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I think it's that the term "programmer" is so loose in the PHP community that good programmers have gone away from PHP. I know that it makes looking for jobs i

by mdasen 18y ago

I think it's that the term "programmer" is so loose in the PHP community that good programmers have gone away from PHP. I know that it makes looking for jobs intolerably annoying. In interviews, you're talking about programming as people who know how to customize WordPress talk about how they can do whatever needs to be done in PHP. Heck, look at WordPress itself - it's a blog engine that takes 10x longer (or more) to render simple pages than it should. And that's the problem. A PHP programmer can simply be someone who knows how to make bad decisions and hack WordPress a little - and the salaries are often reflective of that. So, while you may pay more, so many of us have just left. Yeah, there are bad design decisions (like having a million functions in the global namespace), but it isn't as big a deal as many make it out to be (since, as a web-only language, it's limited to web functions and they're usually quasi-namespaced as, for ex., mysql_*()). The fact is that, because PHP programmers can be idiots who know how to guess and check, real programmers have left - the jobs available, money around, codebases to work with, coworkers to work with, etc. all reflect the fact that so many PHP programmers are really guess and check hack artists.

sosuke 18y ago
guess and check is a surprisingly good skill to learn and one that many people cannot master without years of doing it. employees with guess and check skills will help in fringe cases of development where one or more of the senior developers does not have any experience, instead of reading docs the tend to take a sledgehammer to the problem and can tend to bang a working version out very quickly in any given environment. guess and check hackers that are truly good will be the fastest to adapt to any changing situation in a faster paced development schedule and you might see them flounder in boredom in larger well outlined projects where they can't find problems to try and fix this isn't to say that you, mdasen, doesn't find good guess and check hack artists, but just to put a positive spin on what otherwise looks like a negative comment to developers that don't have their language of choice memorized.
- jrockway 18y ago
  Let me provide a counterexample. Recently, I needed to do a rather complicated SQL query (via an ORM, so not as painful as it sounds). Anyway, I didn't know how to solve the problem, so I wrote a test case and tested various versions of the query. I had no idea what I was doing, really, and it took me a day to get the query to work. Then I realized that the test case was wrong (!) and I was back to square one. I read up on some more relational theory, thought about my problem a bit more, and then had the answer in an hour. To make a long story short, writing code that you don't understand is a bad idea. It may appear to work, but it's probably broken and you just don't have the understanding to know why. If you don't understand code when you write it, what's the chance that you'll ever be able to maintain it?

by mdasen 18y ago

sosuke 18y ago

guess and check is a surprisingly good skill to learn and one that many people cannot master without years of doing it. employees with guess and check skills will help in fringe cases of development where one or more of the senior developers does not have any experience, instead of reading docs the tend to take a sledgehammer to the problem and can tend to bang a working version out very quickly in any given environment. guess and check hackers that are truly good will be the fastest to adapt to any changing situation in a faster paced development schedule and you might see them flounder in boredom in larger well outlined projects where they can't find problems to try and fix this isn't to say that you, mdasen, doesn't find good guess and check hack artists, but just to put a positive spin on what otherwise looks like a negative comment to developers that don't have their language of choice memorized.

jrockway 18y ago
Let me provide a counterexample. Recently, I needed to do a rather complicated SQL query (via an ORM, so not as painful as it sounds). Anyway, I didn't know how to solve the problem, so I wrote a test case and tested various versions of the query. I had no idea what I was doing, really, and it took me a day to get the query to work. Then I realized that the test case was wrong (!) and I was back to square one. I read up on some more relational theory, thought about my problem a bit more, and then had the answer in an hour. To make a long story short, writing code that you don't understand is a bad idea. It may appear to work, but it's probably broken and you just don't have the understanding to know why. If you don't understand code when you write it, what's the chance that you'll ever be able to maintain it?