Programming Languages Thought of the Day

We were just having a discussion about web calendaring packages, and how I didn't want to install anything written in PHP, because my gut feeling was that every single one of them belonged to the patch-of-the-week club -- or, worse, couldn't even be maintained that well.

RST referred me to Rafe Colburn (www.rc3.org)'s comment that everything he did in PHP turned to garbage, even though he was a competent programmer in other languages.

I think that there are some languages, such as PHP and Visual Basic, that are so constructed as to encourage poor programming practices, to not allow good practices, and therefore:

- newbie programmers dominate the community. Thus, no one has a clue, and no one can impart a clue to their brethren.

- competent programmers dismiss it

- newbies who become competent anyway immediately move to another language where they can more easily get things done Right

- and possibly, as RST points out, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is at least partially correct and this is a demonstrative area: some languages are just not good for thinking in.

Thesis: that any newly popular language can in fact be judged by its user community: if a bunch of old competent programmers are proponents, it is probably good. If a bunch of young whippersnappers are showing you how fast they can write apps, it is probably crap.

Programming Languages Thought of the Day

We were just having a discussion about web calendaring packages, and how I didn't want to install anything written in PHP, because my gut feeling was that every single one of them belonged to the patch-of-the-week club -- or, worse, couldn't even be maintained that well.

RST referred me to Rafe Colburn (www.rc3.org)'s comment that everything he did in PHP turned to garbage, even though he was a competent programmer in other languages.

I think that there are some languages, such as PHP and Visual Basic, that are so constructed as to encourage poor programming practices, to not allow good practices, and therefore:

- newbie programmers dominate the community. Thus, no one has a clue, and no one can impart a clue to their brethren.

- competent programmers dismiss it

- newbies who become competent anyway immediately move to another language where they can more easily get things done Right

- and possibly, as RST points out, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is at least partially correct and this is a demonstrative area: some languages are just not good for thinking in.

Thesis: that any newly popular language can in fact be judged by its user community: if a bunch of old competent programmers are proponents, it is probably good. If a bunch of young whippersnappers are showing you how fast they can write apps, it is probably crap.