4 ms·

What you just said is plain stupid. So our language designers can be critical of other languages? Bullshit! Since programmers can vote with their feet and gravi

What you just said is plain stupid. So our language designers can be critical of other languages? Bullshit! Since programmers can vote with their feet and gravitate towards better languages (is it miraculous that almost all programmers have a distaste for PHP?) we should give reasons why we use C and not PHP. If they were equally crappy what would have been the cause of choice of one over the other? I can call PHP the worse language ever, and I don't need to have created a language already.

tesseractive 13y ago
Given the widespread use of PHP for web programming, it seems obvious that in the domain of web programming, developers have voted with their feet for PHP.
- yawboakye 13y ago
  Energetic amateurs. They've not reached maturity so that their votes should be counted.
  - tesseractive 13y ago
    Given that these supposed "energetic amateurs" have created an enormous percentage of the code that web applications across the internet run on, their votes automatically count. If PHP developers had never produced anything of value, that would be a different discussion.
coldtea 13y ago
>So [only] language designers can be critical of other languages? Yes. Or rather, other people can be critical too, but language designer' opinions have far more validity. In other words, anybody can say whatever uninformed BS he wants (it's a free country). But that's no replacement for being an expert in what you're discussing. >Since programmers can vote with their feet and gravitate towards better languages (is it miraculous that almost all programmers have a distaste for PHP?) You'd be surprised. PHP is one of the most popular languages and one of the most used languages, so far from "all programmers have a distaste for PHP". So if we were to use that "voting" argument alone (which I find wrong), PHP should be considered a very good language. Not the intention you had, I guess. While PHP has it warts, it's mainly the less pragmatic and more fad prone programmers that have issues with PHP, those who look for silver bullets and like to feel superior by choice of programming language, editor and the like. As for programmers "voting with their feet", well, they don't do quite a good job at it. The best languages (like LISP, Smalltalk, OcamL, Haskell, to name but a few etc) are seldom the most popular too.
- yawboakye 13y ago
  > but language designers' opinions have far more validity Here's the case we're talking about the work of a language designer. By the way, not all people capable of creating a programming language have created one yet. Marc-André Cournoyer, who wrote the book that Jeremy Ashkenas learnt language design from to write CoffeeScript, has not created a language himself.

tesseractive 13y ago

Given the widespread use of PHP for web programming, it seems obvious that in the domain of web programming, developers have voted with their feet for PHP.

yawboakye 13y ago
Energetic amateurs. They've not reached maturity so that their votes should be counted.
- tesseractive 13y ago
  Given that these supposed "energetic amateurs" have created an enormous percentage of the code that web applications across the internet run on, their votes automatically count. If PHP developers had never produced anything of value, that would be a different discussion.

coldtea 13y ago

>So [only] language designers can be critical of other languages? Yes. Or rather, other people can be critical too, but language designer' opinions have far more validity. In other words, anybody can say whatever uninformed BS he wants (it's a free country). But that's no replacement for being an expert in what you're discussing. >Since programmers can vote with their feet and gravitate towards better languages (is it miraculous that almost all programmers have a distaste for PHP?) You'd be surprised. PHP is one of the most popular languages and one of the most used languages, so far from "all programmers have a distaste for PHP". So if we were to use that "voting" argument alone (which I find wrong), PHP should be considered a very good language. Not the intention you had, I guess. While PHP has it warts, it's mainly the less pragmatic and more fad prone programmers that have issues with PHP, those who look for silver bullets and like to feel superior by choice of programming language, editor and the like. As for programmers "voting with their feet", well, they don't do quite a good job at it. The best languages (like LISP, Smalltalk, OcamL, Haskell, to name but a few etc) are seldom the most popular too.

yawboakye 13y ago
> but language designers' opinions have far more validity Here's the case we're talking about the work of a language designer. By the way, not all people capable of creating a programming language have created one yet. Marc-André Cournoyer, who wrote the book that Jeremy Ashkenas learnt language design from to write CoffeeScript, has not created a language himself.