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Comment by pc86 | Hacker News Reader

PHP was the first language I ever used professionally. The code I wrote - the code every single one of my colleagues wrote - was atrocious. We were paid bottom dollar ($30k in 2008) to write absolute shit code. The PHP community in my area was the same. All newbies, all paid barely more than a fast food manager, all writing code that could be taken down by a HS student with Fiddler.

I'm sure different experiences exist, but the majority of folks who I speak to have experiences that match mine very closely.

PHP is a ghetto.

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PHP is so vast that it's a ghetto, the rich uptown area, a sprawling suburban middle class, and more.

I share some of your experiences - I'm disturbed by how easy it is for people without basic coding knowledge to make money "building php websites". But I also see and run in to a large number of people who can do fantastic PHP code (testable, documented, clean, modular, etc).

One thing I've noticed is that most of the people who can do good PHP code (at least in the sense that it's not crappy) have also worked in other languages/tech, either before or during their PHP work. I know the exceptions, but for the most part, someone's PHP code quality is higher if they've done more than just PHP.

> someone's PHP code quality is higher if they've done more than just PHP.

That's how most quality frameworks for PHP were born, by folks having used other languages.

That being said, I find Symfony3 to be very decent. I was surprised by the quality of its documentation.

My experience mirrors yours exactly but with one difference - we were using .NET (C# specifically).

I'm now a professional .NET contractor (among other things) and looking back at the code we wrote 7 years ago terrifies me. Thankfully I'm not responsible for maintaining it anymore.

I suppose the point is that incompetence is language-agnostic. :)

And since then tools such as Composer and Symfyony3 have been released. It's been almost 10 years. Hell, even Magento2 isn't that bad, if you can look past the awkward dependency injection they're in the process of fixing.

PHP in 2008 is very different to PHP in 2016. PHP frameworks in 2008 are very different to PHP in 2016. PHP developers in 2008 are very different to PHP in 2016.

Just because those tools exist doesn't mean people use them.

There were decent libraries and high quality code back in 2008 (and 2000) but people didn't necessarily use them.

It's arguable somewhat easier today, but that's a relative term.

If you're FTPing code from BBedit or Dreamweaver up to your godaddy shared hosting and clicking buttons in cpanel... composer/symfony won't help.

  > Just because those tools exist doesn't
  > mean people use them.

But, oh, they do! At least there in most of the jobs you will deal either with Symfony or with Laravel.

  > here were decent libraries and high quality code back in
  > 2008 (and 2000) but people didn't necessarily use them.

Please, name a couple from each year. PHP started to mature since PHP 5 and that was released in 2004. While you could have working and tolerable code before that the language was lacking features for high quality code. Maybe if you reframe that as "high quality given the limitations" I'd accept that. But I am seriously curious what would you consider high quality PHP libs from 2000.

Much of what was in PEAR was decent, if not good, and was used by a lot of folks as the basis for their projects.

All judgements of quality are relative to the capabilities of the tech/lang/platform at that time.

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