Programming

Other self-taught narratives, such as starting with Wordpress-based design backgrounds and moving from more simple themes to more complex themes where PHP knowledge is required, to plugin development is a completely valid narrative, but a path that is predominately for women.

Where the heck did that come from? What does any of this have to do with women? Are most Java and PHP developers women?

The argument the author is trying to make is hinged upon this argument that comes out of nowhere. The rest of the article makes some good points but has more of these deviations that just break the flow and make me say "what does that have to do with anything?".

My problem with PHP is the language and the ecosystem. I'm genuinely impressed that people are able to build useful things with it, but the language is, at least to me, far from easy. Starting with array not being an array but a hashmap/dictionary, to complete clusterfuck that many projects are in terms of setting up and tooling. Only C and C++ projects can beat that (or so I have experienced). There is just an assumption that whoever's picking up a PHP project knows LAMP and its components, has root access, and won't be using a debugger.

The PHP debugger has been one of the most frustrating debuggers I've ever had the displeasure of trying to setup. You have to know how to configure php itself, which extensions to install, how to configure those, and how to setup whatever editor or IDE you have to interact with the debugger. Most PHP projects I'm come across haven't set it up and I can understand why.

Also, to use PHP sensibly, you have to learn about zend or whatever the name of that big framework is. But that can break in the most mysterious ways and for PHP beginners it can be a nightmare to understand what went wrong. Add in that its favorite pattern is dependency injection and the language isn't typed and understanding code is downright awful.

One of my bigger gripes is that many projects do not use containers whatsoever. It's either LAMP on your machine or good luck getting that thing to run. If you're new to PHP, well fuck you, you should've known PHP before trying to contribute to the project - that's what it feels like. There are often C/C++ like guides for setting up. first "sudo apt-get install some stuff here", oh wait, you don't use debian? Fuck off chump.

I have sworn off touching PHP projects ever again. The experience has left me scarred.

Anti Commercial-AI license

I’m tired of people dumping on Windows,

Ok now wait a minute...

This is really odd cause one of the first things I learned as a dev is that there is no one superior tool, otherwise everyone would use that instead of the right one for the job.

Woe be unto the person who admits to using Visual Basic.

The same also applies to other things, like tools.

I'm working in Java ecosystem and there's a noticeable trend to look down on people who don't use IntelliJ Idea. I've recently joined a new project and I was strongly encouraged to use it. Therefore I'm currently 3 weeks into my 4th attempt over past 10 years to switch to this tool and it simply doesn't work for me. I've been using Eclipse since around 2007, know it very well and it gets the job done. I will not claim that it is better than Idea. I just don't think switching would give me enough return on investment. Especially now, as I'm still learning the new project.

Another reason not to switch is to avoid becoming dependant on an expensive tool. My current team is using Ultimate edition and I've noticed that they are really depending on the extra features.

So should we be entirely uncritical of whichever language people choose to use because it might be percieved as offputting to someone? Would someone writing in brainfuck or whitespace or FORTRAN66 for an actual project (i.e. not just for their own interest) not be subject to critisim for that choice?

Discussion of how languages have bad features and what they could do better is how progress gets made and languages improve over time. I personally find it annoying the level of recent dumping on python that seems to be popular, but they often have a point. Those points are useful in figuring out either how to make those languages better or how the next language to be created should be. Labeling that as problematic and "actively participating in the exclusion of women from STEM" seems to me to be a huge reach.

There are a lot of programming languages. Also, features can often be hacked onto or off of a language. It's therefore important to be able to quickly reject a language based on undesirable features. It's also important to recall the big picture: to maintain a large amount of instructions or transformations which have been proven correct. Anything which gets in the way of that big picture should be quickly rejected.

I hate random programmer blogs. Always the most inane shit.