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by phlyingpenguin 2342 days ago
To answer your question, I'll once again just paste the same quote. Sure, there are good programmers out there. But PHP is a pretty good heuristic for this class of programmer.

> over the years PHP has managed to get itself a reputation of messy codebases, inexperienced developers, insecure code, an inconsistent core library, and what not.

There's no point in having a conversation if we all need to cheer on the article. Yeah, I've made up my mind. I think this article is misguided. No amount of technical changes to PHP changes legacy codebases or exactly the opening paragraph of the article that everybody seems to be ignoring.
2 comments
Sohcahtoa82 2341 days ago
Yeah, but you still haven't answered the question of how being a PHP developer means being a bad programmer. All you've done is say they have a bad reputation, but reputations can easily be based on false or outdated data.

Java was known for being so slow as to be absolutely worthless 20 years ago, and it still has a reputation for being slow despite many benchmarks proving otherwise.

Yeah, sure, if you take a PHP project from a legacy code base and run a server with it, it'll probably get hacked within minutes, but that says nothing about current-gen PHP.

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milhouse1337 2342 days ago
Haters gonna hate I guess, it's your opinion. The world around any stack evolves and you apparently want to keep your old opinion about PHP. You failed to show us why this reputation is still valid today.
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phlyingpenguin 2342 days ago
Fan clubs gonna fan. Until then, people are identifying so hard with a language that they can't accept that being a bad sign. Claim it's an old opinion if you like. Does that help you invalidate it? It's based on current usage, but it's also reenforced by comment sections like this.
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zdragnar 2342 days ago
I've seen a million dollar java project (which started as scala) crash and burn because the team couldn't code its way out of a box. Ruby / Rails, python, php, heck even chef and vagrant setups that made me question my sanity. Crack open the code for most games and you see an unholy mess of c/++. I also know brilliant people who write excellent code in all of those (except maybe python, it's not too popular in my immediate circle). Golang is probably the hardest to tell good from bad since copy-paste is a virtue.

I have long given up on "language choice" as a marker that automatically says anything about a developer at all.

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