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The conveyor belt metaphor is one of the best that I have ever heard. It's fine to start out with anything, I did pascal/visual basic in high school. Then did

The conveyor belt metaphor is one of the best that I have ever heard. It's fine to start out with anything, I did pascal/visual basic in high school. Then did Java/PHP in college. First year of college I did contract work in PHP and in WordPress. It was fun the first year or so and I love that I could have that "instant gratification" moments that PHP is famous for. Then as I grew and learned about things like concurrency, algorithms, HTTP, networking I found myself wondering off to other languages such as Ruby. Then I learned Ruby and now for a year already am doing Rails and Angular and truly enjoy it. The thing to note here is back in a day when I was doing PHP , I heard a lot from community members and other software engineers saying something like "PHP SUCKS" and stuff like that, but I did not care because everything I wanted to build in that time I could do with procedural PHP or some OOP php or some Wordpress magic. When I realized and knew `why` I want to learn other stuff everything became clear.

noir_lord 11y ago
The hatred of PHP amongst a certain type is hilarious, they automatically assume that if you chose PHP (or worse program in it because it was what you inherited as well) you are a "lesser programmer". I choose to use PHP despite been capable of using most any language I wanted, over the years I've used and forgotten many languages and for the requirements I have PHP was a good fit. Also modern PHP really isn't like old PHP, composer, PSR's, The FIG folks, decent frameworks (Symfony in particular along with Laravel), huge numbers of usable libraries. Yeah the language has issues but then a) what language doesn't b) with experience you can avoid them. When you get down to it I only care about providing value whether that is to myself or my customers and they really don't care what language was used as long as it works.
- imakesnowflakes 11y ago
  > if you chose PHP (or worse program in it because it was what you inherited as well) you are a "lesser programmer". If you choose php, I will assume that you. 1. Either is not aware of that php has a million gotchas that you need to avoid at every step. Take a look at the ever growing (!) list at /r/lolphp. 2. You don't see the significance of the aforementioned gotchas. For eg, you can show things like php's registerglobals to a newbie, and he will be impressed by how convenient it is. He won't see how bad it actually can be. This is not because he is a "lesser programmer", but due to a case of "unknown unknowns". Note that you can have 10 years of PHP experience and can still be like this. > Also modern PHP really isn't like old PHP, composer, PSR's, The FIG.... These things does make a difference. But only on the surface, not deep down where it is really rotten.
  - noir_lord 11y ago
    You can assume whatever the hell you want it doesn't really matter to me since I'm well aware of 1 and 2.
    - berntb 11y ago
      Exactly, you have to evaluate tools in their environment (like biological organisms). And for programming languages, the environment includes the used coding standards -- which need to avoid lots of the crufty pitfalls all environments do have. That said, I don't know enough PHP to have a real opinion. (Yep, I'm hellbanned.)
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - joesmo 11y ago
    Your post is a perfect example of what the author is referring to: stupid people in the community trying to make others feel inferior for programming in a certain technology. When it comes to PHP, such posts are inevitable (that's how I know PHP is actually a good, useful language). About the people who post them, I will assume that you: 1. Are incredibly stupid (register globals has been deprecated for years) 2. Are incredibly closed minded because you make comments like "These things does make a difference. But only on the surface, not deep down where it is really rotten" 3. Can't actually program in PHP and have not written large production apps in it 4. Probably can't actually program any language because you don't realize every single language has a million gotchas My assumptions may be wrong, but it really doesn't matter. That's the problem with assumptions ... the damage is already done.
    - facetube 11y ago
      FWIW, PHP 4.x was completely awful for large and/or OOP codebases due to the totally insane copy-by-default semantics, the need to use &= perfectly at every call site that returned an instance of a class, and a handful of reference-counting bugs that caused interpreter crashes and still weren't fixed when 5.x matured. It's definitely gotten better; I feel like a lot of people who swore off PHP forever are remembering version four.

noir_lord 11y ago

The hatred of PHP amongst a certain type is hilarious, they automatically assume that if you chose PHP (or worse program in it because it was what you inherited as well) you are a "lesser programmer". I choose to use PHP despite been capable of using most any language I wanted, over the years I've used and forgotten many languages and for the requirements I have PHP was a good fit. Also modern PHP really isn't like old PHP, composer, PSR's, The FIG folks, decent frameworks (Symfony in particular along with Laravel), huge numbers of usable libraries. Yeah the language has issues but then a) what language doesn't b) with experience you can avoid them. When you get down to it I only care about providing value whether that is to myself or my customers and they really don't care what language was used as long as it works.

imakesnowflakes 11y ago
> if you chose PHP (or worse program in it because it was what you inherited as well) you are a "lesser programmer". If you choose php, I will assume that you. 1. Either is not aware of that php has a million gotchas that you need to avoid at every step. Take a look at the ever growing (!) list at /r/lolphp. 2. You don't see the significance of the aforementioned gotchas. For eg, you can show things like php's registerglobals to a newbie, and he will be impressed by how convenient it is. He won't see how bad it actually can be. This is not because he is a "lesser programmer", but due to a case of "unknown unknowns". Note that you can have 10 years of PHP experience and can still be like this. > Also modern PHP really isn't like old PHP, composer, PSR's, The FIG.... These things does make a difference. But only on the surface, not deep down where it is really rotten.
- noir_lord 11y ago
  You can assume whatever the hell you want it doesn't really matter to me since I'm well aware of 1 and 2.
  - berntb 11y ago
    Exactly, you have to evaluate tools in their environment (like biological organisms). And for programming languages, the environment includes the used coding standards -- which need to avoid lots of the crufty pitfalls all environments do have. That said, I don't know enough PHP to have a real opinion. (Yep, I'm hellbanned.)
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- joesmo 11y ago
  Your post is a perfect example of what the author is referring to: stupid people in the community trying to make others feel inferior for programming in a certain technology. When it comes to PHP, such posts are inevitable (that's how I know PHP is actually a good, useful language). About the people who post them, I will assume that you: 1. Are incredibly stupid (register globals has been deprecated for years) 2. Are incredibly closed minded because you make comments like "These things does make a difference. But only on the surface, not deep down where it is really rotten" 3. Can't actually program in PHP and have not written large production apps in it 4. Probably can't actually program any language because you don't realize every single language has a million gotchas My assumptions may be wrong, but it really doesn't matter. That's the problem with assumptions ... the damage is already done.
  - facetube 11y ago
    FWIW, PHP 4.x was completely awful for large and/or OOP codebases due to the totally insane copy-by-default semantics, the need to use &= perfectly at every call site that returned an instance of a class, and a handful of reference-counting bugs that caused interpreter crashes and still weren't fixed when 5.x matured. It's definitely gotten better; I feel like a lot of people who swore off PHP forever are remembering version four.