|
|
|
|
|
|
by calpaterson
6614 days ago
|
|
|
>Well, if you don't know enough to miss them, I don't have any way to argue with you--there's no common language in which we can converse about them. While I agree with your actual premise ; this statement is pretty bad form. It is the logical equivalent of a Christian saying that in order for me to critique his faith, I must become a Christian. Replying, "you wouldn't know; you're an imperative programmer" is moot; maybe he is an imperative programmer - but he could also be correct. There is no connection between the two. Deductive logic has never been allowed in the scientific method, which is, ultimately, the barometer of truth. I'm aware that Graham is the originator of this somewhat popular meme, but it's a wrong popular meme. The nature of ignorance of certain desirable features can only explain why people don't immediately demand them; it doesn't prove their usefulness. |
|
|
That's obviously not what I said. My reply was, "If you believe all of the features listed above are useless in a real world development situation, I'm not capable of convincing you otherwise, as we're going to be speaking very different languages". I think there is a difference, though I can see how it comes off as arrogant. It wasn't really intended that way--I'm not a great programmer, and never claimed to be. But I know what makes me (as an adventurous, but not necessarily brilliant, hacker) more productive is good tools. And first class functions, closures, and a great set of libraries (like that found in Perl, Python, and to a lesser degree Ruby), are the tools save me lots of time. When I develop in PHP, and I do so pretty frequently, I miss all of those features constantly and my code is longer, less readable, and harder to maintain.
My point was if you haven't worked with a language that has those features you wouldn't be aware of how much time, and how many lines of code, they can save you. I'm not a smug lisp weenie pushing the blub paradigm (though there is definitely something to the argument) or implying that imperative developers are the scum of the earth. I'm a pragmatic sort of fellow...if it works, use it. But if something works better, why not use it instead?
That said, one of the places where PHP is a perfectly valid language is web applications. Some of the largest applications in the world run on PHP--Facebook, many Yahoo sites, etc. But they also have lots of languages doing the non-frontend work, because PHP is really horrible at a lot of backend tasks. Data and systems management, for example, where Perl and Python, or Java (depending on scale and performance requirements and existence of libraries), would be a better choice.