things about php that make me sad:
1. it exists
2. it's used
3. many of its users make more money than me
4. it has poisoned the market, clients have learned to expect and even demand php-braindeath
1. it exists
2. it's used
3. many of its users make more money than me
4. it has poisoned the market, clients have learned to expect and even demand php-braindeath
Systems and database administration are hugely complimentary skills, but someone who doesn't know anything about setting either one up is still developing.
How about knowing the difference between types of brushes and what effect they have on the canvas? Is it 'great art' if it's accidental?
That said, this is more like arguing that you can't be a great artist if you don't know how to make the canvas yourself.
I'd hope they are experts, or at least have no trouble learning quickly. If they can't manage MSSQL or Tomcat, how do they set up their local development environment, implement automated integration tests, etc?
I work on Java every day. I probably have a better grasp of Tomcat than many people at my company. If we somehow magically lost all our Apache/Tomcat configuration files, there's no way in hell I could build it from scratch.
(I can, however, build a scalable system based around PHP web apps with my eyes closed. I'm not super proud of that.)
WordPress is really an excellent companion to PHP itself - created by beginners who had no idea about how to design a language or framework. They have each since become somewhat respectable, but are shackled by the attempts they made to preserve backwards compatibility in the early days.