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Sadick
Sadick

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Hating on languages you don't use

Please dont. Every language is good at something. Your taste, experience and objectives are not the absolute truth. Just because you don't like it doesn't mean its a shitty language.

Top comments (44)

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thebouv profile image
Anthony Bouvier

It is okay to hate a language. The assumption I keep seeing is you wouldn't hate a language if you knew its nuances. I disagree. I know PHP pretty damn well and I have to use it. But I hate it. I love Python, and I don't get to use it as much as I want.

Having a personal opinion about a language is okay, whether you use it or not. I don't have to try a crap sandwich to know I won't like it. I can look at a language/framework/tool and go "Yep, my experience tells me that is not for me. I don't like how it handles X Y or Z."

Hating a language and telling someone they're dumb for using it is different. I personally hate PHP, but I don't begrudge anyone using it. That doesn't mean I can't say I hate it for fear of hurting your feelings. The fact that you even have feelings to be hurt over me saying I hate a language you love in itself shows that there is more to this than just objectiveness.

You love something, I hate it. That's totally okay. We can even have a fun discussion about the whys on both sides.

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bgadrian profile image
Adrian B.G.

Yes but hate is a personal emotion. It is my hate, based on a subjective or objective experience. It doesn't have to be based on reasoning or logic.

So please let me hate whatever I want, just that, I promise I will be careful when I respond to questions:

  • my professional opinion is ...
  • but personally I hate it

I can leave the 2nd response out if I'm in an official meeting :))

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michaelbrooks profile image
Michael Brooks • Edited

Unless you've used the language and have experience with it, why would you hate it?

People just blindly follow what others say because it's hip or cool. If you used the language and experienced a similar issue then it would be fine to hate on it or suggest your professional opinion.

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bgadrian profile image
Adrian B.G.

Unless you've used the language and have experience with it, why would you hate it?

I don't know, I'm just being the devils advocate here, but that's the beauty of hate, it doesn't have to be objective.

You can have love at first sight, or hate at first LOC.

Stupid examples "I hate Java because is too verbose, and you have to spend years of learning libs and frameworks" Or "I hate all languages where I have to type the semicolons."

Most of the web development is done on hip or cool, so you're fighting a hurricane here :))

People are replacing simple queries with ML scientists, DOM elements with 100kb frameworks and try to write fast important/responsive web services in interpreted languages.

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buinauskas profile image
Evaldas Buinauskas

PHP ranting in 3.2.1.

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sadick profile image
Sadick • Edited

The funny thing is that people who hate on PHP don't actually use PHP, the ones who do are busy getting things done and being productive

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thebouv profile image
Anthony Bouvier

That's a fairly broad claim.

I use PHP.

I hate it.

And that's okay.

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buinauskas profile image
Evaldas Buinauskas

Sounds like a relationship.

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qm3ster profile image
Mihail Malo

@Are the straights okay?

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sudiukil profile image
Quentin Sonrel

people who hate on PHP don't actually use PHP

Well, maybe they don't use it because they hate it :)

Joke aside, you are kinda right, most PHP haters don't actually use or know the language enough to justify this hate (I would know, I'm one of those awful persons :D), but hey, it's not important, IMHO, it's best to just let people have their opinion, whether or not it's justified. Also "hate" is often not "hate" and more "I don't feel like using this language, just leave me alone"... which is kinda ok too, I guess.

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kspeakman profile image
Kasey Speakman • Edited

I used PHP, created a lot of apps in it in v4-5. I wouldn't say I hate it, but I would never use it again on a new project. But then again, I could say that about a lot of languages.

Javascript, I hate. Its weird edges have wasted entirely too much of my limited lifespan.

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nektro profile image
Meghan (she/her)

Learning the nuances of PHP only makes you hate it more :P

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okolbay profile image
andrew

“being productive in php” is a good joke

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6temes profile image
Daniel

I don't program PHP anymore myself since many years ago, but I know some PHP shops that make good profit by building Webapps in PHP.

Besides, in my experience, being productive depends quite more on the developer and the team than in the language.

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okolbay profile image
andrew • Edited

Definitely there's a number of companies running php and are happy about it, question is - how happy developers are. From my experience php programming is way much less about the language and mostly about frameworks.
In fact, language + stdlib is so poor that every other framework defines its own Collection (hi Doctrine). This makes php developer more Symfony or Laravel developer, and the tend to use Bundles distributed along with these frameworks. Just check out php's package manager repository - for every library out there there's "bundle" version which is easy to plug into Symfony. Developers started to forget, how to use libraries.
Funny enough, now Symfony pushes against Bundle distribution system, but it took them this long to decide on that. I dont think this is healthy for both developers and framework, to be that "big" in the whole picture. I like idea of clean architecture and framework being implementation detail, but with php, when you are throwing away framework in an attempt to have clean architecture, you're left with nothing. Believe me, I've been there and abandoned these pointless efforts - amount of boilerplate is overwhelming.
So my point is - php developer's place is being a framework-dependent and producing framework-centric applications. Not something I find particularly exciting.

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qm3ster profile image
Mihail Malo

being productive

but

PHP

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avalander profile image
Avalander

I came here just to say that I hate PHP :P

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kspeakman profile image
Kasey Speakman

The original quote

Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.

  • Eleanor Roosevelt
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lilyotv_ profile image
LilyOfTheValley

If every language is good at something we probably have some languages good at being made fun of (respectfully) :)

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riekus profile image
Riekus van Montfort

I did java for about 8 years, never really liked it.

I was sceptical about moving to javascript after 8 years of java, but I loved JS.

I came back to PHP after about 10 years of not using it, and I loved it.

Bottom line: it's just a language. Languages evolve, and it really depends on what you're trying to achieve which language is suitable to your needs. They're just tools. As with real-life languages, it doesn't hurt to actually learn something about a language before you start bashing it.

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lukewestby profile image
Luke Westby • Edited

Unproductive disparagement of other programming languages is explicitly disallowed at discourse.elm-lang.org, for essentially this reason.

I'll add that it is the case that some languages are designed with haste or other constraints that make them less good at even their stated purpose than other alternatives. The thing is, though, that this is virtually never an interesting insight that adds to conversations in the places it is brought up, both for logical and contextual reasons and because tribal boundary drawing in online conversations tends not to lead to positive exchanges. "I don't like using foo-lang, and I think this understand of my own process for creating mental models explains why." is a correct characterization, but "foo-lang sucks" feels way better to say.

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davecranwell profile image
Dave Cranwell • Edited

I think we all know what this really means is "publicly hating in a way intended to demean those that use it".

Hands up who likes being told that the thing you like is stupid and you are stupid for liking it? Anyone?

It's absolute fine to hate a language, a food, a genre of music etc. Having a personal opinion on stuff is one of the joys of life.

Forcibly inflicting or publicly broadcasting those opinions, however, is not cool.

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stargator profile image
Stargator

I agree. It's fine to have your personal belief and the experiences affirm that belief.

But when you use that belief to push onto others a sense of inferiority, that's when problems occur.

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null_abe profile image
Antoine B. • Edited

Well, I can understand the hate of PHP prior to version 7. But now we have strict type declaration, fast interpretation, PSR and a lot of cool things that make programming PHP experience far more clean and powerful.

I just guess that hate is also linked to the nowadays hype.

IMO you don't have to hate a programming language, because they are like tools, all great at something specific, also some of them evolve in a cool way. But you can definitely hate the way they are used.

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briedis profile image
Mārtiņš Briedis

And we have frameworks. When I started Laravel, it was like a new start. 4 in years and it's still awesome to crank out new projects with tests, dependency injection, middlewares, nice orm. Feels like pure magic! PHP itself is just a small, small part of it, it's the architecture you build on that makes it awesome.

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sudiukil profile image
Quentin Sonrel

Every language is good at something.

I'm gonna flip this statement and say that, in fact, every language is shitty at something. In the end of the day, we all love what we want to love and we all hate what we want to hate, whether or not we are right.

I hate PHP, even if I don't know it very well or use it very often.
I kinda hate JS even if I use it often and know it better everyday.
And I love Ruby even though I know this language enough to understand why some people hate it.

So I guess opinions will be opinions, just do your thing and don't mind what people say, no one holds the one and only truth and every language is both good and shitty anyway.

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perttisoomann profile image
Pert Soomann

Exactly the same reason we have "console wars" (and why people find it so hard to get out of a con deal) - no-one wants to admit they are wrong, therefore they will defend their choice.

With coding (and consoles) it's not only about not being wrong, but being right-er than others, to justify your investment in time in your toolset (or few hundred bucks in your choice of console).

Therefore any competing technology is frowned upon.

It obviously does not help that language demand sometimes is superficially and in extreme measures inflated not by what it does, but how many non-technical people demand it, either for direct project work or recruitment agencies hiring to match their client requests.

Not a surprise then that programmers feel the need to publicly make every other language or framework look absolutely useless and incompetent.

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nabbisen profile image
nabbisen • Edited

I think it's partially up to not only languages but also the timings we meet them.

I had trouble to use JavaScript ten years ago and enjoy using it these days.
I don't know which is the reason that it has changed or that I have.

When it comes to PHP, I didn't like its grammar while just reading its code.
And I felt more familiar with it gradually as I understood how to write it.

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serhuz profile image
Sergei Munovarov

Can I hate on languages that I use though?

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kayis profile image
K

I hated PHP when I used it, I loved JavaScript when I used it.

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sadick profile image
Sadick

You sure can. Because you understand all the nuances that comes with it.

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jonasbn profile image
Jonas Brømsø

“There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses.”

― Bjarne Stroustrup, The C++ Programming Language

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ryanwinchester profile image
Ryan Winchester • Edited

I hate PHP and JavaScript and I use both a lot.

I also love both languages in a way, too.

You are free to love and hate whatever language, just don't intentionally make others feel bad about their language.

I like trash-talking PHP, but it's only fun for me if it's among people who also know PHP and can relate. When I see somebody who doesn't know PHP trash-talking it, it does bother me. It's like "ha ha, really funny /s"

It's like, I can beat up my little brother or make fun of him but "you better not lay a finger on him, and don't you dare talk about my family like that."