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Comment by hackermom | Hacker News Reader

here's my view on this:

the worst carpenter on the planet is the one who whines about the tools he/she has at hand to complete the task, cheeky because he/she doesn't have his or her favorite hammer around.

the best carpenter is the one who gets the job done with the tools at hand. go php. there are just bad programmers, not bad tools.

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I would have to disagree with you when you say there are no bad tools. Try frame a house using a brick, or perhaps a sledgehammer. Software is the same, for example, C is a bad language to use when creating a website, its possible, but not a good idea.

Well, if you're using C, first you need to write an interpreter, such as perhaps a Ruby interpreter, or PHP, or a JVM, etc.

You can write web apps in C; I wrote CGI "scripts" in C as recently as 2004.

Even the best carpenter in the world isn't going to produce his best work if you force him to use a blunt $3 chisel. Conversely hiring the best carpenter in the world and trying to save money by making him use a blunt $3 chisel is a huge waste of money.

Sure a great carpenter will be able to produce good work even with bad tools, but if you want him to produce his best work you have got let him work with what he considers the best tools.

I would agree with hackermom. Of course, there are tools that may adhere to some standard better than others, but who is to say that adhering to a particular standard is the right move every time? And to what degree should a tool adhere to said standard before it becomes magically "good"?

Without context of the given problem at hand, the timeframe to complete the project, and the skillset of those involved, it's naive to make a blanket statement saying there are just plain bad tools.

In my humble opinion, tools should enable you to get your job done faster and at a higher quality than had you not used the tools. The more skilled a programmer is, the more variation there is in leveraging a tool for the end goal. This goes for any framework and any language.

Seems like people are forgetting that there are a lot of very handy functions built into PHP5 that make life simple for the web developer. Yes, some args are inconsistently ordered, and naming conventions are not the most consistent. Still, the fact of the matter that there are several high-quality frameworks available for PHP5 that are as strict or loose as you like speaks to me that PHP--like Ruby or Python or Perl--is a platform that at allows people to get things done. Isn't that the point, after all?

> the best carpenter is the one who gets the job done with the tools at hand. go php. there are just bad programmers, not bad tools.

It really depends on your subjective view of what "best" means.

The best programmer in the world can probably do a better job than you at any given task, using only the GCC compiler.

But ... I'd bet he's going to cost you hundreds of dollars per hour, and he probably wouldn't get the job done faster that a decent programmer who is using "the right tool for the job".

Good design / Low cost / Fast ... pick 2

Myself ... I could use PHP, since it's mainstream and there are lots of low-cost hosting solutions, but I prefer Python because the tools are more mature and not necessarily related to web-dev (iPython, PyQT, Nltk, numpy, Django) ... and really, I've worked with Symfony, Django, ASP.NET MVC, Ruby on Rails and Perl's Catalyst ... the quality of a framework is heavily dependent on the language, trust me ;)

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