5 ms·

Hear hear! Let me take the example PHP, since you mentioned it and I don't know enough to have an opinion. PHP is generally claimed to suck badly. But even I

Hear hear! Let me take the example PHP, since you mentioned it and I don't know enough to have an opinion. PHP is generally claimed to suck badly. But even I can see that the "haters" on HN generally don't know/discuss the existing PHP frameworks and methods. If I would look at PHP to evaluate it for a project, I'd look at if it seems fun to use (really important!) -- and if it would be usable with good coding standards and modern frameworks. The bad things people talk about PHP (bad cruft in naming of methods, kludgy parts) are not relevant if it takes a few hours/days to learn that -- and if a good coding standard can limit yourself to a subset of the language. You need to do that for all languages anyway. (See JavaScript.) But: One big red flag would be if the language proponents are language war fanatics that vote down criticism of their language/framework while attacking all competition. You probably know which ones I talk about.

lmm 13y ago
> The bad things people talk about PHP (bad cruft in naming of methods, kludgy parts) are not relevant if it takes a few hours/days to learn that -- and if a good coding standard can limit yourself to a subset of the language. You need to do that for all languages anyway. (See JavaScript.) Javascript is by no means a good language. I think "needs a coding standard and a few hours/days to learn which parts to avoid" is a point against a language - not necessarily reason to rule it out entirely, but a mark in the negative column. There are plenty of languages where this need for a standard doesn't seem to arise, because the obvious way to do things is good enough (e.g. Python). > But: One big red flag would be if the language proponents are language war fanatics that vote down criticism of their language/framework while attacking all competition. You probably know which ones I talk about. That's a terrible reason to make any decision. It reminds me of the guy who wouldn't listen to U2 because he didn't like their fans. If you avoid languages that're used by idiots you'll find yourself on a treadmill where you're constantly moving from incomplete language to incomplete language, because as soon as a language gets good enough, idiots will find it and use it.
- BugBrother 13y ago
  >>Javascript is by no means a good language My point was that you have to compare the practical use cases, that is "the good parts" of a language/framework -- not the bad cruft you can avoid. A few hours investment is nothing. (JS still has problems, many are being solved.) This is trivial of course, but strangely ignored by many on HN with an IQ that probably is the sum of our two's... >>If you avoid languages that're used by idiots I wrote that I am suspicious of environments used by language war cultists, intelligence is orthogonal. (A typical example is someone that starts recommending his favorite environment even when it isn't discussed, as suitable for everything just by its std use cases... Like you :-) ) Edit: Absolutely agree, mercurial.
  - mercurial 13y ago
    I think there is a point to be made for avoiding an ecosystem (without necessarily using a loaded word) due to a perception of low quality of available libraries. This has certainly happened to me in the past. On the other hand, some stacks, I feel, do help with writing better code. But don't fool yourself that there is a silver bullet.

lmm 13y ago

> The bad things people talk about PHP (bad cruft in naming of methods, kludgy parts) are not relevant if it takes a few hours/days to learn that -- and if a good coding standard can limit yourself to a subset of the language. You need to do that for all languages anyway. (See JavaScript.) Javascript is by no means a good language. I think "needs a coding standard and a few hours/days to learn which parts to avoid" is a point against a language - not necessarily reason to rule it out entirely, but a mark in the negative column. There are plenty of languages where this need for a standard doesn't seem to arise, because the obvious way to do things is good enough (e.g. Python). > But: One big red flag would be if the language proponents are language war fanatics that vote down criticism of their language/framework while attacking all competition. You probably know which ones I talk about. That's a terrible reason to make any decision. It reminds me of the guy who wouldn't listen to U2 because he didn't like their fans. If you avoid languages that're used by idiots you'll find yourself on a treadmill where you're constantly moving from incomplete language to incomplete language, because as soon as a language gets good enough, idiots will find it and use it.

BugBrother 13y ago
>>Javascript is by no means a good language My point was that you have to compare the practical use cases, that is "the good parts" of a language/framework -- not the bad cruft you can avoid. A few hours investment is nothing. (JS still has problems, many are being solved.) This is trivial of course, but strangely ignored by many on HN with an IQ that probably is the sum of our two's... >>If you avoid languages that're used by idiots I wrote that I am suspicious of environments used by language war cultists, intelligence is orthogonal. (A typical example is someone that starts recommending his favorite environment even when it isn't discussed, as suitable for everything just by its std use cases... Like you :-) ) Edit: Absolutely agree, mercurial.
- mercurial 13y ago
  I think there is a point to be made for avoiding an ecosystem (without necessarily using a loaded word) due to a perception of low quality of available libraries. This has certainly happened to me in the past. On the other hand, some stacks, I feel, do help with writing better code. But don't fool yourself that there is a silver bullet.