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Comment by swatcoder | Hacker News Reader

> They should be able to say why they went with PHP over something else that was available at the time they started.

Why, exactly? PHP, node, Ruby, Java, .NET, and Python are all capable tools with mature webapp frameworks. In terms of capabilities, the differences between them only matter for a small and rare set of projects.

They could have decided on one of these platforms by rolling a die and it would have little direct impact on their success or potential.

Presumably, the actual criteria was likely familiarity and fluency for their tech founder or early developers. This familiarity and fluency matters 1000x more to success than the differences between these frameworks.

Given that all the tools are mature and capable, having a team work with tools they know is a lot more valuable than handing them tools that they'll be learning how to use as they go.

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Why? Because I wouldn't want to join a team that makes decisions for no reason.

> Presumably, the actual criteria was likely familiarity and fluency for their tech founder or early developers.

That would be a completely valid answer to the question. The fact that they didn't answer the question at all is the problem here, not that they chose PHP.

Or maybe they didn’t want to waste time on a candidate with such superficial focuses? Next time ask them why they chose to paint the wall dark blue instead of navy blue.

If they were hiring an interior designer or painter who asked why a specific color or paint type was chosen, but gave no answer... that might still be weird.

This highlights something most devs don't understand. Product development is about developing a product not about writing code. All the choices we make should facilitate making a good product, writing good code is a side effect.

In this metaphor the colour of the wall is equivalent to the product. The code is equivalent to whether the painters used brushes, pads or rollers or whether they used ladders or scaffolding - the customers do not care.

By asking why choose php you are asking why use rollers to paint.

> In this metaphor the colour of the wall is equivalent to the product.

If that's the case, asking about the choice of implementation language sounds like asking about the spec.

It might be part of the technical spec but almost certainly not part of the product spec.

The end user does not care about the programming language.

"Presumably, the actual criteria was likely familiarity and fluency for their tech founder or early developers."

Then... why is it so hard for people to just answer like that? It's a perfectly acceptable reason, but often (like the GP in this subthread) I find people won't actually answer like that. They'll try to come up with weird justifications re: technical merit vs competing tech, and I've found their specific examples might be demonstrably wrong or are just fancier ways of saying "this was a personal preference".

What's been lost in all this discussion... the state of the code. I'd much prefer a stack in XYZ with some tests, sample data, repeatable steps, etc. vs a stack in ABC without any of the above.

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