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Comment by lutusp | Hacker News Reader

You really want to teach kids PHP? There are at least twenty better choices for teaching computer science basics and computer familiarization. PHP is not an appropriate teaching tool, any more than BASIC is.

I expect that, after exposure to PHP, young programmers will be placed in the position that led to this famous quote:

"It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: As potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration." -- Edsger W. Dijkstra

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You're right, we should probably just start 7 year olds out with assembly language and beat them with sticks. Starting them off with a fairly easy language that's widely widely widely used and easily introduces simple topics like variables, loops, etc is probably a terrible idea. Thanks for your consideration.

> You're right, we should probably just start 7 year olds out with assembly language and beat them with sticks.

What's wrong with the dozen languages that are obviously and manifestly superior to PHP in every respect?

> Starting them off with a fairly easy language that's widely widely widely used and easily introduces simple topics like variables, loops, etc is probably a terrible idea.

You're unqualified to be having this conversation. PHP is not a general purpose programming language, nor is it exemplary in any way whatsoever. It is a crippled, limited and broken language that is widely known among computer science professionals to be a pastiche of compromises.

For students, compare it to Python or Ruby, to name just two obviously superior classroom candidates that have every advantage over PHP. PHP can't even be tested or run without a server available. And I shouldn't have to tell you this.

http://www.securityfocus.com/news/11430

Quote: "Perhaps PHP should stand for Pretty Hard to Protect: A week after a prominent bug finder and developer left the PHP Group, data from the National Vulnerability Database has underscored the need for better security in PHP-based Web applications ... A search of the database, maintained by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), found that Web applications written in PHP likely account for 43 percent of the security issues found so far in 2006, up from 29 percent in 2005."

I really should have realized that my attempt to help kids learn something would degenerate into another pointless trolling argument over which language is better. I'm clearly a horrible human being. How about this...Why don't YOU write your own book using whatever language you want...or stop talking. In the mean time, I'll be off teaching kids php.

> I really should have realized that my attempt to help kids learn something would degenerate into another pointless trolling argument over which language is better.

What argument is that? You don't have any possible justification for choosing PHP. Ask anyone with more than a few months' exposure to computer programming.

With Python (as just one example), if I am a student, I can run the language in a bare-bones text terminal and get useful results and feedback. I cannot do this with PHP.

With Python, I can start an interactive, graphic session to get immediate, instant feedback in my experiments (IPython and others). I cannot do this with PHP.

With Python, if I happen to be underprivileged and want to learn programming, I can support my efforts with a simple computer with few resources and no HTTP server running -- like a Paspberry Pi. I cannot do this with PHP:

http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/tag/python

If I make a syntax error, I get immediate feedback, with a description and a line number. I cannot do this with PHP.

If I want to learn object-oriented principles, Python and Ruby both support full-fledged classes. PHP's support for object-oriented programming is, like everything else, a weak substitute.

It isn't possible to imagine a worse choice for students. In fact, I just realized you're not serious -- you're trolling. You want to have a pointless discussion about a crippled language.

> Why don't YOU write your own book using whatever language you want ...

As a matter of fact, I have written several languages in my 40-year career, and I was programming before you were born.

PHP is not a general-purpose computer programming language, it is a dedicated tool for designing server-side content, and it possesses a number of serious drawbacks. Teaching programming with PHP is like teaching mathematics with an abacus.

And if you were qualified to have this conversation, you would already know this.

I've been programming for nearly 30 years. I can use PHP to easily teach 7-10 year-olds simple concepts such as variables, loops, etc. in a very easy to understand and easy to implement way.

I can spark an interest in programming that can lead to further learning opportunities. PHP is a perfect tool for that in my mind. There. That's my justification.

Once someone learns one language...ANY language, including Basic which you hate as well, but which I learned first on the Commodore 64 and was not irreparably damaged from...one can easily pick up another. I picked up python in a day, ruby in a day. Let's be serious.

I don't need to have an interactive graphic session to get immediate instant feedback for 7 year old children. I don't need a text terminal to get useful results and feedback for seven year old children. I don't need to discuss object-oriented principles for 7 year old children.

I need pretty pictures, possibly comic in nature, and an easy programming language. I choose PHP.

I'm not trying to churn out 7-year old computer scientists and I don't think you understand that.

You don't like PHP...yippity do. As I said before, if you don't like it, shut up and write your own childrens book using whatever language you want.

Nothing you say will stop me from writing this book. So keep talking if you like, but I'm done interacting with you.

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