11 ms·

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 certa

by 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
  > I feel like a lot of people who swore off PHP forever are remembering version four. I think that's a valid point however I'm not sure if that is better or worse when they are attacking something.
  - facetube 11y ago
    Oh, almost certainly worse, unless Rasmus Lerdorf is going on another mailing list tirade and flaming them directly.
stickfigure 11y ago
There are objective differences between programming languages and it's reasonable to have strong opinions about the relative merits and demerits of each. Yes, it's toxic when people who have no real-world experience with a language or platform rant about it, because this tends to be useless bile. But that does't mean PHP is just as good as anything else. If you only know a single programming language, you should have some inner doubts, no matter what that language is. This is healthy.
- shkkmo 11y ago
  Of course languages are different. Some are better for some things than others. Choosing a language without knowledge of its tradeoffs is not a vary good idea. The issue the parent is comments is judging someone based on their use of a language without knowing if that person has any knowledge of the tradeoffs is doing them a disservice. Spewing that judgement on the internet is actively harmful.

by joesmo 11y ago

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
> I feel like a lot of people who swore off PHP forever are remembering version four. I think that's a valid point however I'm not sure if that is better or worse when they are attacking something.
- facetube 11y ago
  Oh, almost certainly worse, unless Rasmus Lerdorf is going on another mailing list tirade and flaming them directly.

stickfigure 11y ago

There are objective differences between programming languages and it's reasonable to have strong opinions about the relative merits and demerits of each. Yes, it's toxic when people who have no real-world experience with a language or platform rant about it, because this tends to be useless bile. But that does't mean PHP is just as good as anything else. If you only know a single programming language, you should have some inner doubts, no matter what that language is. This is healthy.

shkkmo 11y ago
Of course languages are different. Some are better for some things than others. Choosing a language without knowledge of its tradeoffs is not a vary good idea. The issue the parent is comments is judging someone based on their use of a language without knowing if that person has any knowledge of the tradeoffs is doing them a disservice. Spewing that judgement on the internet is actively harmful.