Sorry, but the article seems like an expression of imposter syndrome and excessive worry about what other people think or say. In this case the other people mainly consist of anonymous critics and "gatekeepers" online. Why hitch your identity or sense of worth to a programming language or tool? Why get upset about people who have different opinions when you can just as well choose to ignore them?
If you can add value for your employer or customers and make a living, which language or tools you use to do that makes no difference. Pick any language, tool, style of work and you can find people who criticize it. So what? How does random criticism rise to gatekeeping?
The job market has tightened up because of economic changes and worry that money will get tighter. That affects most sectors, not just tech or programming. If you read HN you know that many companies have hiring freezes, people have or will soon get laid off, and good jobs get scarce with more competition. That has nothing to do with gatekeeping or programmers who look down on PHP. The programming business goes through booms and busts for reasons that have nothing to do with programming languages.
I have used PHP for years, since it came out and offered an alternative to Perl CGI scripts, ASP, and Cold Fusion. It gets the job done. It has some problems. I don't use PHP exclusively, I don't think of or call myself a "PHP programmer," and I don't care that some programmers hate it, whether out of experience or ignorance. My customers don't care about that, they have business problems to solve, a budget and schedule, and don't read language flame wars. Focus on finding work rather than complaining about job ads and PHP haters.
Sifting through job postings online and filling out applications describes one of the least effective and most time-consuming ways to find work.
I think you are expressing what I am saying too. It’s not about not criticizing technology, it’s about doing so in a productive and inclusive way. Even as a seasoned developer, getting blasted as worthy of prosecution for criminal negligence in #rust on IRC because I mentioned I was a C++ embedded developer led me to be put off rust, which is a neat language, for a couple of years. Who benefits from that?
That kind of thing makes me wonder why anyone has so much of their identity and self-worth invested in a programming language. I never say I am a programmer and certainly not I am a PHP (or Javascript, or C, or whatever) programmer. I say I write software. The job and the tools I happen to use don't form part of my identity. I don't take other people's opinions personally.
No one benefits from that kind of thing, and I know it happens a lot in online forums and chats. But I see it as their problem, not mine. I don't feel a need to get included in a fake "community" built around a programming language or framework or editor and I can't understand people who do.
I certainly agree with that, but that level of detachment and comfort with technology comes with time. When you start out, programming is your tool, until you grow and discover new tools, usually through the help of other people. Certainly communities, conferences, meetups, websites centered around specific technologies, niches and programming languages make sense. They are not “fake.”
The author of the article wrote on his site that he has twenty years experience. That seems like enough time to disconnect one's identity and self-worth from PHP.
The large group of programmers who use PHP don't qualify as a "community" to me. Programmers can share and learn from each other, and criticize tools and express opinions, and that has some value, but it falls short of what I would call a community. It seems fake in the same sense that the BMW motorcycle rider rallies I used to attend seem fake -- all we had in common was owning a brand of motorcycle. "Contrived" maybe describes the hollowness better than "fake."
I’m the author actually :) I certainly don’t identify as a PHP developer, but it’s the one language I use relatively often that gets an intense amount of condescending hate in the US.
I also was referring to users of a language more so than communities, although I am certainly part of php channels and entire php slacks, just as I am part of devops slacks or common lisp and rust and react discords. These certainly feel like communities.
The situations I am referring to more broadly is say, the inevitable onslaught of “PHP is hot garbage” comments on anything mentioning PHP. How does that make people write PHP for a living feel? What’s the point? The only thing I can do as a user is to ignore the troll and feel slightly worse for my day. I wager that people writing those comments don’t lead the most fulfilled lives either.
Please, criticize the latest language RFCs and the performance of the interpreter and the use of globals, criticize the proliferation of copy-paste wordpress plugins, how you dislike a certain CSS style. Show how clojure tackles things differently and what there is to be gained. That is very different, it shows respect to other people, and it opens up a dialogue where both sides can gain something.
If anything, I would say that writing such comments is the author defining their identity as “not a PHP user”, since that is about the entire information contained in such a statement.
> The situations I am referring to more broadly is say, the inevitable onslaught of “PHP is hot garbage” comments on anything mentioning PHP. How does that make people write PHP for a living feel?
I use PHP and have for 20 years. Comments like that don't make me feel anything. Either the person making the comment has something useful to say or they don't. Calling a successful language and its ecosystem "garbage" (which I have seen plenty of times) communicates ignorance or maybe insecurity, but it doesn't affect me emotionally. I don't feel any worse about myself knowing that trolls and ignorant people frequent online forums.
If someone wants to define their identity in terms of a programming language they love, or hate, they can of course go ahead and do that. I don't understand why someone would choose such a trivial thing to hang their identity on so I'm not going to let them get under my skin.
That would indeed be the ideal, but I know enough people for whom statements like these have a real impact, me included. As you pointed out, they are ignorant and insecure, and IMO stifle actual technical discourse. Their only purpose is for their author to somehow feel better at the expense of other people.
Not everybody has the thick skin and confidence they belong in tech that you have, and it for sure is always nicer to have a constructive exchange than having to face adversity. I want people to be like the person that kindly pointed out SICP to me rather than someone blasting me for using global variables. The first was much more effective.
You can't control other people, you can only control how you react to them, or maybe how much interaction you have with them. You can call it a thick skin, but it comes down to evaluating criticism from other people and deciding if it means anything to you or not. Do you have any reason to take their opinion seriously? Do they direct their comments at you, personally, or just throw out stuff like "PHP sucks" to stir the pot?
Of course we would live in a nicer world if no one made ignorant or mean comments but we don't live in that world so we have to adapt and decide how we respond to other people.
I think it is expected that when commenting on your own article, you add a note to each comment to indicate you are the author. Enjoyed the article. I love it when “obsolete” technologies are used to build great software.
Just because we are developers, we are not immune from humanity. Tribalism is a survival trait inherent to our species, we will oft apply it where it has very little utility.
That being said, I guess what I'm trying to say is, I think we can all agree that people who don't like Perl are lesser nerds, unworthy of our kinship.
> Off-handedly rejecting PHP, Java, WordPress, Javascript, and other oft-criticized languages and frameworks is a sign of a closed mind; of willing ignorance.
No, we should gatekeep Javascript. It is an annoying trap laid on websites that is sprung just by going there. The profusion of Javascript has made the internet much worse. It used to at least be possible to just turn off Javascript and ignore that whole scene. So we did, it took over the internet, and now we have to either give up or play the annoying selective script blocking game to get 95% of websites to work.
I'm all for not judging others -- Wordpress, Java, PHP, use whatever platform you want, have fun! On your computer.
> It is hard to stress how transformative this can be for marginalized communities and people in countries outside of western Europe and the US
These kind of takes, where "marginalized" is used to arbitrarily police whatever behaviour the authors doesn't like, contribute to render online discourse the insufferable hell it has become in the last 10 years.
I'm sorry, I won't refrain from criticizing a technology I don't like because a strawman member of a "marginalized community" could get discouraged from learning said technology. That's just... madness.
How do I/we/you unflag this? It's an apropos topic worth discussing.
I notice it where I work to an extreme degree (MAANG).
There is no value in holding religious opinions about any particular tool in the toolbox independent of use. But, there are individuals who throw their weight around with smartaleck negativity and many worship them as a result. I posit that people who cannot backup their claims with data or a survey of concrete experiences are selling their ego over engineering discipline. Arrogance isn't a signal of quality of anything beside arrogance. You'd be surprised how many over-confident people crash into hubris be it a startup product no one wanted or get sloppy with hiring based on trickery or trivia. Get too cocky and the Sword of Damocles of karma, life, or social capital is waiting to chop those who get "too big for their britches". (2022 cross-cultural context: it's an idiom of people who believe themselves to be 3 meters tall. I'm surprised it's recorded as an Australian saying when my 8th generation Irish-American grandfather said it in Texas. Australia is the Commonwealth's "Texas", I guess.).
Many things are replaced by better iterations, but plenty of large frameworks are still around. I was thinking of tooling like npm, webpack, react, redux, heck even vim, emacs, linux. It’s easy to forget that linux was the target of the same kind of derision back in the days.
Sure. It's kind of a sensational article, though, without much information in it, so I'm not sure it's a great fit for HN. It's possible that users will continue to flag it for that reason.
Also, hopefully you won’t consider this kissing your boots, but I genuinely appreciate what must be the tremendous amount of effort you put into this site. I have gained so much from this site, and the ruthless commitment to quality submissions is a big part of it.
Hating a language is not at all the same thing as hating its users.
PHP is an awful mess, and the fact that it's a common tool for budding web devs makes that worse, not better. New coders should not have to learn to navigate that pile to get anything done. I feel for them because I've been them.
My point is that calling PHP an awful mess, besides being unproductive and (IMO) not true, is that from their perspective, it is putting them down. Even from my perspective, after a long career writing in many languages, PHP is far from an awful mess, and it pays my pretty decent principal engineer salary.
I think that not wanting to see things from that perspective closes you off from becoming a better programmer.
If you're a new developer who happens to be focusing on PHP, seeing senior folks criticizing PHP as a language should make you question why they're doing that, and research their claims to see if they have merit. Some will and some won't. Taking someone's Twitter rant against some of the specific oddities of PHP as an assault on you personally seems like an opportunity for personal growth we should be encouraging, and not turn to coddling people like they're children. And the same could be said for JS on the front end, JS on the backend, C or C++ or Rust or Java or any number of languages.
Approaching others' criticisms with an open mind and trying to disprove them will make you better than trying to hamfist it into a claim of gatekeeping where there is none.
I have plenty of criticism of PHP, and I address the fact that valid criticism is essential in the third section.
Blindly saying that PHP is a hot mess, in a public setting, is detrimental to I think the community at large. PHP is but one of the many tools I’ve been using, my heart is with Common Lisp, but I’ve really enjoyed Java, golang, C++, Typescript and now rust. Nothing binds me to PHP except I get a tremendous amount of stuff done with it.
I have plenty of hot takes on technology, and love to use strong language when I rant amongst friends. If anything, I am really not attached to any one of them, there is good and bad everywhere, and many decisions have nothing to do with technical merits at all.
There is a difference between constructive criticism and calling a language "awful mess". PHP is fine for many use cases and I cannot take a "senior folk" seriously if they plain old trash a language without providing constructive criticism which any language warrants including PHP.
So the point is that PHP is no different than say Go or JS or Java. They all have their pros and cons.
I'd be willing to explore the possibility that PHP isn't as bad as I think it is. I'll wholeheartedly agree that putting down anyone who uses PHP is bad.
My objection is that you're declaring that people who attack a language are actually attacking its users, which makes them bullies, which means you should ignore them. I think you're taking things far too personally and using it as a reason to dismiss criticism.
But oftentimes our ire towards certain technologies seems like ire towards those that use them, even if that’s not the intent. It leaves people feeling “outside” as it implies they should have known not to use that technology.
My takeaway from the article was that when we see someone using a technology we despise, we take action to make their specific life better, rather than hate on the tech. In the case of PHP, that might be asking what issues they run into and suggesting solutions. That could lead to conversations like “you know, Python doesn’t have this issue, you might want to check out X framework to try it out”. But general flaming on PHP isn’t productive.
It is also missing that there are many valuable things to be learnt from a technology that is that successful. This doesn’t happen by accident, and also shows that technical elegance is but a small part of being a successful engineer.
But really, switching to Java for a bit, a tremendous amount of amazing engineering has gone into making Java the language it is. The Java flaming might have gone down in recent years, but the hot takes from the C/C++ unix crowd in the aughts was impressive.
If you can add value for your employer or customers and make a living, which language or tools you use to do that makes no difference. Pick any language, tool, style of work and you can find people who criticize it. So what? How does random criticism rise to gatekeeping?
The job market has tightened up because of economic changes and worry that money will get tighter. That affects most sectors, not just tech or programming. If you read HN you know that many companies have hiring freezes, people have or will soon get laid off, and good jobs get scarce with more competition. That has nothing to do with gatekeeping or programmers who look down on PHP. The programming business goes through booms and busts for reasons that have nothing to do with programming languages.
I have used PHP for years, since it came out and offered an alternative to Perl CGI scripts, ASP, and Cold Fusion. It gets the job done. It has some problems. I don't use PHP exclusively, I don't think of or call myself a "PHP programmer," and I don't care that some programmers hate it, whether out of experience or ignorance. My customers don't care about that, they have business problems to solve, a budget and schedule, and don't read language flame wars. Focus on finding work rather than complaining about job ads and PHP haters.
Sifting through job postings online and filling out applications describes one of the least effective and most time-consuming ways to find work.