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Okay, real question here.

Why do some programmers hate languages like PHP or JavaScript?

Comments
  • 11
    Because they suck. Everyone will agree to that.
  • 8
    Preamble, I don't have strong feelings about either.

    Javascript, because of a sluggish, fragile ecosystem with package bloat to ridiculous degrees, and a strong tendency to push the "anyone can be an engineer" mindset which results in a lot of sloppy, lazy code, wage stagnation and skilled-profession false commoditization. The ecosystems themselves are fractured and the number of supportability targets is high.

    Php, numerous reasons depending on the individual. Most of them relate to history. Some hubris, some remember the "personal home page" days, multithreading and async is marginal to nonexistent (reactphp is probably the best out there for a sane async model), regarded as a prototype language by many, legacy foreign language error messages, WordPress, encountering 5-10k line single file monoliths, and generally low salaries. And some people just dislike it because it's not new and shiny. There's probably a thousand I missed, that's just what generally comes to mind.
  • 1
  • 3
    I hate PHP and js because of their attitude to types and type safety
  • 3
    They hate JavaScript because it's fucking everywhere, thousands hours of debugging on a single syntax can drive anyone insane.

    That's why there's always a major paradigm shift every decade in coding languages.
  • 0
    I love both. c:
  • 5
    I hate php because how clunky it feels like, but when i say i hate something, what i mean is that a better in every way alternative exists.
  • 3
    I love both, yet I completely understand the dislike or hatred. As a whole there is only one "language" for which I can find no redeeming qualities to: VBA. None, zero zip. But in terms of JS and PHP I would venture to say that it deals a lot with the history that both of them had: One as a toy to add scripts into a website, the other as a mashup of CGI implementations that generated a template system and then through a continuous process of Frankenstein like experiments evolved into a language. While these two languages have evolved tremendously, this does not mean that there are no alternatives or better implementations, but it is hard to make someone forget the horrors of php 4, or the initial steps into manipulating the DOM in JS. it was a painful, error prone process, heck even today if you are not aware of php quirks these will bite you hard. I dislike one thing of php: the ease of entry. There is a lot of horrible code out there, that us on the senior level need to fix.
  • 1
    @AleCx04 so while php after version 5 added a lot of good things and php v 7 added better things to make the language more pleasant, it is still engraved in the minds of developers as something bad. I rather ignore those points since it has served me well, I know most pitfalls and how to outmaneuver them and I have seen these things in many other languages, but php makes a point to have them really present and strange in some cases if you are not used to the language.

    I love it, and I find no reason why not to use it granted that you know what you are doing, it sure lets noob devs write horrible stuff, but under good tutoring and visualizing proper practices it can be a very powerful tool in one's aresenal.

    It has also made me wealthy enough to select my projects or do the things that interest me the most, and frameworks like Laravel and Symfony make it a joy in my opinion. PHP 7 is also blazing fast.
  • 3
    @mrtehseen Javascript fatigue is a very REAL thing man
  • 0
    There isn't much wrong with JS, a part from some quirks and questionable decisions. The issue is the entire frontend ecosystem. It's incredibly complex, with many layers of abstraction and indirection, and there's the whole NPM minefield, too. Things change so quickly that you can end up in dependency hell within months, and there are often breaking changes every few months as well. Also, it's trivial for a package maintainer to push invisible malware.

    PHP is internally inconsistent and full of pitfalls. Unless you know the language well, you will run into unexpected behavior in correct-looking code, guaranteed.

    PHP absolutely is better now than it was, but still has many of the same faults. There is a better language choice for every scenario. However, there are a lot of PHP jobs out there, so it isn't a poor career choice.
  • 1
    @AleCx04 says it well.
  • 1
    It's not that I hate any language. I have reached the point where I hate learning new ones, though ( because it means I'm having to learn the same old things all over again because language "blah" is the new hotness when I can already do all that hotness in 4 other languages)
  • 0
    Frankly? Because it's cool to do so.

    If you look at the dev sphere it's all about what's popular *right now*, it's why organisations who make a language push the marketing for them so darn hard.

    There's always a new language or framework that's "better" for little reason beyond the makers claiming it is; But that's enough to sway most people, languagea are treated more like a product now than a tool to create wonderful things.
  • 0
    Can't speak for everyone.

    I for one would LOVE javascript if it was
    - typed
    - intuitive

    Yes, there is typescript, but it introduces another annoying thing -- weird syntax. So it's 2x unintuitive

    JS's behaviour is often acting against what you would expect. Sometimes it uses OOP, sometimes it does not care about most of its principles, sometimes it fucks up your arrays/comparisons/sorting/etc. because you did asked it to do things the "intuitive-way" rather than the "javascript-way".

    I do like JS for JSON and for being generic and portable. But these two things just annoy me too much.

    As for PHP -- [spoilers!] I was learning PHP one. Bought a book and everything.. In fact it was my first programming language!
    I had to turn it down because I hated its cryptic/perl-like syntax. And that it's too easy to find buggy libs.

    And so I left for the better good -- Java. Now I feel like Benjamin Barker when he found his cutthroats: "At last! My arm is complete!".

    But hey, that's just me!
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