I've now seen twice the notion insinuating PHP is somehow still a lesser language.

[sushee@ohai.social]

I've now seen twice the notion insinuating PHP is somehow still a lesser language. Some people are apparently stuck in a 25 year old notion of PHP.

NOBODY can afford this anymore and if this shit of communities doing it to EACH OTHER doesn't stop, you're just making it easy to be destroyed.

So be in freakin' solidarity with each other for a change.

I challenge you to say something good about the language you dislike the most.

I'm so SO tired of this shit since 1999, really.

[mnl@hachyderm.io]

@sushee The PHP hate in the US is a real thing, it's impressive. It's been a "normal" language literally since like 2004 o_O

[torb@hachyderm.io]

@sushee While I _personally_ don't like PHP… but like from an objective perspective it's just *not* that different from all the scripting languages like JavaScript, Python, Ruby, etc… who seem to be be fairly respected.

I'm also confused by how people can think it's lesser. Around 40% of all websites is built with a PHP-based system and one of the biggest social networks was built on it. It can clearly be used to create things.

Personally I think it's cool if someone make stuff and if PHP is one of those tools, cool!

(My dislike is of PHP is mainly based on my mild dislike of scripting languages in general, specifically: I find lack of static typing in languages very awkward to work with personally.)

[kboyd@phpc.social]

@sushee oh gosh, the language I dislike the _most_? I'm not even sure what that would be. Like, I sometimes poke fun at (or outright denigrate) javascript, but it's obviously extremely powerful. and coding in it works well enough. I wouldn't say I dislike it the _most_.

So that leaves, I dunno, objective C or maybe Go, but I don't have enough experience in them to even say something bad about them properly, let alone something good.

[solariz@chaos.social]

@sushee I started with php as my first lang, and tbh I still often prefer it. #php

[solariz@chaos.social]

@mnl @sushee interesting, I never thought this a regional thing, but true here at least in my bubble (EU techies) there isn't much hate against php at all.

[mnl@hachyderm.io]

@solariz @sushee programming language ethnography is fascinating. Germany and Ukraine are php, france has ocaml, Russia is very c++ (at least was in the early aughts), java vs c#. I worked with indian developers and while not remotely knowledgeable about its culture, java seemed to at least within their cultural sphere to be omnipresent.

While people were clowning on php when I lived in Europe, it was usually more in jest. I encountered genuine if not hatred, then dismissal and ridiculing of php and Java developers here in the US, amongst people from whom I really expected better (recurse center alumni).

One reason I think that php gets so much flack here in the US is classism. A lot of businesses here are started by what I’m going to call “hustlers”, people who like building businesses. They will usually get a supply chain going and put a Wordpress site in front because they can muck about with plugins, then hire a php dev or two (because until relatively recently, JavaScript was second grade citizen in wp), and usually hire non-us developers on freelancer.com (which is where I got the job that ultimately made me move to the US). As such, a lot of php developers are lower-class people, often from the global south (while not necessarily lowerclass, I was living in eastern Germany and barely making ends meet because uh autism and German work culture or something). People often without degrees, or working in “software sweat shops” and not all that invested in their craft or not having the opportunities to invest in it.

[solariz@chaos.social]

@mnl @sushee I think also PHP (at least was back in php4 days) was relatively easy to learn for people not studying "programming" so I remember already at this time it was often talked down to not being a "high language". But yeah very interesting if you think about it.

[mnl@hachyderm.io]

@solariz @sushee it’s an awesome entry level language and still is, because you can write a file and drop it in a folder and boom your website works. Change the file press reload and your changes are live. Now that sure is problematic to some respect, but that’s why I still like using it too, just like I grab an arduino even if I have 15 years of experience in embedded.

No npm brain melt or “static void main(int argc, char *argv[]) { }”.

[crell@phpc.social]

@torb @sushee Fun fact: PHP has the strongest enforced typing of any scripting language. It's actually pretty solid these days. All that's missing is generics, which are really hard to do in PHP's model.

[crell@phpc.social]

@sushee

I really dislike working in Python, largely because it's so untyped. But I am currently trying to steal context managers for PHP, and would love to steal comprehensions, too.

Python has a similar "get shit done and move on" mentality to it to PHP, which is part of why it's so popular.

[zerodogg@hachyderm.io]

@sushee Ok, challenge accepted. mod_php is and was brilliant. Reduced the barrier of entry to making server side webapps to nearly nothing. Write normal HTML, add some <?php blocks, copy to server. Webapp.

[torb@hachyderm.io]

@Crell @sushee That’s cool to hear!

I feel with gradually typed languages culture matters a lot. How much is types used in practice?

[flq@freiburg.social]

@sushee any language that still thrives at this point must be working.

[crell@phpc.social]

@torb @sushee Fairly widespread. The pockets of resistence are largely super old libraries, or WordPress.

Almost anything written in the last 6-8 years is very well typed.

[a_lex_ander@mastodon.social]

@torb @Crell @sushee No offense, but your "I dislike PHP because it's not typed" is the exact reason why PHP devs wonder where all the ideas about it come from.

I personally haven't written a single PHP project without types and later strict enforcement in the last 10 years. I'd guess 95% of my entire codebase (due to some libraries opting to be backwards compatible) is typed.

[a_lex_ander@mastodon.social]

@zerodogg @sushee FrankenPHP (building on Caddy) is the new mod_php. Start server, get SSL out of the box, drop script, run everything in parallel.

[torb@hachyderm.io]

@a_lex_ander @Crell @sushee I mean, my main point here was that even if my premise was true you would still *have to* recognize that it’s not worse than many other popular and relatively respected languages.

Additionally I also wanted to make the point that you can dislike something and still respect it.

[a_lex_ander@mastodon.social]

@torb @Crell @sushee As I wrote, I'm not trying to attack you in any way. It's just funny how many misconceptions there still are even after a decade. I don't know of any language that seems to be as misunderstood. But then again, someone recently told me monitors in Linux are almost impossible to configure because of all the config files and I genuinely couldn't remember the last time I opened an XF86Config.

[torb@hachyderm.io]

@a_lex_ander I was kinda aware that PHP had gradual typing (as with all scripting languages), so it doesn’t change it *that much* for me. I really like fairly strong and strict type systems. Of course those come with their own tradeoffs (my Swift compile times are at times slow and my the compiler error messages not always the easiest to understand). I suppose I’m willing to pay that particular price.

EDIT: Did not take it as an attack at all! It’s hard to keep detailed track of all tech communities and it was fun to learn more!