Ask HN: Why no love for PHP?

If you're new to programming, don't waste your precious memory to inventorying an ugly mass of built-in PHP functions. Just pick Python, Ruby, C# or something else--anything else. If you have to learn it for your job, well, learn one of the other languages anyway.

For example, about typing... your argument is that when you cast a string to an int, it returns 0. What would you have it return, null?

Typing is jank in a number of ways, but in most cases I See the logic in the original decision. To a noice, the idea that false == "false" (because "false" casts to 0) but true != "true" just seems broken. But what else would you have it do?

About namespaces, people are complaining that PHP should use the dot operator like every other language. PHP uses dot for concat, which eliminates the ambiguity of using + for both concat and addition that exists in other languages. Now, they're going to use a backslash for namespace resolution. And that does create operator ambiguity. So PHP trades one ambiguity (dot) for this other.

And what do you possibly mean by "older style language"? Do you mean functional features? As you probably know, lambad's and closures will be available in 5.3. I agree that Python (my language of choice) and even C# (my 2nd fave) seem cleaner. But of course they do. They're new. Java seemed clean in 1997, too.

And finally.. I do value consistency in userland code and in the runtime. And PHP is horribly inconsistent. A salvation army of a language. But that stopped actually affecting me about 8 years ago when I left behind VIM for a real IDE with intellisense.

Many hobbyists who have reached the utmost peak level in their art go totally primitive. Cooks grow their own food. Carpenters make hand-made furniture, people really serious about clothes go bespoke.

Just because we spend more time agonizing over things doesn't mean we have to spend more money on them. More "expensive" and "fancy" doesn't make them better- in cooking, look at the revival of cast-iron cookware and the people learning how to sharpening their own knives. The coffee snobs don't buy the most expensive starbucks brands- instead they go order fresh coffee beans, roast themselves, and then grind them. A person really into clothes doesn't get the latest Tom Ford/Armani suit- they instead get a bespoke suit from an English tailor, which is often far cheaper. There has been a movement away from $150 running to shoes to shoes like the vibram five-fingers to even barefoot!

Why do masters of the art do that? I think it's because of the idea that you can create something from nothing. This is very easy to do with computers (programming is the only profession where you can truly create something from nothing, limited only by your mind). You're not limited to someone else's vision when you do this- you can have everything exactly the way you want, the way you care about, the way that lets you exude your passion the most.

The guy who uses Ruby on Rails is no different from you, you just create your art in different ways. Using a green screen editor doesn't matter to them- they're not stirred up by it.

Instead, they get stirred up by using RoR. Maybe RoR solves a unique problem that they've been dealing with. Similarly, the guy tired of dealing with Java switches to Clojure and experiences the same light that you're experiencing- going simpler doesn't matter that too much to him.

There's no right or wrong answer in simplicity vs. complexity. Someone out there (Wozniak) is more of a purist than you and is writing everything in Assembly. The guy writing the latest and greatest web application is using Django because it's the simplest, most purest way to solve their problem- and when they get passionate enough about it that this is no longer the case, they'll go write their own.

You can get caught up in the tools and the techniques, but the one thing that really matters is that the examples I gave (and the example that you gave, which I love and will definitely remember) are of people expressing their passion. We may express it in different ways, but at least we're exuding it.

People that don't exude any passion drive me crazy.