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Comment by lloeki | Hacker News Reader

> Does their hard work deserve this constant ridicule?

Nobody seriously criticizing PHP is ridiculing people working with it. On the contrary, I personally applaud people having to, and succeeding at extracting diamonds with a broken pickaxe.

> The problem is, many "eloquent, smart programmers" are too busy "posting long, well researched screeds" to spend some time making PHP better (or making a better PHP).

A "better" PHP would be at its core so entirely different and incompatible with the current PHP that calling it "PHP" would be a complete misnomer. Since it would be such a different language/platform with only vague syntactic and semantic similarities, one might as well invest its time in the better designed, actively developed, battle-tested, currently available alternatives.

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> Nobody seriously criticizing PHP is ridiculing people working with it.

I rarely see this. I've found it hard to find a good criticism of PHP that doesn't find a way to insult it's user base.

Probably the best criticism of PHP has come from Jeff Atwood's recent post[1] (and even he couldn't go the post without slinging immature, and downright vulgar insults).

1. http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/06/the-php-singularity...

That's exactly what I'm talking about, it's insulting and it disappoints me that all of the recent HN threads have been full of similar insults. Their arguments always seem to boil down to "my hammer is better than your hammer, and you're an idiot for choosing the wrong hammer, but luckily I am here to re-educate you".

PHP is so incredibly bad as to have no redeeming qualities to the language whatsoever other than its simplicity in deployment.

Whereas I can have reasoned conversations with proponents of most modern languages, PHP is simply and unequivocally a complete and total failure of a language, and there is resultantly absolutely no room for concession when discussing the language.

PHP is broken and should never be used, and if there are use cases that the alternatives don't address, we should work to address them.

> PHP is broken and should never be used, and if there are use cases that the alternatives don't address, we should work to address them.

What alternatives meet your standards of not sharing qualities of PHP while matching the quality of simplicity in deployment (of which Python and Ruby instantly fail)?

I don't think any language matches the simplicity of deployment, but outside some very constrained use cases in environments where there can not be sufficient technical expertise and staffing, deployment doesn't begin to justify the technical travesty of PHP.

In a corporate technology organization there is no justification.

I assume then that there are also no languages that don't share qualities with PHP?

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