[Killswitch]

I don't care if this comes off as trolling, but here it is: as I read through this, I thought to myself, much like the author, "how appaling!" - then I saw the word "PHP" - and went "oh, well that means there's gonna be a bunch of people hating on a language because one developer doesn't know what he's doing and happens to be using that language".

[hamburglar]

All the php hate I've seen over the years is because of one guy who doesn't know what he's doing? ;)

[Killswitch]

Oh yeah, I forgot, because of the low barrier of entry, PHP is the only language in the history of all programming languages where there are people who don't know what they are doing. Forgot that all Python, Ruby, etc devs are gods gift to programming and don't make mistakes. My good, your bad.

[hamburglar]

upvoting you despite your inability to take a bit of good-natured ribbing

[Killswitch]

Sorry, just as a PHP developer who understands his language isn't perfect but is growing and fixing pains, it annoys me to see people who don't use or haven't used the language since PHP4 talk trash about it as if they've been a PHP developer for years and use it daily.

Rarely do you see PHP developers talking about the pitfalls of big frameworks and other languages.. For example XSS vulnerabilities that recently plagued Rails.

I too have upvoted both your replies to show no ill will. Beautiful day here in Chicago and I took a little time off to cruise the city before coming back and getting back to work. Really puts you in a good mood.

[hamburglar]

PHP's public image problem is mostly due to the direction from which you can approach it. You can be the maintainer of a static HTML page who knows nothing at all about programming, and someone can help you dip your toe into PHP by showing you some simple tricks, and suddenly you have the ability to start adding code here and there, copy/paste style, to your content. The results are predictable. And for better or for worse, the language has been given some ill-advised features in order to cater to this type of user.

And you can approach it in the opposite direction, as well: as a programmer who knows what he's doing, you need to choose a language and a platform to run your app on, and PHP is ubiquitous and perfectly capable, and you know which ill-advised language features to avoid, so it's a reasonable choice.

The difference between PHP and most other languages for building web sites is that with most other languages, you simply can't follow the first path. Web servers that let you just drop snippets of ruby into HTML are not everywhere (I assume that exists in some ill-advised apache module, but I haven't personally seen it). You need to know a significant amount up front to get your code running, so the "never even considered programming before" portion of the population is naturally suppressed. It doesn't mean they don't exist or that somehow making a language more difficult to use automatically makes its users better, it just means that a certain type of amateur user is naturally suppressed, so there is proportionally fewer of them.

Note the similarities: ActionScript/Flash is actually a pretty cool piece of technology [let's ignore their poor track record with regard to security holes in the runtime, since that's an orthogonal issue]. And yet it's terrible to program in for a seasoned developer because the community is so chock full of artists and amateurs who just dipped their toe in to add some minimal interactivity to their drawings that you often have a hard time finding docs that are written above the copy/paster level. And well-written ActionScript code is a relative rarity as a result. I'm sure that on at least some level, any seasoned dev who primarily uses PHP can relate.

[Killswitch]

> The difference between PHP and most other languages for building web sites is that with most other languages, you simply can't follow the first path.

I agree, but funnily enough, I started at the first path, and if it wasn't for that path in 2001, I wouldn't have made it to the second path.

[krapp]

...Rasmus Lerdorf?

[aashishkoirala]

Touche!