5 ms·

Being Arrogantly Ignorant

33 points by larve 4y ago

PhasmaFelis 4y ago
Hating a language is not at all the same thing as hating its users. PHP is an awful mess, and the fact that it's a common tool for budding web devs makes that worse, not better. New coders should not have to learn to navigate that pile to get anything done. I feel for them because I've been them.
- codegeek 4y ago
  "PHP is an awful mess". There we go again.
- larve 4y ago
  My point is that calling PHP an awful mess, besides being unproductive and (IMO) not true, is that from their perspective, it is putting them down. Even from my perspective, after a long career writing in many languages, PHP is far from an awful mess, and it pays my pretty decent principal engineer salary. I think that not wanting to see things from that perspective closes you off from becoming a better programmer.
  - pc86 4y ago
    If you're a new developer who happens to be focusing on PHP, seeing senior folks criticizing PHP as a language should make you question why they're doing that, and research their claims to see if they have merit. Some will and some won't. Taking someone's Twitter rant against some of the specific oddities of PHP as an assault on you personally seems like an opportunity for personal growth we should be encouraging, and not turn to coddling people like they're children. And the same could be said for JS on the front end, JS on the backend, C or C++ or Rust or Java or any number of languages. Approaching others' criticisms with an open mind and trying to disprove them will make you better than trying to hamfist it into a claim of gatekeeping where there is none.
    - larve 4y ago
      I have plenty of criticism of PHP, and I address the fact that valid criticism is essential in the third section. Blindly saying that PHP is a hot mess, in a public setting, is detrimental to I think the community at large. PHP is but one of the many tools I’ve been using, my heart is with Common Lisp, but I’ve really enjoyed Java, golang, C++, Typescript and now rust. Nothing binds me to PHP except I get a tremendous amount of stuff done with it. I have plenty of hot takes on technology, and love to use strong language when I rant amongst friends. If anything, I am really not attached to any one of them, there is good and bad everywhere, and many decisions have nothing to do with technical merits at all.
    - throwaway67743 4y ago
      They're doing that because they're out of touch, PHP is not the same as it was 15 years ago.
    - codegeek 4y ago
      There is a difference between constructive criticism and calling a language "awful mess". PHP is fine for many use cases and I cannot take a "senior folk" seriously if they plain old trash a language without providing constructive criticism which any language warrants including PHP. So the point is that PHP is no different than say Go or JS or Java. They all have their pros and cons.
  - PhasmaFelis 4y ago
    I'd be willing to explore the possibility that PHP isn't as bad as I think it is. I'll wholeheartedly agree that putting down anyone who uses PHP is bad. My objection is that you're declaring that people who attack a language are actually attacking its users, which makes them bullies, which means you should ignore them. I think you're taking things far too personally and using it as a reason to dismiss criticism.
- teucris 4y ago
  But oftentimes our ire towards certain technologies seems like ire towards those that use them, even if that’s not the intent. It leaves people feeling “outside” as it implies they should have known not to use that technology. My takeaway from the article was that when we see someone using a technology we despise, we take action to make their specific life better, rather than hate on the tech. In the case of PHP, that might be asking what issues they run into and suggesting solutions. That could lead to conversations like “you know, Python doesn’t have this issue, you might want to check out X framework to try it out”. But general flaming on PHP isn’t productive.
  - larve 4y ago
    It is also missing that there are many valuable things to be learnt from a technology that is that successful. This doesn’t happen by accident, and also shows that technical elegance is but a small part of being a successful engineer. But really, switching to Java for a bit, a tremendous amount of amazing engineering has gone into making Java the language it is. The Java flaming might have gone down in recent years, but the hot takes from the C/C++ unix crowd in the aughts was impressive.
- edmcnulty101 4y ago
  Modern PHP is actually really sophisticated. It's just the users that are terrible. KIDDING!
eventhorizonpl 4y ago
captainthrow 4y ago
Can we change the title to something like “PHP is good despite the nay-says”? The title as it is is writing cheques that the article can’t cash.
- aliqot 4y ago
  Using the title of the post is generally the correct way, with few exceptions.
  - captainthrow 4y ago
    It’s low effort flamebait.
    - pc86 4y ago
      And has been flagged as such, but editorializing titles leads to much worse things.
      - aliqot 4y ago
    - larve 4y ago
      I’d honestly be curious to know why you think this is flamebait. Who am I flaming here?
      - captainthrow 4y ago
      - dang 4y ago
        The title is just provocative pejoratives. That's definitely flamebait by HN standards.
        larve 4y ago
aliqot 4y ago
Just because we are developers, we are not immune from humanity. Tribalism is a survival trait inherent to our species, we will oft apply it where it has very little utility. That being said, I guess what I'm trying to say is, I think we can all agree that people who don't like Perl are lesser nerds, unworthy of our kinship.
trasz 4y ago
>A tool with 200,000 users and 500 contributors will quickly become better than something maintained by 3 people in academia. No, quite the opposite - in most cases a decade later that tool will be an abandoned pile of technological debt.
- larve 4y ago
  Many things are replaced by better iterations, but plenty of large frameworks are still around. I was thinking of tooling like npm, webpack, react, redux, heck even vim, emacs, linux. It’s easy to forget that linux was the target of the same kind of derision back in the days.
  - trasz 4y ago
    Most of your examples are the “three guys at academia” case.
    - larve 4y ago
      I’m not sure I understand?
bfgoodrich 4y ago
gregjor 4y ago
Sorry, but the article seems like an expression of imposter syndrome and excessive worry about what other people think or say. In this case the other people mainly consist of anonymous critics and "gatekeepers" online. Why hitch your identity or sense of worth to a programming language or tool? Why get upset about people who have different opinions when you can just as well choose to ignore them? If you can add value for your employer or customers and make a living, which language or tools you use to do that makes no difference. Pick any language, tool, style of work and you can find people who criticize it. So what? How does random criticism rise to gatekeeping? The job market has tightened up because of economic changes and worry that money will get tighter. That affects most sectors, not just tech or programming. If you read HN you know that many companies have hiring freezes, people have or will soon get laid off, and good jobs get scarce with more competition. That has nothing to do with gatekeeping or programmers who look down on PHP. The programming business goes through booms and busts for reasons that have nothing to do with programming languages. I have used PHP for years, since it came out and offered an alternative to Perl CGI scripts, ASP, and Cold Fusion. It gets the job done. It has some problems. I don't use PHP exclusively, I don't think of or call myself a "PHP programmer," and I don't care that some programmers hate it, whether out of experience or ignorance. My customers don't care about that, they have business problems to solve, a budget and schedule, and don't read language flame wars. Focus on finding work rather than complaining about job ads and PHP haters. Sifting through job postings online and filling out applications describes one of the least effective and most time-consuming ways to find work.
- larve 4y ago
  I think you are expressing what I am saying too. It’s not about not criticizing technology, it’s about doing so in a productive and inclusive way. Even as a seasoned developer, getting blasted as worthy of prosecution for criminal negligence in #rust on IRC because I mentioned I was a C++ embedded developer led me to be put off rust, which is a neat language, for a couple of years. Who benefits from that?
  - gregjor 4y ago
    That kind of thing makes me wonder why anyone has so much of their identity and self-worth invested in a programming language. I never say I am a programmer and certainly not I am a PHP (or Javascript, or C, or whatever) programmer. I say I write software. The job and the tools I happen to use don't form part of my identity. I don't take other people's opinions personally. No one benefits from that kind of thing, and I know it happens a lot in online forums and chats. But I see it as their problem, not mine. I don't feel a need to get included in a fake "community" built around a programming language or framework or editor and I can't understand people who do.
curtisblaine 4y ago
> It is hard to stress how transformative this can be for marginalized communities and people in countries outside of western Europe and the US These kind of takes, where "marginalized" is used to arbitrarily police whatever behaviour the authors doesn't like, contribute to render online discourse the insufferable hell it has become in the last 10 years. I'm sorry, I won't refrain from criticizing a technology I don't like because a strawman member of a "marginalized community" could get discouraged from learning said technology. That's just... madness.
bee_rider 4y ago
> Off-handedly rejecting PHP, Java, WordPress, Javascript, and other oft-criticized languages and frameworks is a sign of a closed mind; of willing ignorance. No, we should gatekeep Javascript. It is an annoying trap laid on websites that is sprung just by going there. The profusion of Javascript has made the internet much worse. It used to at least be possible to just turn off Javascript and ignore that whole scene. So we did, it took over the internet, and now we have to either give up or play the annoying selective script blocking game to get 95% of websites to work. I'm all for not judging others -- Wordpress, Java, PHP, use whatever platform you want, have fun! On your computer.
engineerDave 4y ago
I mock languages because they've caused me enormous pain at some point, not "offhandedly". Their scorn is deserved.
1letterunixname 4y ago
How do I/we/you unflag this? It's an apropos topic worth discussing. I notice it where I work to an extreme degree (MAANG). There is no value in holding religious opinions about any particular tool in the toolbox independent of use. But, there are individuals who throw their weight around with smartaleck negativity and many worship them as a result. I posit that people who cannot backup their claims with data or a survey of concrete experiences are selling their ego over engineering discipline. Arrogance isn't a signal of quality of anything beside arrogance. You'd be surprised how many over-confident people crash into hubris be it a startup product no one wanted or get sloppy with hiring based on trickery or trivia. Get too cocky and the Sword of Damocles of karma, life, or social capital is waiting to chop those who get "too big for their britches". (2022 cross-cultural context: it's an idiom of people who believe themselves to be 3 meters tall. I'm surprised it's recorded as an Australian saying when my 8th generation Irish-American grandfather said it in Texas. Australia is the Commonwealth's "Texas", I guess.).

33 points by larve 4y ago

Hating a language is not at all the same thing as hating its users. PHP is an awful mess, and the fact that it's a common tool for budding web devs makes that worse, not better. New coders should not have to learn to navigate that pile to get anything done. I feel for them because I've been them.

codegeek 4y ago
"PHP is an awful mess". There we go again.
larve 4y ago
My point is that calling PHP an awful mess, besides being unproductive and (IMO) not true, is that from their perspective, it is putting them down. Even from my perspective, after a long career writing in many languages, PHP is far from an awful mess, and it pays my pretty decent principal engineer salary. I think that not wanting to see things from that perspective closes you off from becoming a better programmer.
- pc86 4y ago
  If you're a new developer who happens to be focusing on PHP, seeing senior folks criticizing PHP as a language should make you question why they're doing that, and research their claims to see if they have merit. Some will and some won't. Taking someone's Twitter rant against some of the specific oddities of PHP as an assault on you personally seems like an opportunity for personal growth we should be encouraging, and not turn to coddling people like they're children. And the same could be said for JS on the front end, JS on the backend, C or C++ or Rust or Java or any number of languages. Approaching others' criticisms with an open mind and trying to disprove them will make you better than trying to hamfist it into a claim of gatekeeping where there is none.
  - larve 4y ago
    I have plenty of criticism of PHP, and I address the fact that valid criticism is essential in the third section. Blindly saying that PHP is a hot mess, in a public setting, is detrimental to I think the community at large. PHP is but one of the many tools I’ve been using, my heart is with Common Lisp, but I’ve really enjoyed Java, golang, C++, Typescript and now rust. Nothing binds me to PHP except I get a tremendous amount of stuff done with it. I have plenty of hot takes on technology, and love to use strong language when I rant amongst friends. If anything, I am really not attached to any one of them, there is good and bad everywhere, and many decisions have nothing to do with technical merits at all.
  - throwaway67743 4y ago
    They're doing that because they're out of touch, PHP is not the same as it was 15 years ago.
  - codegeek 4y ago
    There is a difference between constructive criticism and calling a language "awful mess". PHP is fine for many use cases and I cannot take a "senior folk" seriously if they plain old trash a language without providing constructive criticism which any language warrants including PHP. So the point is that PHP is no different than say Go or JS or Java. They all have their pros and cons.
- PhasmaFelis 4y ago
  I'd be willing to explore the possibility that PHP isn't as bad as I think it is. I'll wholeheartedly agree that putting down anyone who uses PHP is bad. My objection is that you're declaring that people who attack a language are actually attacking its users, which makes them bullies, which means you should ignore them. I think you're taking things far too personally and using it as a reason to dismiss criticism.
teucris 4y ago
But oftentimes our ire towards certain technologies seems like ire towards those that use them, even if that’s not the intent. It leaves people feeling “outside” as it implies they should have known not to use that technology. My takeaway from the article was that when we see someone using a technology we despise, we take action to make their specific life better, rather than hate on the tech. In the case of PHP, that might be asking what issues they run into and suggesting solutions. That could lead to conversations like “you know, Python doesn’t have this issue, you might want to check out X framework to try it out”. But general flaming on PHP isn’t productive.
- larve 4y ago
  It is also missing that there are many valuable things to be learnt from a technology that is that successful. This doesn’t happen by accident, and also shows that technical elegance is but a small part of being a successful engineer. But really, switching to Java for a bit, a tremendous amount of amazing engineering has gone into making Java the language it is. The Java flaming might have gone down in recent years, but the hot takes from the C/C++ unix crowd in the aughts was impressive.
edmcnulty101 4y ago
Modern PHP is actually really sophisticated. It's just the users that are terrible. KIDDING!

eventhorizonpl 4y ago

captainthrow 4y ago

Can we change the title to something like “PHP is good despite the nay-says”? The title as it is is writing cheques that the article can’t cash.

aliqot 4y ago
Using the title of the post is generally the correct way, with few exceptions.
- captainthrow 4y ago
  It’s low effort flamebait.
  - pc86 4y ago
    And has been flagged as such, but editorializing titles leads to much worse things.
    - aliqot 4y ago
  - larve 4y ago
    I’d honestly be curious to know why you think this is flamebait. Who am I flaming here?
    - captainthrow 4y ago
    - dang 4y ago
      The title is just provocative pejoratives. That's definitely flamebait by HN standards.
      - larve 4y ago

aliqot 4y ago

Just because we are developers, we are not immune from humanity. Tribalism is a survival trait inherent to our species, we will oft apply it where it has very little utility. That being said, I guess what I'm trying to say is, I think we can all agree that people who don't like Perl are lesser nerds, unworthy of our kinship.

trasz 4y ago

>A tool with 200,000 users and 500 contributors will quickly become better than something maintained by 3 people in academia. No, quite the opposite - in most cases a decade later that tool will be an abandoned pile of technological debt.

larve 4y ago
Many things are replaced by better iterations, but plenty of large frameworks are still around. I was thinking of tooling like npm, webpack, react, redux, heck even vim, emacs, linux. It’s easy to forget that linux was the target of the same kind of derision back in the days.
- trasz 4y ago
  Most of your examples are the “three guys at academia” case.
  - larve 4y ago
    I’m not sure I understand?

bfgoodrich 4y ago

gregjor 4y ago

Sorry, but the article seems like an expression of imposter syndrome and excessive worry about what other people think or say. In this case the other people mainly consist of anonymous critics and "gatekeepers" online. Why hitch your identity or sense of worth to a programming language or tool? Why get upset about people who have different opinions when you can just as well choose to ignore them? If you can add value for your employer or customers and make a living, which language or tools you use to do that makes no difference. Pick any language, tool, style of work and you can find people who criticize it. So what? How does random criticism rise to gatekeeping? The job market has tightened up because of economic changes and worry that money will get tighter. That affects most sectors, not just tech or programming. If you read HN you know that many companies have hiring freezes, people have or will soon get laid off, and good jobs get scarce with more competition. That has nothing to do with gatekeeping or programmers who look down on PHP. The programming business goes through booms and busts for reasons that have nothing to do with programming languages. I have used PHP for years, since it came out and offered an alternative to Perl CGI scripts, ASP, and Cold Fusion. It gets the job done. It has some problems. I don't use PHP exclusively, I don't think of or call myself a "PHP programmer," and I don't care that some programmers hate it, whether out of experience or ignorance. My customers don't care about that, they have business problems to solve, a budget and schedule, and don't read language flame wars. Focus on finding work rather than complaining about job ads and PHP haters. Sifting through job postings online and filling out applications describes one of the least effective and most time-consuming ways to find work.

larve 4y ago
I think you are expressing what I am saying too. It’s not about not criticizing technology, it’s about doing so in a productive and inclusive way. Even as a seasoned developer, getting blasted as worthy of prosecution for criminal negligence in #rust on IRC because I mentioned I was a C++ embedded developer led me to be put off rust, which is a neat language, for a couple of years. Who benefits from that?
- gregjor 4y ago
  That kind of thing makes me wonder why anyone has so much of their identity and self-worth invested in a programming language. I never say I am a programmer and certainly not I am a PHP (or Javascript, or C, or whatever) programmer. I say I write software. The job and the tools I happen to use don't form part of my identity. I don't take other people's opinions personally. No one benefits from that kind of thing, and I know it happens a lot in online forums and chats. But I see it as their problem, not mine. I don't feel a need to get included in a fake "community" built around a programming language or framework or editor and I can't understand people who do.

curtisblaine 4y ago

> It is hard to stress how transformative this can be for marginalized communities and people in countries outside of western Europe and the US These kind of takes, where "marginalized" is used to arbitrarily police whatever behaviour the authors doesn't like, contribute to render online discourse the insufferable hell it has become in the last 10 years. I'm sorry, I won't refrain from criticizing a technology I don't like because a strawman member of a "marginalized community" could get discouraged from learning said technology. That's just... madness.

bee_rider 4y ago

> Off-handedly rejecting PHP, Java, WordPress, Javascript, and other oft-criticized languages and frameworks is a sign of a closed mind; of willing ignorance. No, we should gatekeep Javascript. It is an annoying trap laid on websites that is sprung just by going there. The profusion of Javascript has made the internet much worse. It used to at least be possible to just turn off Javascript and ignore that whole scene. So we did, it took over the internet, and now we have to either give up or play the annoying selective script blocking game to get 95% of websites to work. I'm all for not judging others -- Wordpress, Java, PHP, use whatever platform you want, have fun! On your computer.

engineerDave 4y ago

I mock languages because they've caused me enormous pain at some point, not "offhandedly". Their scorn is deserved.

1letterunixname 4y ago

How do I/we/you unflag this? It's an apropos topic worth discussing. I notice it where I work to an extreme degree (MAANG). There is no value in holding religious opinions about any particular tool in the toolbox independent of use. But, there are individuals who throw their weight around with smartaleck negativity and many worship them as a result. I posit that people who cannot backup their claims with data or a survey of concrete experiences are selling their ego over engineering discipline. Arrogance isn't a signal of quality of anything beside arrogance. You'd be surprised how many over-confident people crash into hubris be it a startup product no one wanted or get sloppy with hiring based on trickery or trivia. Get too cocky and the Sword of Damocles of karma, life, or social capital is waiting to chop those who get "too big for their britches". (2022 cross-cultural context: it's an idiom of people who believe themselves to be 3 meters tall. I'm surprised it's recorded as an Australian saying when my 8th generation Irish-American grandfather said it in Texas. Australia is the Commonwealth's "Texas", I guess.).