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I feel no need to hate a language, but I recognize that I have a feeling of hatred towards it. I also recognize that such feelings bias my words and feel that it is helpful to others when known biases are disclosed.

In this context, I think disclosing my emotions towards the language tells others that while I dislike PHP the way Heroku phrased their "makers at heart" was a positive sentiment that I could agree with. It seemed relevant.

Why do I hate it at 80%?

Because it burned me in the past. Because it makes doing things right hard. Because other people make the same mistakes over and over and yet I still have to use it on occasion.

It's an emotion built up after years of negative experiences. My emotional experience with PHP went from Interested to Excited to Cautious to Wary to Hateful.

For me, PHP was the friend that promised the moon and when he did show up he came with week-old dried out cheese instead of the moon that he promised.

Cumulative bad experiences, especially when larger factors (legacy decisions, inertia, switching costs, etc) force you to continue having those bad experiences, leads to negative emotions.

Call it extreme dislike if you want, but for me it is a lesser form of hate.

Note that this is all personal description. Perhaps it was the timing (04-08) perhaps it was my level of experience, perhaps it was bad luck. I realize that some people have unanimously or mostly positive experiences with PHP and I'm not trying to diminish their experiences.




> Because it makes doing things right hard.

It actually doesn't. It makes doing things wrong easy. And no, those are not equivalent.


In a situation where our natural compulsions are not always right, they are largely equivalent.


I have never understood this hatred towards a language. Some languages and the ecosystems around it may allow you to burn yourself easily more than the others and in some cases where you were in your career when you first started hacking in that language might have burnt you. But in both scenarios I don't see the source for hatred. It adds to who you are as a developer I think. I frequently hear this from people who like to identify themselves with one of these camps. Why not enjoy all the languages and use them for what they are good at or more accurately use them for what you are good at using them for. Can't we all just get along...


I wouldn't care about PHP if it weren't so popular. I mean, it's terrible to program in Brainfuck, but nobody uses it seriously so it doesn't matter.

PHP has a unique combination of terribleness and popularity, though, and that's a bad mixture.


>PHP has a unique combination of terribleness and popularity, though, and that's a bad mixture

I've read similar arguments made against C, and C++, and Java, and Ruby here, so I don't think that bias is unique.


Ruby is flawless,Java is rigid,C well nothing against C,C++ is a mess yes.

PHP is a mix of C (apis like mysql_fetch_assoc ), C++ (:: ->) and java (class and interface ) with javascript weak typing.

It is a mess. I'm a PHP dev, the problem is when i have to maintain other's people mess too. Ruby and Java messes are far more easier to maintain than any PHP one.

There is also the PHP culture and community ,which quite toxic.

For all these reasons,while PHP is my bread winner I have no love for it.





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