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You're mixing technologies (PHP vs Ruby / Python) with types of programmers (inexperienced vs experienced). Wielding a master's sword does not a swordmaster ma

by iguana 13y ago

You're mixing technologies (PHP vs Ruby / Python) with types of programmers (inexperienced vs experienced). Wielding a master's sword does not a swordmaster make. Surely you've seen enough RoR and Django projects to know that. Some people will say that something not written in a strongly typed language is not well engineered. If it's not compiled, it's not efficient. This is just programming snobbery. For what it's worth, I was that kid in high school, except back then it was Perl. That's how I learned. Something that makes it even easier? That just creates more programmers. Without shitty programmers, we'd be paid a lot less. I talk a lot of smack about PHP and JavaScript, but these terrible languages have brought more people to programming than any other languages.

astrodust 13y ago
I've seen some screwed up Rails and Django projects, but the severity of the damage is never, ever, as bad as a bespoke PHP application. It's not even in the same league. Remember, both PHP and JavaScript were serious tar-pits ten years ago. JavaScript has made enormous strides in that time, the cultural shift is unbelievable. People went from writing absolutely terrible client-side code, to using frameworks (Moo, Scriptaculous at first, later jQuery, RequireJS) to using it server-side for serious applications. It's gone from complete anarchy to highly civilized. There's some things JavaScript does very well now, and in an elegant way mostly free of quirky tradition and/or obnoxious anachronisms. Meanwhile PHP has only degraded. It's improved, technically, but the community is now hyper-fragmented. Best practices are routinely ignored. Frameworks don't inter-operate even on the most basic level. There's no leadership. There's opposition to even the most obvious improvements to PHP, like deprecating components that are doing nothing but holding PHP back. Killing off `mysql_query`, for example, is absolutely imperative, but it's going to be a bitter fight.

by iguana 13y ago

astrodust 13y ago

I've seen some screwed up Rails and Django projects, but the severity of the damage is never, ever, as bad as a bespoke PHP application. It's not even in the same league. Remember, both PHP and JavaScript were serious tar-pits ten years ago. JavaScript has made enormous strides in that time, the cultural shift is unbelievable. People went from writing absolutely terrible client-side code, to using frameworks (Moo, Scriptaculous at first, later jQuery, RequireJS) to using it server-side for serious applications. It's gone from complete anarchy to highly civilized. There's some things JavaScript does very well now, and in an elegant way mostly free of quirky tradition and/or obnoxious anachronisms. Meanwhile PHP has only degraded. It's improved, technically, but the community is now hyper-fragmented. Best practices are routinely ignored. Frameworks don't inter-operate even on the most basic level. There's no leadership. There's opposition to even the most obvious improvements to PHP, like deprecating components that are doing nothing but holding PHP back. Killing off `mysql_query`, for example, is absolutely imperative, but it's going to be a bitter fight.