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Are you serious? You can't figure out why this is? Seems logical to me. These defenders are presumably professional PHP developers. They're presumably supporti

Are you serious? You can't figure out why this is? Seems logical to me. These defenders are presumably professional PHP developers. They're presumably supporting their families by coding PHP. The more widely-spread the language is, the more it's used for new projects, the more lucrative and interesting their work will be. And here you are, making a fuss, and many of these people may know ONLY PHP. And you're trying to argue that their most valuable skill should be put on the trash heap. That's why THEY fight so hard: They're feeding themselves with the language. Now, why do YOU fight so hard against them?

jerf 15y ago
I fight against technologies I perceive as bad choices in an attempt to convince younger developers with less of an experience base that they should pick up something else that will give them the same or better capabilities for much less pain. My contribution to the community, as it were, as I have in turn benefited in my career from such signposting. You can carve out a decent subset of PHP, but there's this painful and dangerous beginning and middle part where you're still learning this subset and in the meantime you're writing grossly insecure code. Perl has much the same problem. There are no languages I know where you are immediately writing brilliant code, but there's certainly ones you can learn faster, cut down the danger period, and also have many of the worst dangers ameliorated by much better design decisions at the API and language level. (How much of PHP and all similar languages would have been better if only the default interpolation HTML escaped everything and you had to especially ask for direct interpolation, instead of the other way around?)
- encoderer 15y ago
  And you know, none of that offends me. But to act incredulous that professionals who have spent thousands of hours mastering a skillset might actually defend it publicly seems naive.
  - glenjamin 15y ago
    The implication is that anyone who has spent thousands of hours mastering PHP should be well aware of its bad points, and can only contend that its "good enough for the job".

jerf 15y ago

I fight against technologies I perceive as bad choices in an attempt to convince younger developers with less of an experience base that they should pick up something else that will give them the same or better capabilities for much less pain. My contribution to the community, as it were, as I have in turn benefited in my career from such signposting. You can carve out a decent subset of PHP, but there's this painful and dangerous beginning and middle part where you're still learning this subset and in the meantime you're writing grossly insecure code. Perl has much the same problem. There are no languages I know where you are immediately writing brilliant code, but there's certainly ones you can learn faster, cut down the danger period, and also have many of the worst dangers ameliorated by much better design decisions at the API and language level. (How much of PHP and all similar languages would have been better if only the default interpolation HTML escaped everything and you had to especially ask for direct interpolation, instead of the other way around?)

encoderer 15y ago
And you know, none of that offends me. But to act incredulous that professionals who have spent thousands of hours mastering a skillset might actually defend it publicly seems naive.
- glenjamin 15y ago
  The implication is that anyone who has spent thousands of hours mastering PHP should be well aware of its bad points, and can only contend that its "good enough for the job".