Hacker News Reader

Comment by ForHackernews | Hacker News Reader

To be fair, PHP is kinda dangerous, especially in the hands of novices. Honestly, a world with fewer people-who've-never-written-code writing PHP doesn't sound like a bad start to me.

Don't get me wrong, it's possible to write great code in PHP, it's just a language that makes it easy for you to shoot yourself in the foot.

View on HN

You hear the same argument for C / C++ but you don't see people putting it down as much as PHP.

The beginner's C / C++ programs don't usually get put on the Internet (or even on a local network).

There is no such thing as a bad program. If it works, it's fine. Really...

It's bad if it's susceptible to running an attacker's arbitrary code.

The dangerous features of C/C++ gives you something useful in return -- low level control of memory. The dangerous features of PHP don't provide any benefits. It's dangerous because of poor design.

That's probably because C/++ don't have good drop in alternatives. If I want to write a website, there are at least half a dozen equally mature languages to choose from. If I want to write any kind of embedded systems code, C is almost always going to be far and away the easiest way to go.

Not as much, but an awful lot, and in similar ways.

There's a difference in that PHP originated as a low-quality templating language, and that C/C++ are historical monuments of computing that most of the infrastructure of the world and most of the interpreted languages of the world run on.

There's not much of a difference in people calling both old, only used by dinosaurs, essentially unsafe, and the root cause of all bugs being choosing to use them in the first place.

Sure I do, just not in the web dev community because they're generally seeing more PHP to warn about than C / C++ to warn about.

The difference is that PHP is far more accessible to the average beginner than C/C++.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com