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Comment by endijs | Hacker News Reader

What I got from this was - he ditched PHP not because it's impossible to write good code with it, but because it's possible to write crappy code with it. And that messed up code is result of bad team, not bad tool. But yeah - you can feel that I'm PHP dev and if that will result in HN down-votes, so be it. But I had to express my opinion.

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What I was most hoping to get from this blog post is to encourage PHPers to give Python a go. Try it out, build something in it. I think lowering the amount of bespoke PHP code in the wild would help the software industry as a whole.

That or the referral codes on your links to Linode and Digital Ocean.

Yeah, god forbid he have links that generate revenue for him. For shame!

Good developers should try to learn new tools regardless IMO.

This right here is the best comment in reply to the original article, and says succinctly why the original article misses the point.

Now that he's classifying himself as a Python programmer, he will run into the same problems as a when he was just a PHP programmer.

Language Programmers suffer.

I appreciate the encouragement, and a couple references along the way. After some time away from programming on a daily basis, Python is bringing me back.

I would go farther and say PHP makes it easy to write crappy code. Much harder to screw up in Python than PHP. Can you do it? Yes, but have to actually go out of your way to it, as the "easy" way is 99/100 the correct way, or will at least will fail hard and fast. That is where PHP errs, and something Go gets right. Code should either work or error ... warnings are a code smell, and PHP is very warning happy, including things that are an error in pretty much any other language, like accessing an undefined variable.

Actually, this is the way I'd look at it too - speaking of someone who was guilty of being very 'jacky' in managing a PHP production codebase. Throw some code inside a function to deal with whatever issue you're having and call it good...

In Python, it almost feels like that is akin to changing gears without a clutch... and I've only theories as to why that is.

it's more like the abandoned PHP because they had a crappy years-old codebase. And start developing in a new language (Python) with a new codebase which is not years old and they can design correctly. And in about 4-5 years they abandon python because they've got a crappy python codebase...

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