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Comment by dncornholio | Hacker News Reader

Hating on PHP almost feels like racism. All the arguments are biased or false. I always get sad after clicking on PHP articles on HN.

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I feel it's the opposite. Always a lot of people defending PHP in these threads, no criticism allowed. Gives a very misleading picture of the industry - in reality, PHP is not a loved language, it's below Powershell and just over C in the latest ranking[0] with 40% love / 60% dread.

[0]: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2021#technology-mo...

This only adds fuel to my argument. Yeah let's post a results on how people FEEL about a language. How is that objective?

I could argue 100% of the 40% of the people actually uses PHP and 100% of the 60% people don't even use it.

I've worked in PHP for years. It still makes me nauseous. I would never recommend anybody to learn PHP, it's simply a shitty language all around.

You can argue that, but it's not what the question was about. The survey question is:

> Which programming, scripting, and markup languages have you done extensive development work in over the past year, and which do you want to work in over the next year? (If you both worked with the language and want to continue to do so, please check both boxes in that row.)

Of course nothing requires survey participants to be honest or to actually totally read and comprehend the question.

I would argue that racism comes from ignorance and insecurity.

A lot of frustration with PHP comes from using it a lot (not ignorant) and not enjoying it. They want to be better programmers than they language would allow.

Granted, PHP has improved a lot since I last used it (2004). I think a lot of the arguments were true, but are no longer valid.

And juvenile programming language tribalism. You could compile hundreds of pages of ranting about any language and their ecosystem if you wanted to. Some people need to learn that just because you prefer one thing over the other it doesn't mean all the other things suck.

I also suspect a lot of the people complaining about X language/platform/ecosystem are not even using them in production environments judging by their very idealized view on building software.

Wait, what, really? PHP has come a long way, but is still littered with bad design, weird syntax and trying to be a bad Java with no threads and worse scalability.

You're perhaps joking, but victims of actual racism might not think that's funny.

I'm not joking and it's not supposed to bu funny. It's supposed to be confrontating.

Example: Someone saw some bad PHP code once in their lives and think all PHP code is bad. They saw someone say bad things about PHP so they think all PHP is bad. Or they think PHP is bad because they don't like how it looks.

Are you thinking about prejudice instead?

> All the arguments are biased or false.

All of them?

At the time of writing, 100%

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