[JohnHaugeland]

> I tend to feel "comfortable" coding things with PHP but hate the fact it's one of the poorest languages to have in the toolkit.

Well, then you've already lost, because you're accepting what the herd is telling you without any form of critical insight.

Enjoy wasting the next five years chasing fads.

[codewright]

Quoting "Beating the Averages" written by the creator of the community you're ostensibly participating in, emphasis mine because I know reading is hard:

Blub programmer wouldn't use either of them. Of course he wouldn't program in machine language. That's what compilers are for...

As long as our hypothetical Blub programmer is looking down the power continuum, he knows he's looking down.

Languages less powerful than Blub are obviously less powerful, because they're missing some feature he's used to. But when our hypothetical Blub programmer looks in the other direction, up the power continuum, he doesn't realize he's looking up.

What he sees are merely weird languages. He probably considers them about equivalent in power to Blub, but with all this other hairy stuff thrown in as well. Blub is good enough for him, because he thinks in Blub.

When we switch to the point of view of a programmer using any of the languages higher up the power continuum, however, we find that he in turn looks down upon Blub. How can you get anything done in Blub? It doesn't even have y.

By induction, the only programmers in a position to see all the differences in power between the various languages are those who understand the most powerful one. (This is probably what Eric Raymond meant about Lisp making you a better programmer.) You can't trust the opinions of the others, because of the Blub paradox: they're satisfied with whatever language they happen to use, because it dictates the way they think about programs.

Edit:

Your crab-in-a-bucket mentality will not be welcomed warmly here. You might consider encouraging other people to learn new things instead of being a sour asshole to somebody asking the community for advice.

Please go back to lurking.

[JohnHaugeland]

> Your crab-in-a-bucket mentality will not be welcomed warmly here.

Excuse me?

All I said was "you shouldn't be taking for granted that PHP is terrible, when you don't know other languages, just because a bunch of people have told you so."

I have actually been here quite a bit longer than you have; years before I created my account. I've also been a professional developer for more than 20 years.

Just because you disagree with my position doesn't mean you get to insult me and announce that a community which has received me better than it has received you (take a look at our score averages, please) is not going to like me.

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> You might consider encouraging other people to learn new things

Maybe you should calm down and re-read what you're arguing with. That's exactly what I did.

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> instead of being a sour asshole to somebody asking the community for advice.

I think maybe you should also consider whether you're speaking to yourself by accident. I didn't curse, or make any personal attacks.

What I did was say "if you make this assumption, and choose not to learn directly, it will cost you."

.

> Please go back to lurking.

I would appreciate it if you don't speak to anyone in this fashion anymore. Your tone is far beyond appropriate, you don't appear to have taken the time to figure out what I was actually saying, and you have been really quite unacceptably aggressive.

If anything, your tone encourages me to speak out more often, because I find this sort of lynchpin "anyone who disagrees with the herd is just being a crabby asshole" nonsense to be one of the most direct ways to challenge people's intent to grow.

I mean, yes, you've managed to quote a blub article. Very nice.

But I don't think you've received the impact you were going for. I was not an asshole by saying "don't take for granted what the crowd tells you; learn for yourself." And I don't need to be told, in response, that I should be encouraging learning.

The next time you feel like being this severely critical in public, it may help for you to take a few hour breather, and then come back and make sure the person really actually did say the thing you thought, and that your tone in response is at least somewhat appropriate.

I hope you will consider the possibility that you're just yelling at your own imagination. I'm kind of mortified by what just happened here.

I don't know how to walk away from this supportively. I realize you're trying to defend someone, but it's from an attack that didn't exist, and in response, you've gotten just astoundingly vulgar.