
Contempt Culture - coryfklein
http://blog.aurynn.com/contempt-culture-2
======
leepowers
I guess I never understood the elitism and strong feelings around programming
languages. It's such a strange thing to stake one's _identity_ to.

It's like getting upset that Dostoyevsky wrote _Crime and Punishment_ in
Russian. The language is irrelevant - he got his point across regardless.
Would the novel be any less important and valuable if it was written in
German, or Portuguese, Latin, or Mandarin? Of course not.

~~~
d0lph
There are valid reasons to not like a language, PHP being the easiest to pick
on: [https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-
design/](https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/)

As for the people using the language, I have inherited a few PHP projects, and
without exception, they are a mess. The code quality and readability is
usually garbage, simple stuff like tabbing and consistent variable names. SQL
Injection vulnerabilities, and XSS issues abound.

~~~
ekiminmo
This is exactly the attitude that the author is taking issue with.

Many inexperienced developers use PHP and make a mess. But try to remember
that there are also many brilliant engineers at Facebook and other companies
using PHP and doing amazing things with it.

~~~
d0lph
By valid reasons, I mean other than the developers, read the link in my post.

You may also appreciate this viewpoint: [https://blog.codinghorror.com/php-
sucks-but-it-doesnt-matter...](https://blog.codinghorror.com/php-sucks-but-it-
doesnt-matter/)

------
kixiQu
This is really important. Even if you think that PHP is the worst thing
humankind has ever inflicted upon itself, you are not making the world a
better place by denigrating the work done in it with this spirit of contempt.
If it is terrible, then speak positively about what can be done. If it is
painful, then speak positively about how projects / devs can migrate. There
are things within tech that deserve to be spoken about negatively, including
within language design and software engineering practices, but when everything
devolves into tribal signifying you are _not making anything better._

