For a while I have been observing a tendency of technologists/engineers to describe technology in either black or white terms ie. X technology sucks, use Y technology. Most recent example is an article by someone going by the name of Eevee in his PHP a fractal of bad design. It is a damning expose of PHP’s failings/bad decisions/inconsistencies etc. Unfortunately as most articles of this type it involves a number of ad-hominem attacks like these
It’s so broken, but so lauded by every empowered amateur who’s yet to learn anything else, as to be maddening. It has paltry few redeeming qualities and I would prefer to forget it exists at all.
or
I assert that the following qualities are important for making a language productive and useful, and PHP violates them with wild abandon. If you can’t agree that these are crucial, well, I can’t imagine how we’ll ever agree on much.
This irritates me on many levels since it makes so many misguided assumptions e.g.
- Everyone’s mind is the same therefore everyone should like or hate language X
Of course not. Your mind is different than my “defective” mind. I quite prefer writing in PHP. I have written/write code in Ruby/Python/Perl and PHP is my preferred language. That may change but at this point it’s my preference. You may disagree with my choice and that’s OK.
- Issues we are trying to solve are similar/identical and we have same resource constraints aka one-size fits all
Of course not. If most coders on my team are well versed with PHP and we have a tight schedule you bet we are most likely to choose PHP. Technical merits are not the only consideration to be taken. They are certainly important but they often pale in comparison to other considerations such as people and culture.
- PHP core developers are incompetent
I have on a number of occasions disagreed and been frustrated with decisions made by PHP core developers however I do assume that in most/all cases they are well intentioned and are making the best decision under available circumstances. PHP has been around for a long time so I imagine making major changes is tough and involve making significant tradeoffs. If those tradeoffs become a show stopper for me I’ll use a different language.
Anyways the most bothersome part of the whole post is the technology “tribalism” which results in things like this (from Kibana README file)
Q: Why is this in PHP instead of Java, Ruby, etc? A: Because PHP is what I know. The total PHP is less than 200 lines. If you want it in something else, it shouldn’t be too hard to port it to your language of choice
That makes me pretty sad.