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Comment by aneesh | Hacker News Reader

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aneesh

If anyone else had written this, it wouldn't be worth noting.

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Not true. If Guido van Rossum had written it, it would definitely be worth noting.

It would be noteworthy if any evangelist for any programming language that is not PHP said something like this.

Still not really worth noting. It shouldn't take a celebrity telling you the obvious for you to acknowledge it.

Although I definitely think you're correct, it's an important point none the less. A lot of us get so caught up in bashing PHP usage for large apps that we forget it's really great for small throwaway scripts and prototyping mini-apps.

DHH pointing this out reminds us that even someone super devoted/entrenched in the RoR world can see the utility of it for this kind of use case, and that the rest of us should as well.

If you can't maintain your large scale PHP projects, more blame lies with you than it does the platform.

Unfortunatley, the ease of getting PHP scripts up and running leads to the bulk of its poor implementation. Is the lesson to make setup just difficult enough to scare of the novices?

If PHP wasn't easy to get started with, I would have never started developing for the web, period.

Remember, everyone was a novice once. Lowering the constraints to get started can only mean that more great things will be created, not less.

Ditto. There's a lot to be said for being available on every $8 shared hosting platform on the web. In a couple weeks I had my first database driven site up and running using the LAMP stack with no prior programming or Linux experience at all.

Thank god it is now defunct so I can't embarrass myself by linking to it.

A lower barrier to entry often means that a low standard of quality should be expected of a lot of entries :). But I can't argue that it's an easy choice for someone who wants to get started writing web applications in their garage -- $8 shared hosting is great if you're at that end of the spectrum.

PHP works fine for many people and, hey, if it works for you by all means stick with it. We should all work with the tools we're most comfortable with.

http://www.coboloncogs.org/COGS.HTM

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