Gee, I wonder if this guy hates Java?

[giza]

http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=165966&cid=13845934

It's an interesting rant about PHP vs. Java, written by a C coder.

Comments welcome.

Comments

[taral.livejournal.com]

I think he hates Java and PHP both.

[balinares.livejournal.com]

Which might be a sign of experience.
Tenet one of computer programming is: it sucks.
The experienced worker's primary task will be to figure out how to make it suck less.
Neither Java nor PHP help much with that, each for its respective reasons, but that's another matter.

[kellic.livejournal.com]

OK I need to go to bed....For some odd reason I read
"Gee, I wonder if this guy hates Jews?"... o.O Not sure where that came from..

[netcrimes.livejournal.com]

Geez. "Huge Donkey balls." That's a visual I can't get out of my head.

[pyesetz]

The post contained excessive profanity.  Use less, mean it more!  Like him, I'm a C coder who manages Java-programmers.  I've done some PHP projects, but nothing huge.  His comments (after I mentally deleted all the fucking intensifiers) seem correct to me.  Do you agree with his technical position?

[giza.livejournal.com]

I'm not a big Java guy, so I can't comment on that aspect.

I agree with most of what he says about PHP, and I don't necessarily see that as a weakness, either. Sure, if you're an idiot programmer who just wants to throw code together, then yes, PHP will shoot you in the foot. But, if you give some thought to what you do, you can create some nice systems.

I've been experimenting with module writing for Drupal (http://www.drupal.org/) over the last week, and that's a great example of a nice framework that was built in PHP. It worries about the details of databases and user authentication so that you don't have to! :-P

[scs-11.livejournal.com]

Every language that 'simplifies' programming (I'm talking PHP and perl here, not java) ultimately falls into the same black hole - people write programs in it without knowing how to program well, and you wind up with an unpredictable, unmaintainable mess. To write good code in the language, you have to use self-discipline - and of course, that's one of the programmer-ish traits that 'simple' scripting languages supposedly free you from.

This isn't to say PHP and perl aren't nice, just that, well, cheaters never prosper. Complexity always bites you in the ass, and there's no way to avoid the problem of large == complexity.