Dissing Programming Languages

It seems to be PHP's turn to be dissed at the moment with various articles floating about on the Interwebs and programmers who don't program in PHP being various surprised and appalled by its weaknesses.

Some of the articles are simply lazy: they ask PHP to do stupid things, that no sane programmer would, and then get pantsy because it produces unexpected results. Some are well argued. In fact I read one today where the author knew a lot more about the quirks of PHP than I did. But I was left wondering "why, if he hates PHP so much, is he bothering".

Over the years I've programmed in all sorts of languages from Microsoft Basic in a 4K ROM on a UK 101 through Fortran on ICL mainframes and early CP/M microprocessors, BCPL, ALGOL and Lisp at university, COBOL on early versions of MS/DOS, Microsoft Xenix, and Linux, a variety of scripting languages but especially bash, perl and awk, the aforementioned PHP and, latterly, JavaScript.

And these are just the highlights, for example I've missed out languages like Kebasco, a bastard language developed solely to control optical mark readers¹.

I've seen them come and go too. Anyone who worked for ARM back in the day will remember the era when the decision came down from on high that the future was Modula-2². It wasn't.

I remember reading Linux Journal which ran a whole issue assuring me that the future was Ruby. It wasn't³.

We trained a whole generation of programmers in Java, I think in the belief that it was going to be the language we wrote everything in. Wrong again (although I suspect Android is helping it to something of a renaissance at the moment).

Now the flavour of the month seems to be Python and no doubt another one will roll into town soon.

But it comes down to this: all programming languages suck. They each suck in different ways and anyone who has had the misfortune to program any of them for any length of time first discovered how they suck and then, if they're in any way competent, not just programs around those weaknesses but also exploits them.

And if you don't think your current development language sucks then you're not the sort of person I'd want to employ as you're clearly not smart enough.

1. This incidentally is another things I've observed over the years: someone is always convinced the world will be a better place if there's just one more language. No, it really wouldn't be.
2. If you've not come across it before you're not alone, it came out of Pascal and still lingers.
3. Although WikiPedia claim that in March 2013 "about 211,295 web sites are running Ruby on Rails" so it's still got some traction, although for comparison they also claim that "more than 244 million websites" use PHP.