[jbarrow]

One place in which this problem was particularly apparent was (is? I haven't kept up with it for a while) the PHP community. PHP gets a bad rap as a terrible language, but a large part of this was the ease of beginning the learning process with PHP; download [X|W|M]AMPP, spin up an Apache instance, and get just dive in. What this led to was a lot of sub-par instruction material from people who didn't have a solid grounding in design principles, or "tutorials" created from people who had little experience.

Despite this, there were clearly experts who could "finely craft" PHP applications. Although Facebook may not be the best example, it is the first one that comes to mind.

[girvo]

I've worked on huge web applications that were super maintainable and fun to work on, solving pretty interesting problems for multi-billion dollar companies... In PHP. I sometimes want to defend the language, but it does have some terrible parts to it, and a lot of the people that use it aren't software engineers. But a lot of them are, and so I just choose to work with them instead of complaining about it all!

On top of that, the latest developments in the language and community have seen some big changes for the better around tooling, best practices, and the like. So I'm firmly of the belief that with the RFC, PSR and Composer/Packagist trio, as well as things like HHVM, we will see things begin to change for the better on this front in the future. Call me Mr Optimistic ;)