PHP and C are both fine languages, they have their strengths and their weaknesses. They’re tools and if you feel the need to shit on them then you clearly need more practice using a diversity of languages.
Ah yes, the almighty counter “everything is relative”. “Malbolge is a fine language with its strengths and weaknesses. It has perfectly valid usecases and can never be shit on, ever.”
PHP is probably a fine language, my issue is I suffered dealing with so many shitty applications written in php when I was still coming up through the ranks of IT.
God the number of broken WordPress installs and shitty WordPress plugins.
I understand your pain - the real reason for that is that PHP was the first “hobbyist” programming language so a lot of self trained folks built websites that ended up slowly morphing into successful businesses.
One of the things I’m actually most proud of from the PHP community is that around 5.2 the maintainers looked around and saw sites like Quora and StackOverflow were littered with the worst fucking PHP advice endorsing functions like mysql_query and ill-advised features like magic_quotes so the community invested a lot of resources in purging answers that preached anti-patterns and replace them with non-terrible answers.
I work in PHP and it’s perfectly serviceable now, we’ve got strict typing, namespaces, lambdas, all the nice shit you’d expect in a modern language.
Pretty much all of the command line coreutils programs I use daily are in C; cd, ls, pwd, touch, rm, etc. If I want to write some small utility I’ll usually reach for a scripting language first like bash python ruby etc, but if it needs to be small and fast I’ll use C instead.
Inertia is a mofo. I did embedded programming for industrial automation almost thirty years ago, building upon and expanding an existing nightmare of C code… and I bet there’s still some of mine running something out there to this day.
The thing with C is that it’s almost always going to be the fastest high-ish level language and it has an extremely stable ABI. Self contained code written 30 years ago will likely compile with only minor (and sometimes no) tweaks today. You’re lucky to go 3 years on C++ without something fairly big breaking due to changes in the underlying language and ABI.
This is a really good post about why C is so difficult to seriously consider replacing, or even to avoid by using a different language for certain projects: faultlore.com/blah/c-isnt-a-language/
It isn’t just a language, but it is a language - as it eventually gets around to saying, but it starts off by saying that it isn’t, then later corrects itself to say that it is, etc. I feel like the focus of this ignores the historical context of what C was written to be for - at the time there was like Assembly, BASIC, Fortran (?), other long-dead languages like was it A and/or A* or whatever, there was a B language too! (developed by Bell Labs, if Google can be trusted these days), etc. - and C was developed to be better than those. So saying that like it lacks type conversions is very much missing the point - those were not invented yet. A lawn mower also lacks those, but it’s okay bc it doesn’t need them:-) I am probably nit-picking far too many points, I suppose to illustrate that the style of the article became a hindrance to me to read it b/c of those reasons. But thank you for sharing regardless.
I don’t really like the title either, but the article does demonstrate how unfortunate it is that we’re effectively locked in to using the ABI at some level of nearly every piece of software.
That said, there definitely were languages with better type systems prior to the invention of C. Pascal is a frequently-cited example.
Chaotic evil is “creates ticket, but intentionally words the problem poorly before logging off, leaving the junior help desk worker to fend for himself, giving you the solution to a different problem that isn’t relevant in your case”
Really, there’s a vast number of ways for IT support to be evil or chaotic. I wonder if there was ever a viral fiction series in the early internet about it…
programmer_humor
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