No, it's good for people to be extremely vocal about technologies riddled with serious flaws. It's unfortunate, but ultimately beneficial, even when they have to do this repeatedly.
It doesn't matter if we're talking about PHP or JavaScript, or a web framework like Ruby on Rails, or various NoSQL databases, or even certain operating systems.
Even if people have used such technologies with some degree of success in the past, and even if they may still be using them today, it's important for us to move past them, as a community and as an industry.
Making their flaws widely known is a very good step toward moving to better technologies. So I encourage people to be vocal about their bad experiences, or about the flaws they see in technology. It's an important part of advancement.
Except nobody jumps in for a karma train of circle jerking each other about flaws in Python, Ruby or anything else.. Just PHP... Because it's the new cool hip thing to do.. Bash PHP... If you don't, then you won't get high fives from the rest of your hipster friends.
I've been writing PHP for 12 years... I've learned that its got flaws... Just like anything else... I've gotten over it... Why? Because I actually enjoy writing PHP. And nothing you or anybody else can say will change that, so just get over it. Use what's best for you, not what is the new hip thing to use.
It's not a cool hip thing to bash PHP. It's been happening for quite some time and Python and Ruby don't get as much flak, because they don't deserve as much.
I realize it's annoying for you, someone who enjoys writing PHP, to keep hearing people complain about PHP, but it's always going to happen. And although it won't convince you to stop using it, it will surely convince others to think about trying something else.
Python and Ruby aren't riddled with security holes. Python and Ruby offer quite sensible language features. Python and Ruby have relatively clean, comprehensible standard libraries. Python and Ruby make it easy for developers to rapidly create complex systems, while still retaining a high degree of safety and security. Python and Ruby are getting better with age, rather than stagnating or gaining features in an ugly, tacked-on fashion. Python and Ruby generally have more experienced, professional communities behind them.
Simply put, they don't suffer from the many inherent problems that PHP suffers from. That means they won't catch anywhere near as much flak.
And your description of anyone pointing out PHP's flaws as being a "hipster" or doing it because it's a "new cool hip thing to do" is absurd. Many of us who speak out the loudest against PHP have been doing so since the late 1990s, and many of us are now well over 50 years old. We're about as far from "hipsters" as you can get, in just about every respect.
Nope, no vulnerabilities in Ruby or Python, just PHP. Because PHP sucks, Ruby and Python and Erlang and Go and Java and C++ and blah blah blah blah blah are superior languages to PHP, blah blah blah.
Python 15 in 5 years
Ruby 36 in 7 years
PHP 341 in 14 years
No one claimed that other languages are flawless. Besides that the biggest problem are not vulnerabilities in the languages; the biggest problem are vulnerabilities in products build using the languages and PHP makes it especially hard to write correct code because of its many quirks making it (almost) impossible to be aware of all edge and corner cases.
Those two sentences say a lot more to those of us who have used PHP extensively. This is especially true for those of us who have had to maintain relatively old PHP applications developed by numerous (often inexperienced) developers over the course of many years. And it says even more to those of us who also have had many years of experience with other, better tools.
Sound like you need to hate the players, and not the game...
Sorry if that's cliche, but your justification sounds more like it is rooted in your experience with badly developed programs, not so much a bad language.
I've been working with PHP for a long time. I've worked with other languages as well, but for the last 10 years career-wise PHP has been my bread and butter. And I've seen plenty of bad PHP as well, I absolutely don't deny that. As one of the most popular and most accessible languages out there, it's inevitable that lots of beginners will produce low quality code.
But I've also seen plenty of very good PHP code.
I've worked on quite a few large-scale PHP projects that were delivered on time and on budget, have maintained good performance under extremely high loads, and have had no security issues over years of time in production environments (including banking and automotive).
Want to know why? Because we wrote the applications properly, we tested them well, and we knew what we were doing.
I'm sure equivalent teams can do just as well with Java or .NET (or whatever else), but our stack expertise is with PHP, so that's what we choose because that's what we are best with.
Any tool in the hands of a bad craftsman will produce shoddy results. And as I said before, PHP's popularity is certainly a dual-edged sword, but I believe the good outweighs the bad...
So unless you can name some magical framework or language that can prevent mediocre or inexperienced developers from making mistakes or producing bad code, I think you're being narrow-minded and unfair in your criticisms..
The text between the lines was supposed to read as »I would have preferred if Google had not added support for PHP and it would have been way cooler if they had build something as easy as PHP but without insanity«. Okay, that's just an opinion but what else should a comment on a simple fact like »Google App Engine finally supports PHP« be?
It doesn't matter if we're talking about PHP or JavaScript, or a web framework like Ruby on Rails, or various NoSQL databases, or even certain operating systems.
Even if people have used such technologies with some degree of success in the past, and even if they may still be using them today, it's important for us to move past them, as a community and as an industry.
Making their flaws widely known is a very good step toward moving to better technologies. So I encourage people to be vocal about their bad experiences, or about the flaws they see in technology. It's an important part of advancement.