Yep, PHP is turning 30 this year! Wondering if "PHP is still relevant?" Ever since we have been hearing that PHP is dead. It was “dead” 10 years ago, 5 years ago, and “is dead” today. But somehow - it isn’t. Anyway... happy birthday!

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[–] lime@feddit.nu 43 points 1 week ago (24 children)

my entire way of reasoning about programming languages changed when i read on article about how hating on php was misogynistic. i clicked on it because it just sounded like yet another ragebait, but it made sense.

basically, since php is simple, and integrated with html, the vast majority of php devs started out as designers who later got into code. since php has always been a mess, nobody wanted to build mainstream tooling for it except the people actively working with the language. this means that mainstream ideas about language and tooling design didn't percolate down to php like it has done to most languages. so php devs, when exposed to tooling the rest of the world takes for granted, are usually overwhelmed because not only is there a lot of it, nobody in php-land uses tools like that. so they get called bad devs of a bad language. some of them, who really like to code, push through this massive difficulty spike, while others just assume that "actual programming" is too hard and go back to design, even though tooling usage has little to do with your skill as a programmer.

the kicker, of course, being that web design has more women than most other dev specialisations.

[–] lilja@lemmy.ml 17 points 1 week ago (1 children)

In the start of my career I felt that there was a sentiment around web dev that it's not "real" programming in a way. Not sure if that's the case any more seeing as the majority of modern develoment is for web platforms.

I've never heard the idea that PHP is a language used by web designers who migrated to coding, but it kind of makes sense. How PHP works, where everything is just HTML until the <?php tag comes in, made it so attractive as a way to add some spice to static pages. I cut my teeth on PHP and moved on to other languages later, so it makes sense that it would function as a gateway drug of sorts, also resulting in it not getting the attention from seasoned experts that other languages benefit from.

Calling dislike of PHP misogynistic feels like a massive stretch.. but maybe it's not considering how the designer/programmer divide also has a massive gender disparity. PHP has its problems, tooling being just one side of it, and its nature as a designer-friendly language makes it easy for elitists to mask their bigotry behind "objective" arguments that PHP is bad.

[–] lime@feddit.nu 7 points 1 week ago

i think the wording of the original article was intentionally inflammatory, but "the purpose of a system is what it does". if shit-talking php causes women to leave the profession, it doesn't really matter what the intent was.

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