Re:Tell HN: "Ruby vs. PHP" is not of interest to good hackers.
by jon_dahl on Thursday April 09, 2009 @12:54PM
(#554680)
This is fair. For what it's worth, I think PHP kind of sucks, and interesting criticism of any language is worthwhile. I love Steve Yegge's Tour de Babel article (http://steve.yegge.googlepages.com/tour-de-babel), and I even generally enjoy Zed's loud criticism of my day-to-day language.
What I don't like is language trolling, which often comes in the form of claiming that one language is better than another. Unless you're looking at a narrow slice of the language (performance, documentation, expressiveness), you can't just say that one language is better than another.
Well, let's not go over the top here. Many of the most famous hacker writings are passionate critiques of computer languages.
I work with PHP every day. But if I were not allowed to use rude words to describe PHP I'd never get through the day without biting through my tongue.
I think what you mean to say is: "Good hackers find interesting criticism of PHP to be interesting."
(It also helps to be constructive, and polite, although those are not hard-and-fast rules provided you are interesting enough. Have you read Steve Yegge's Kingdom of Nouns article? Have you heard Paul Graham's hilarious line about recruiting Python programmers vs recruiting Java programmers? They are good writers, and funny, but they are also scathing.)