[tkiley]

This article has spent an hour or two on the front page with no discussion. I've always wondered what that means; perhaps in this situation, it means that YC's active commenters aren't active PHP developers?

Regardless, I think this is a pretty cool idea. It seems like a lot of effort to emulate what's (arguably) a missing language feature, but for those of us who are stuck in PHP for one reason or another, it's an interesting development.

[jriddycuz]

Yeah, it sounds kinda nice to me. But that' because I'm stuck with PHP for the time being. I'm tired of fighting the language though, so creating these kinds of hacks just becomes more of an intellectual exercise.

And I think you're right that YC's commenters are by and large not PHP developers. I've only known a couple of real hackers that work in PHP, and even they didn't work in it by choice. Though it makes me a little sad to say this because PHP was the first language I learned (hooray sentiment!), I hope PHP dies off soon. It has matured in recent years, but unfortunately not in any new directions. I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that the vast majority of PHP programmers are idiots who couldn't code their way out of a paper bag, and the better PHP hackers tend to be enterprise-y, as that's the direction PHP is headed nowadays.

[leftnode]

I tend to agree, but I'll fully admit, I'm a PHP hacker and I've been hacking in it since around 1999 or so. I didn't see this as much of a hack (read parts of the paper associated with it) as much as a way to do some cooler things in 5.3.

I consider myself a pretty good PHP programmer, but you're right, most of them out there don't deserve the title "programmer". I'm so disgusted by 99% of the open source PHP crap out there.

That said, I do look forward to learning new languages and new ways to develop on the web (what I really love doing).

[lucasoman]

That's the situation I find myself in: a developer stuck with PHP.

In response to the first bit, a friend observed that Warnock applies.