should tell them to shut the fuck up. Again, as long as it works it can be written in pascal, cobol, assembly or asp native. When you grow up and get to deal with exponential growth, it will be your "rich's worries" to rewrite the code in the newly not mocked Xish lang.

73 points by jocoda 8y ago

I feel like the kind of people that go to a hackathon are the kinds of people that are looking for some sort of in-group/out-group dynamic, and programming language choice is the easiest way to decide who is in and who is out. When they get older they'll realize it's not worth the effort.

jstanley 8y ago

Isn't the whole point of a hackathon meant to be getting something quick and dirty up and running in limited time? I think using PHP warrants extra points for style.

realusername 8y ago
I would also add that people clearly got stuck in the past regarding their point of view of programing languages, PHP is a decent language nowadays, it's not PHP3 anymore... The same way JS evolved a lot since the days of IE6.
gaius 8y ago
Isn't the whole point of a hackathon meant to be getting something quick and dirty up and running in limited time? No, the point of a hackathon is to condition the Workers that unpaid overtime is not only normal and expected but also fun!
gyaru 8y ago
>I think using PHP warrants extra points for style. Especially if literally everyone else is just using node + MongoDB.
- chriswarbo 8y ago
  > Especially if literally everyone else is just using node + MongoDB. There's definitely a "narccissism of small differences" going on in programming languages. PHP, JS, Python, Ruby, Perl are all basically the same (dynamically typed, imperative, interpreted, optional class-based-OOP, etc.). If a decision's been made to use one of these, then things like library availability and developer experience are probably much more important than particular language features or quality. Yet there's a whole bunch of fighting and in-group/out-group between these. Likewise Java and C# are essentially the same thing (I think the lawsuit banning Microsoft from bundling Java had a big influence on their push for C#, rather than actual features of the language). There also seems to be a certain level of incests among languages. I remember PHP had an RFC (request for comments) for adding generators to the language, seemingly because Python has them. I commented that it would be better to go with delimited continuations, since they're more powerful and could also use the same implementation as exception handling. My comment was not well received, presumably because delimited continuations would actually make PHP different from its kin, rather than even closer. > I think using PHP warrants extra points for style. I always feel like a "real" programming language debate should throw in the occasional curveball, like a Prolog interpreter embedded in Smalltalk or something. At least it would break the monotony. On a related note, why shouldn't a mars rover be programmed in TeX? http://sdh33b.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/icfp-contest-2008.html http://sdh33b.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/icfp-contest-2008.html

rwnspace 8y ago

Matthew 7:5, "You hypocrite! First remove the beam out of your own eye, and then you can see clearly to remove the speck out of your brother’s eye." These particular people truly do lack self-awareness, to criticise PHP as JS users.

palemoon 8y ago
> to criticise PHP as JS users. and as JS users using MongoDB as a data store.
dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago
Frankly, modern JS is roughly at the same level as PHP as far as language is concerned. What is messy is the variety of frameworks and the quality of some of them. The well-known PHP frameworks are by definition mature and stable. I can't say the same about JS frameworks though. The point is you create code using frameworks, not just the language itself.
- Yaa101 8y ago
  It is not at the same level, you need a bignum library to make JS do even correct math, which is something a programming language should be able to do on its own. JS shouldn't be called a programming language but a scripting anomaly.
  - RaleyField 8y ago
    This passes for closures in PHP: function ($arg) use ($capturedVariable) { return 1; } I rest my case.

cztomsik 8y ago

PHP is great platform for prototyping, even better if you're experienced. I actually used PHP a lot for general purpose scripting and code generation because it was so easy and fast. Now I'm at node-land (I had no issues with PHP I just needed something with concurrency and PHP didn't have it at the time) for a few years but I still have great memories. Do what you want (and what makes you most productive) and don't care about others :-) BTW: What I especially love about PHP is its documentation, or sort of integrated stackoverflow. I can't remember any other platform having "recipes" integrated directly in the documentation (which in my opinion, is brilliant idea)

viraptor 8y ago
> I can't remember any other platform having "recipes" integrated directly in the documentation This has good sides and bad sides unfortunately. There are some really questionable ideas in those comments and they're not always downvoted to death. Presenting them to the beginners on the same page as the official docs makes them trust and copy-paste solutions sometimes.
- cztomsik 8y ago
  Yeah but I also believe it's important for beginners to learn by doing, even if it means doing wrong. There is no universal "good way" of doing software anyway and best practices and patterns can be harmful too. Take java spring or ruby on rails for example, those are opinionated ways of doing SW but they are also big pile of complexity and sometimes you really need just read a file, transform it a little and output the result. I think those awkward examples and hacks are valuable too because you get involved in internals and you know then how the entire thing works under the hood.
mercer 8y ago
I still find myself using PHP for really quick and dirty mostly-static stuff. It's still so liberating to write HTML with some snippets of code, FTP that shit somewhere, and have it just work.
maxk42 8y ago

icebraining 8y ago

So it's a thread in which people criticize tribalist behavior by engaging in their own tribalist behavior. Sounds ironic, I say from my self-satisfied position of detached superiority.

bryanrasmussen 8y ago

I guess I've made fun of php in the past, due to having felt pain in using it at a project, but I don't think even I would be a big enough jerk to do it to someone I didn't know in the a public space.

dexen 8y ago

Nothing's wrong with the good old PHP. In fact, it reminds me of my 2012 comment[0]. The website[1] proclaiming PHP as "most likely to be a fad" is, of course, long gone by now[2], while PHP thrives. -- the old comment -- Particularly ironic is PHP ranking high for ``This language is likely to be a passing fad''. Given its 17 years of history and recent the recent progress with versions 5.3 and newer... whoever voted on this position either wasn't aware of PHP's actual situation and outlook, or was just being thinking wishful. > Why does almost everyone know the language? If anything, it is that almost everyone can dabble in PHP and ^C^V some code. IMHO real knowledge of PHP and its ecosystem seem to be quite rare -- judging by reading some published code, which was as generic and un-PHP as possible, and by [many clueless] comments [posted on] the official docs. -- the old comment -- [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4929143 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4929143 [1] http://hammerprinciple.com:80/therighttool/items/php http://hammerprinciple.com:80/therighttool/items/php [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20170913184701/http://hammerprinciple.com:80/therighttool/items/php https://web.archive.org/web/20170913184701/http://hammerprin...

icebraining 8y ago
long gone by now The snapshot you linked in from September 2017...
dkns 8y ago
How can you predict that language is a fad when it's powering wikipedia, facebook and wordpress, which accounts for a huge amount of total internet traffic, is beyond me.

nukeop 8y ago

People's allegiances are tribal, and this kind of juvenile gatekeeping is probably only prevalent among teenagers and young college students. I've never identified with a particular technology so strongly as to feel attacked when its flaws are pointed out, and vice versa, I have never felt the need to attack anyone personally based on the technologies they use. Some might be better for some tasks but not others, and that's the only thing that matters. Experience shows that people who lack broad knowledge of several programming languages tend to identify as "language X developers" instead of developers as such. This enhances tribalism and creates pointless language wars. Any time somebody says that some particular language is the best choice for everything, or some other language is never the best choice for anything, they're just inexperienced and are trying to mask it with fake confidence. Except for Java of course, it's the worst.

placebo 8y ago
I assume that last sentence is misunderstood humor.

helpme420 8y ago

In my personal experience, people use PHP because it is the only thing that they were taught. NOT because they have considered options and have consciously decided to settle on PHP.

legostormtroopr 8y ago
The same can be said for JavaScript. Even worse can be said of JavaScript, a PHP developer will have to learn JavaScript for any client side behaviour, whereas the entire JavaScript community has rebuilt large code bases to not have to learn anything else.
- TrickyRick 8y ago
  Not true, I started off with Java, learned Objective-C, then PHP and finally JS (And by JS I mean Node) and today I still settle on Node for all my hobby project simply because it's so easy to get something up and running. However I wouldn't use it for a larger-scale project with a big team - but I wouldn't use PHP for that either. ;)
- AmericanChopper 8y ago
  Node is pretty much the new PHP. JS is pretty easy to pick up, a lot of people know it, and then node was invented so that people could just write their whole stack in it. Apart from ‘I already know it’, most people would be hard pressed to come up with a reason why node was the best choice for their project. You can say the same about PHP, except... PHP is infinitely more fucked and nonsensical than JS. There’s no project where PHP is the best choice, or even a realistically defensible choice. It is also an enduring blight upon the internet. PHP apps are riddled with bugs and vulnerabilities.
realPubkey 8y ago
This is so true. I used PHP for 4 years just because I didn't knew anything else. Now I know python, java, javascript, rust and my decision to stick at javascript was clear and prudent. Today I would never devil anyone for using php or whatever feels good for them.
8y ago

draw_down 8y ago

If you don’t like people shitting on the language you use, DO NOT become a JS developer.

vincengomes 8y ago

The best programming language is the one which can get the job done. PHP is a well established backend stack and in no way inferior to the latest sexy stacks

mikedd 8y ago

I always made fun of php. No reason, I've never truly worked with it in depth and I'm also not the best JS dev. I never attacked a person for writing php I just mocked php itself. Even so, this made me feel bad and I'm going to change my attitude. Nobody should feel bad for doing something they enjoy. <3

sirclueless 8y ago
I've used PHP and I too make fun of it. It's a silly language made years ago without a lot of attention paid to normal software development practices and it shows. There is a laundry list of facepalm-worthy things the language does. But it's just a language. Good software is made in bad languages all the time. And making fun of PHP is not the same thing as making fun of someone who is using PHP. I'm sure Rasmus Lerdorf will happily tell you PHP is full of expedient design choices that would be different in hindsight, but that doesn't make it OK to poke fun at people trying to get work done.
- robryan 8y ago
  There is plenty of activity within frameworks and on internals from people who are absolutely concerned with good software development practices. Obviously it does suffer from some design issues due to backwards compatibility but is moving in the right direction.
giancarlostoro 8y ago
Heck I make fun of PHP as much as I've made fun of JavaScript (maybe less actually) but now I'm heavily investing my resources at becoming a fine grained JavaScript developer, and I'm looking back at PHP all these years later because if I wanna "hack up something" in PHP I don't have to think about where to host it, you are totally spoiled by the offerings. Have fun trying to say the same about any other web framework / stack.
sneak 8y ago
What if they enjoy writing non tokenized SQL statements with user input and without an ORM? Some practices are bad. PHP was my first working language and I used it for years. I’ve since used a dozen other stacks in the intervening fifteen years. PHP is objectively a poor choice, an impediment to its user. Someone who is told this, who doubles down on ignorance of better, more efficient, more predictable, consistent, safe, and useful languages, is worthy of ridicule—not because of their ignorance, but because of their will to remain ignorant.

Promarged 8y ago

In my experience people making fun of technology X (for all X) only reveal their own lack of understanding of not only X but their own tools too. Every tool has its own advantages and disadvantages. Fanatics of any kind always remind of this fragment of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: > You are never dedicated to something you have complete confidence in. No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. They know it's going to rise tomorrow. When people are fanatically dedicated to political or religious faiths or any other kinds of dogmas or goals, it's always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt.

rootlocus 8y ago
> In my experience people making fun of technology X (for all X) only reveal their own lack of understanding of not only X but their own tools too. I find mocking X (for any X) to be occasionally educational https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGkIsUBfanQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGkIsUBfanQ
- mercer 8y ago
  I love that talk, but for some reason I never found it to be mocking in a 'bad' way. Perhaps it's because all these bad things are so obviously bad that they're like 'the sun rising'.
icebraining 8y ago
Having doubt in one's dogmas sounds healthy.
chriswarbo 8y ago
> Every tool has its own advantages and disadvantages. I agree with this, but only as a conversation starter, not a rebuttal-killer. When I was a PHP dev I had a colleage who liked to say "the only tool nobody complains about is the one that nobody uses", as if that somehow makes all tools equal. Yes, all languages have flaws; no, not all languages will set the font colour to 33200000000000 because they guess that the string "332e11" should actually be treated as an integer written in exponential notation. Looking back, I guess it's a form whataboutism (although without any specific examples). PS: I absolutely agree with (almost) everyone that personal attacks are absolutely unjustified.

ZgjimDida 8y ago

This is quite an interesting way of thinking. I saw somewhere that from the different thinks that you can be a snob about, one of them is a programming snob. Thinking that when you use one programming language, framework you are way superior than others. (I'm not saying that languages don't have superiority over each other). But I think this is the same mindset that makes people think that they need to use ML to solve every problem, when actually you can solve it without it just fine. As has been discussed in an earlier post.

gregoriol 8y ago

Well, a hackathon's goal (and a life's goal, if you think about it) is to get things done. Just beat them at that. With any thing you might like and enjoy. It's not because everyone gets crazy about those new Nike shoes that you should wear them too, just enjoy running.

roryisok 8y ago

Reddit won't load for me, I'm guessing the end of that sentence is "and it won"?

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
Eupolemos 8y ago
Nope, just made him feel really shitty.
giancarlostoro 8y ago
"Used PHP in a Hackathon was made fun of and it made me feel really shitty." I'm not liking this new reddit, I can't even fold comments.
- bartl 8y ago
  Really? There's no "[-]" in front of the user name?
  - giancarlostoro 8y ago
    I don't see it on my personal laptop on Firefox (Linux Mint), or on my workstation at work also using Firefox (Ubuntu 14 - no plugins). Edit: WOW I can't believe this, I opened it up in Chrome and it works / shows the comment folding option. It astounds me how much Chrome is becoming the new IE in regards to functioning websites where I wont be surprised to see (or not see) more cross-browser issues when using Firefox instead of Chrome. Can I have the web where everyone wanted to be backward compatible with all browsers back? Edit 2: Also wondering how this got published by Reddit and nobody noticed some basic site functionality missing?

yulapshun 8y ago

As much as I hate PHP, I'll never judge people simply because they use PHP. I know some very good programmer who code in PHP.

julienfr112 8y ago

Your best response ? Win the hackathon !

RutZap 8y ago

I have been using PHP professionally for 7 years now and I absolutely love it. The community grew up from the old days when I started playing with it (almost 15 years ago). There are incredible pieces of software built with it, and nowadays the language is unrecognisable from the state it was in when it gained the bad reputation. i think Symfony 4 is a wonderful framework and it allows us to use PHP to build things that most would think it's impossible in the language of spaghetti code. Yes, there are still a lot o people out there that hack some very questionable code together in PHP but we shouldn't dismiss it like this. I've tried multiple languages (C#, Java, javascript) and I have to say PHP is my favourite so far (you guys can comment on this as much as you like, I still like it a lot). It's disheartening to hear that in a hackathon people got "bullied" for using a programming language. You would never pick upon a mechanic for using a screwdriver instead of a chisel or something similar, as long as he can achieve the same thing. Also, I can't help to notice a trend of ..."brogramming", where if you don't use the newest and coolest tech you're treated as an outcast, bullied and made fun of; it's quite sad if you ask me.

ert23 8y ago
Completely agree with you. In the last 5 years I wrote a lot of Javascript code in Node. For sure I can say that there is no great framework that give you the "completeness" that Laravel, Symfony or CakePHP give you.
sneak 8y ago
> nowadays the language is unrecognisable from the state it was in when it gained the bad reputation I used it then (3.x, 4.x) and I recognize many of the terrible warts are still front and center. PHP isn’t bad because it’s not new and shiny, it’s bad because it does opaque and wrong things and demands a user of the language know all sorts of inconsistent PHP-specific nonsense that does not benefit the language authors, the language users, or serve the solving of the problem of the language user. It’s not prejudice or signaling, it’s objectively deficient in ways that haven’t been acceptable in decades.
- tjoff 8y ago
  And then we have javascript, somehow people seem to think that is ok. I much prefer PHP, also the warts are serverside which makes a huge difference.

ert23 8y ago

PHP until version 5 was not great. PHP jokes and hate are always been lingering around. Part of the reason is that PHP started as a hack and that Rasmus, the "inventor" of PHP, has always been a bad frontman. You can read some of his quotes here: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Rasmus_Lerdorf https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Rasmus_Lerdorf Almost every person that is a good SW engineer and like to code has problem with that philosophy. The truth is that today PHP is a pretty good language. CakePHP, Laravel and Symphony have been pretty good frameworks from a SW engineering point of view. I haven't written PHP code in the last 5 years but I miss the development experience. Everything is by default stateless. Accessing a page always starts from a blank state. You edit and save a file and you can reload instantly the page with the new code. Of course "re-execute everything" can become quite expensive at runtime... In general I think the modern PHP is hated without a reason. Its bad rep will be hard to overcome.

jackweirdy 8y ago

Wikipedia, openstreetmap, Facebook - lots of world changing projects were started by hacking something together in PHP.

sneak 8y ago
...started in a vastly different landscape than today. Lots of world-changing projects were written in FORTRAN or APL but that doesn’t make them suitable for new apps today. Also, many world-changing projects that did succeed would have been rendered total failures had they chosen this pathological language early on. Your examples do not support your point.
- jackweirdy 8y ago
  “Suitable” is a subjective term. The best tool for a job is the simplest one that gets the job done and the one you know best. Would I start a startup in PHP tomorrow? Probably not (not least because I don’t know PHP). But that doesn’t make it unsuitable for everything.

tallanvor 8y ago

PHP started out as a personal project, not with some grand design to be one of the most used languages powering websites. So yes, there were things about the language that were objectively bad, and it'll never be completely on par with a language that was truly designed from the ground up, but so what? Your knowledge and the requirements of the job should dictate the tools you use - not what's hot. If it works, scales to the extent you need it to, and can be secured, then great!

guru4consulting 8y ago

Slack was built with PHP. And here's the article from Slack engineering https://slack.engineering/taking-php-seriously-cf7a60065329 https://slack.engineering/taking-php-seriously-cf7a60065329 I guess building quicker is more important than building better, especially in hackathons or in startups where you are testing the product-market-fit. That means, one can use whatever language/tool they are most productive with. Of course, if you are lucky and if you gain momentum, then you will have the resources to re-engineer it with the right language/tool.

spacemanmatt 8y ago

I have been cleaning up after horrible PHP programmers for years. It is a good living. I do internally debate whether MySQL is a worse choice than PHP, but it's moot because they are almost always found together in the wild.

philippz 8y ago

PHP is awesome. We love it. Always flexible & fast and professional and structured on demand - totally depends on you what you make of it.

krembo 8y ago

It's basically gets to the point that you either get your shit done, or you don't. I've seen a handful super smart developers starting to code in the newly Xish language, and don't getting to the finish line, either in time or at all. So, you should be proud of yourself for delivering MVP in a hackathon, assuming that that's what you did. When people make fun of you you should tell them to shut the fuck up. Again, as long as it works it can be written in pascal, cobol, assembly or asp native. When you grow up and get to deal with exponential growth, it will be your "rich's worries" to rewrite the code in the newly not mocked Xish lang.