Ask HN: PHP for Python programmers

A language snob is someone who derives a feeling of superiority from the language they use, in reality the tools matter a lot less than language snobs will have you believe.

I've worked with lots of people over the years, and some of them were all-out snobs about 'their' chosen language.

These people were extremely irritating to work with because they refused to look past the minimal advantage that you derive from working in language a,b or c.

The stuff most of us create could be implemented in just about any language without anything close to the kind of 'slowing down' that you allude to, it all boils down to how well you know your language and the environment you operate in, as well as knowledge about the domain you are building your work for.

In my experience the choice of language has a relatively small impact on the speed of the initial build and the quality of that build.

Over a longer term for less than rocket science style projects it is far more important to have good documentation and a supply of reasonably competent coders than that it is important to do your project in any one specific language.

Of course, there are languages such as brainfuck and a bunch of others that you'd do well to avoid for many reasons but I take it we're limiting the discussion to the top 10 languages used to build everyday applications and web-apps, say Java, C++, Python, Perl, PHP, Ruby, C# and whichever won't spring to mind at the moment.

It's great that the PHP devs do that! Is that a compelling reason to use the language? I'm not so sure.

>That's a straw-man, I said no such thing;

You said:

> The team that makes PHP makes quality a higher priority than just about any other language

Can you explain to me what I misinterpreted?

> And no, I'm not going to provide you with any 'evidence' for my claims, you can take my word for it. This is not a court of law, and besides that I never made any claims about other languages before this comment and I don't feel like putting other languages and/or their developers down.

It's a little silly to make a comparative statement like "The team that makes PHP makes quality a higher priority than just about any other language" and then refuse to provide examples of where this happens and matters. If you'd just said "The PHP devs respond quickly to bug reports", sure, but when you start saying "They do this better than other languages", you're implicitly already "put other languages and/or their developers down". In a case like that, I don't think it's out of line to ask for examples; if there are major failings in other languages that go ignored and unaddressed, then that's certainly worth some attention. If there aren't, the whole point is moot anyhow. If there are examples of systemic problems that go ignored in other languages, I'd like to know about them - that may matter when I choose a language for a project.

I'm not interested in trashing PHP here; I use it on a daily basis, and get a lot done with it. I also use Ruby, Python, Javascript (both server and clientside), bash, and the occassional perl on a daily basis, and don't have problems with mysterious segfaults and unexplained crashes from 2-year-old bugs that would somehow make PHP's lack of such problems a major marketing bulletpoint. I don't understand your position at all, because as far as I can tell, it's "The PHP interpreter is mostly bug-free, and bugs get fixed quickly" (which is great!), but...what language with showstopper bugs survives mainstream use?

It's definitely not elegant when compared to Ruby or Python but it's not as bad as Java. Because you know Python, it won't be hard to pick up but you'll need to accept that you're working with a different environment and live with the tradeoffs.

The neat thing about PHP code is that it runs pretty much anywhere. This is not a big deal when you're building one app that is going to be used by a lot of users but it is a big deal when you have projects you're building that are open source and you want to foster a growing community.

As others have mentioned, a lot of your sanity levels will depend on what their current code looks like. If it's at a company like Facebook, I'm assuming their code would be at least decent or even nice. On the other hand, it could be a complete nightmare to work with bad code. A different way to look at bad code could be as an opportunity to do a lot of work and make yourself very valuable to the team. It just depends on whether you want to take on that type of role.

Now if money and distribution of your code isn't a biggie for you, I wouldn't take the job as you don't want to realize you've wasted a year on something you hate.

The result is a bloody mess. Find a different job.