Contempt Culture
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I’d been making critical comments about PHP the language, and PHP developers, nothing more than standard “PHP sucks” sort of language. The same thing I’d been doing, and supported in doing, for years.
This was a bombshell. I’d been loudly criticising the language and, through that criticism, implying that people using the language weren’t as good me, weren’t good programmers. And suddenly I was thinking about all the myriad ways that someone with that background would feel othered by me, like they didn’t belong and weren’t welcome in the communities I was a part of.
This culture has ramifications. PHP communities, for example, have lacked access to the development of DevOps tooling, the use of PHP is widely derided as being insecure by default, are they are widely mocked for being an “objectively bad language.”
Yet people make their livings working with PHP, deploying PHP, trying to secure PHP. Don’t they deserve the help that we received, the help of good practises and security-first development? These people who can’t improve their work because we won’t work with them and drive them away from our communities with mockery and spite.
And then they engineer things on their own, because they still need these tools, and we have the gall to ask why they didn’t use these other tools.
Tools that we mocked them for asking about, telling them to get a real language, to rewrite their entire app, to rebuild from scratch because their particular path was not blessed enough.
Because we were the problematic elements.
What can we Do?
SHUT. UP.
No, really, cut it out. If you need to make fun of a language, do it with your own language, inside your own community. JavaScript is really good at this, because they’re trying to help people write better code within JavaScript.
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Boy have you got the wrong audience for that piece.
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@blakeyrat Does this mean you're deleting your account?
Or are you making fun of this guy?
What are you trying to say to us?
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@yamikuronue said in Contempt Culture:
Boy have you got the wrong audience for that piece.
Probably, but I read it, liked it, and decided to share.
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Wait, is this guy arguing that we should accept PHP devs as valid devs?
He is off his fucking rocker.
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@blakeyrat said in Contempt Culture:
@yamikuronue said in Contempt Culture:
Boy have you got the wrong audience for that piece.
Probably, but I read it, liked it, and decided to share.
Reread it and then decide whether it is OK for us to make fun of you and call you an idiot for posting it.
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If you're that invested in software, you have problems. If software makes it hard for you to do things right, and easy to do things wrong, you should be running screaming away, not complaining when people point it out to you.
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@blakeyrat said in Contempt Culture:
If you need to make fun of a language, do it with your own language, inside your own community.
I can see the point here, after all we don't have any active PHP devs who make fun of the language on this forum.
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He makes some decent enough points. But...
What can we Do?
SHUT. UP.No, really, cut it out. If you need to make fun of a language, do it with your own language, inside your own community. JavaScript is really good at this, because they’re trying to help people write better code within JavaScript.Make fun of all languages equally! Yay! (yes, sure, even Javascript)
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@magus Addendum: No one's self-worth should be derived from what software they use. Ever. That's the road to completely avoidable pain and grief.
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@magus said in Contempt Culture:
@magus Addendum: No one's self-worth should be derived from what software they use. Ever. That's the road to completely avoidable pain and grief.
I use ColdFusion, I have a self-esteem problem.
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This just reads to me as if the author overvalues their own potential contribution to the PHP community.
"Those poor php devs can't figure anything out without our help, and we've been mean to them instead. We shouldn't be saying they aren't good programmers, we should heavily imply it instead. They can't improve their work because we won't work with them."
Then, despite insisting that WE have the almighty power to help them...
"What should we do? SHUT UP."
I guess they'll forever languish in obscurity then.
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@hungrier said in Contempt Culture:
I can see the point here, after all we don't have any active PHP devs who make fun of the language on this forum.
cough....
It was a short stint though. Side money.... I swear...
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And suddenly I was thinking about all the myriad ways that someone with that background would feel othered by me, like they didn’t belong and weren’t welcome in the communities I was a part of.
othered
othered
The
is 
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@blakeyrat said in Contempt Culture:
Yet people make their livings working with PHP, deploying PHP, trying to secure PHP. Don’t they deserve the help that we received, the help of good practises and security-first development? These people who can’t improve their work because we won’t work with them and drive them away from our communities with mockery and spite.
And then they engineer things on their own, because they still need these tools, and we have the gall to ask why they didn’t use these other tools.
Tools that we mocked them for asking about, telling them to get a real language, to rewrite their entire app, to rebuild from scratch because their particular path was not blessed enough.Well, if you really believe that PHP is a bad language and should die, then it's logical to try to push people away from it. Which poses the question of how to create an "anti-PHP culture" without driving "PHP people" away from it.
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@anonymous234 said in Contempt Culture:
Well, if you really believe that PHP is a bad language and should die, then it's logical to try to push people away from it.
Didn't work with @Arantor, maybe we should push him a bit harder
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@wharrgarbl said in Contempt Culture:
@anonymous234 said in Contempt Culture:
Well, if you really believe that PHP is a bad language and should die, then it's logical to try to push people away from it.
Didn't work with @Arantor, maybe we should push him a bit harder
Well @Arantor isn't crazy, he knows how terrible it is and has come to accept it. Like Stockholm syndrome
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After reading this article, I can't help but think that he hangs out in vastly different crowds than I do. I have seen, committed and experienced plenty of ribbing (I am a fan of PERL after all). But I have never once felt like the community was not willing to help, even if they knew nothing of the language.
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@groaner said in Contempt Culture:
othered
That's a good reason to stop reading and give the author a participation trophy.
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@boomzilla said in Contempt Culture:
@blakeyrat Does this mean you're deleting your account?
Or are you making fun of this guy?
What are you trying to say to us?
He's @ben_lubar'ing us, but with text instead!
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@anonymous234 said in Contempt Culture:
Which poses the question of how to create an "anti-PHP culture" without driving "PHP people" away from it.
Simple: By pointing out what other languages do better. Showing alternatives is way more effective than insulting someone's job or intelligence.
BTW: I think there are much worse environments than PHP. I'd prefer having to write a PHP backend to being forced to work on a JS frontend any day, for example.
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@antiquarian said in Contempt Culture:
@groaner said in Contempt Culture:
othered
That's a good reason to stop reading and give the author a participation trophy.
Normally yes, but in this case I'm pretty sure the author just covfefe'd "bothered".
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@anotherusername Given the rest of the article I'm not so sure about that.
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Based on a 10 second scan of blakey's highlights (and a 0 second scan of the rest of the thread), I'll respond:
Yes, answering a PHP help question with "don't use PHP" isn't very helpful and should only be done on sites specifically geared towards "contempt culture" (like us!)
I still have to use [Censored] for legacy reasons from time to time and searching the web for help on it only to see "don't use [Censored]" is quite infuriating.
That said, answering a PHP help question with "you can achieve this correctly by doing A then B then C. Note that this is much simpler to do right in other languages, you should switch away from PHP if possible" is perfectly valid anywhere.
Also, talking about how horrible PHP is in any context other than trying to help somebody is always fine as well. (Assuming there aren't any PHP-lover forums. There shouldn't be)
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@createdtodislikethis said in Contempt Culture:
I still have to use [Censored] for legacy reasons from time to time and searching the web for help on it only to see "don't use [Censored]" is quite infuriating.
I find this to be more common in C++, where there are like 10 layers of those, where if someone tells you what you should use instead, your next search will turn THAT up as deprecated.
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It's a pretty typical neckbeard turning into white knight self-realization / growth piece. It's not even that well written IMO.
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@asdf said in Contempt Culture:
I think there are much worse environments than PHP. I'd prefer having to write a PHP backend to being forced to work on a JS frontend any day, for example.
Or even worst, JS on the backend
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@timebandit said in Contempt Culture:
Or even worst, JS on the backend
I was going to point out you typoed "worse" but then I realized you're actually right. ;)
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Is there another language that lets you throw text files on a server and have a working backend for a website?
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@xaade said in Contempt Culture:
Is there another language that lets you throw text files on a server and have a working backend for a website?
That's not up to the language, it's up to the software implementing it.
This is not pointless pedantry, it's an important distinction.
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@timebandit said in Contempt Culture:
@asdf said in Contempt Culture:
I think there are much worse environments than PHP. I'd prefer having to write a PHP backend to being forced to work on a JS frontend any day, for example.
Or even worst, JS on the backend
Javascript on the backend, PHP on the frontend!
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@anonymous234 said in Contempt Culture:
@xaade said in Contempt Culture:
Is there another language that lets you throw text files on a server and have a working backend for a website?
That's not up to the language, it's up to the software implementing it.
This is not pointless pedantry, it's an important distinction.
It was actually an honest question, not an argument. I was actually wondering if there was another language that was used this way.
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@xaade That was kinda the point in the CGI specification. Programs talked back and forth with a web server using environment variables, STDIN, and STDOUT.
Apache's mod_cgi and Perl worked this way in the late 90s, you just had to associate the .pl file extension with it, much like you had to associate the .php file extension with mod_php.
Of course, best practices these days are to use mod_fcgi for that, which requires special modules to work with in Perl.
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@dragoon said in Contempt Culture:
Wait, is this guy arguing that we should accept PHP devs as valid devs?
He is off his fucking rocker.
Fuck you, I'm just as valid a developer as you are.
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@xaade I know that Python defines a Web Server Gateway Interface (WSGI), which is basically a standard way for a web server to pass HTTP requests to any callable object. It does not specify how the web server is supposed to get that object. Presumably it would be easy to configure one to automatically grab and load files from a standard directory.
However it seems that "real world" systems keep gravitating towards more and more complex deployment systems instead
.
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@arantor said in Contempt Culture:
Fuck you, I'm just as valid a developer as you are.
That your nightly mantra?
cough php sucks cough
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Let me set the record straight for a moment, because there's a lot of myths about PHP that aren't true any more.
Yes, it has type juggling. Except that the type juggling is getting more strict. 7 brought us the ability to specify types of things going in and types of things coming out - and with 7.1 it's more strict about this for the internal functions. In other words, all the shit y'all gave us for nonsense behaviour of variables, we started to do something about it.
Yes, we had some bullshit practices for input, the likes of magic quotes. Register globals. We, as a language community realised the evils of this, and removed them again.
mysql_real_escape_string? Yes, it was a fuck-up, but it was also to avoid breaking backwards compatibility, because we actually give a shit about that kind of thing. MySQLi has both, but that's because MySQLi was built to make it easy to migrate code forwards and be a drop in replacement for the old (now removed) MySQL library. Backwards compatibility and some thought to forwards movement.
In fact we even did some crazy-ass shit in recent versions like adding generators. We also have traits too, plus variadic functions. All of which feels natural to work with.
The PHP standard library is more robust and feature complete than some languages can claim, too.
Yes, it still has warts, but the dev team is listening and is working on trying to actually, you know, fix the issues rather than do stupid pointless shit that doesn't need to be in the language.
We have sane package management, we have a collection of frameworks that all provide a nice variety of feature set choices. We have a language that is forward-moving and a growing collection of developers in the language that aren't fucktarded misanthropes that can only sneer at other languages for being some definition of inferior. We, as a language community, realised mistakes were made and are trying to fix them.
And if all you can do is sneer down at us, wonder why we're going to tell you to fuck off because we're trying to learn from our mistakes. And we're doing that in a way that doesn't require massive build chains or transpilers or masses of dependencies.
Oh, and let me know when your language of choice powers approximately a quarter of the whole fucking internet.
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@arantor said in Contempt Culture:
Oh, and let me know when your language of choice powers approximately a quarter of the whole fucking internet.
Toby Faire, plenty of people here use C#, Java, Python, and JS, at least one of which must do that.
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Let's also just take a quick look at the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_popular_websites for a moment and compare languages.
Google (search) - according to Wikipedia's page on Google Search, this is C/C++/Python.
YouTube - definitely has some Java in it (e.g. the Gangnam Style incident), apparently some Python and some JS.
Facebook - Hack, a PHP derivative, as well as some C++.
Baidu - lists itself as HPHP, which is a Hiphop implementation, i.e. Hack's engine running PHP.
Wikipedia - PHP
Yahoo - parts of it were, or possibly are, still built in PHP according to references on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Search
Reddit - Python
Tencent QQ - no idea but they certainly have engineering teams that are C/C++ based
Taobao - PHPEveryone bashes PHP but there is an awful lot of stuff written in it. And the language is getting better. The problem is still that there's a lot of idiots doing it wrong but that's not the language's fault...
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@arantor said in Contempt Culture:
The problem is still that there's a lot of idiots doing it wrong but that's not the language's fault...
It is if it makes it easy to do things wrong and hard to do things right.
@arantor said in Contempt Culture:
And the language is getting better.
^ is encouraging, though.
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@magus said in Contempt Culture:
It is if it makes it easy to do things wrong and hard to do things right.
But we're getting better. The main problem left is that to fix the 'easy-to-do wrong things', we have to think about breaking backwards compatibility on a major scale.
The egregious stuff - magic quotes, register globals - has already gone away, so there is scope for more subtle breaking behaviours going forward, but we have a lot of lower hanging fruit we can tackle. For example,
create_function, the not-quite-a-closure maker is going away in favour of actual closures, and is deprecated in 7.2. Finally. We've only had real closures for about 6 years already.
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For every programming language, there exists a person who will tell you that this language is a terrible monstrosity and you should never use it.
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@arantor said in Contempt Culture:
Let's also just take a quick look at the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_popular_websites for a moment and compare languages.
Google (search) - according to Wikipedia's page on Google Search, this is C/C++/Python.
YouTube - definitely has some Java in it (e.g. the Gangnam Style incident), apparently some Python and some JS.
Facebook - Hack, a PHP derivative, as well as some C++.
Baidu - lists itself as HPHP, which is a Hiphop implementation, i.e. Hack's engine running PHP.
Wikipedia - PHP
Yahoo - parts of it were, or possibly are, still built in PHP according to references on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Search
Reddit - Python
Tencent QQ - no idea but they certainly have engineering teams that are C/C++ based
Taobao - PHPEveryone bashes PHP but there is an awful lot of stuff written in it. And the language is getting better. The problem is still that there's a lot of idiots doing it wrong but that's not the language's fault...
So you're saying that PHP is awful and nevertheless a quarter of internet is powered by it?
Well, now about this whole SkyNet thing, guys. Just letting you know: we're safer than we thought we were.
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@kt_ I'm saying that PHP historically was awful but it's getting better and the people that still run stuff on it are building better because of it.
I also forgot to mention that Tumblr runs on PHP too and were very excited when moving their stuff to PHP 7 where they could take advantage of the newer shinier stuff.
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@arantor said in Contempt Culture:
Tumblr runs on PHP too and were very excited when moving their stuff to PHP 7 where they could take advantage of the newer shinier stuff.
I thought the disgusting oily residue that runs out of that place was already plenty shiny.
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@arantor said in Contempt Culture:
For example,
create_function, the not-quite-a-closure maker is going away in favour of actual closures, and is deprecated in 7.2. Finally. We've only had real closures for about 6 years already.Do you feel that this change, putting such an issue to rest, gives you...
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closure?
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@createdtodislikethis said in Contempt Culture:
Assuming there aren't any PHP-lover forums. There shouldn't be
That would be the equivalent of StormFront for coding.
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@kt_ said in Contempt Culture:
So you're saying that PHP is awful and nevertheless a quarter of internet is powered by it?
Next you'll tell me that most internet-connected devices are trivially hackable, that COBOL programs are still being written, that virtually no programmers understand the basics of Unicode or that you can't create a file named "con" in Windows.
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@xaade said in Contempt Culture:
Is there another language that lets you throw text files on a server and have a working backend for a website?
ASP.NET still allows you to throw an ASPX on the web without requiring a DLL or anything. Something like this is enough:
<%@ Page Language="C#" %> <% Response.Write("Hello, world."); %>Just like the good ol' days of Classic ASP.
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@groaner you didn't have the 'glasses go on' moment in the middle and the YEAAAAAAAAAAAH at the end, but yes.
Contempt Culture - The Particular Finest
