As CTO, I am asked from time to time to consult other startups on their technology stack and their development process. As in any industry, you can find the good, the bad and the ugly in IT. The thing with IT is that it’s littered with illiterate halfwits who never grew out of their puberty programming days.
I’m talking about people “choosing” PHP as a language. Don’t get me wrong – most web developers have at one point stumbled upon PHP and used it for a while, including me.
But if you are using PHP to set up your startup, it is not a choice. It simply shows that you never learned any other language.
Any programming language is a tool. Each fits a specific job. And if your only tool is PHP, you are a carpenter with one single broken hammer.
Let me explain
Here at adeven, we are currently a team of five coders. Together we use a wide array of languages every day: C, C++, Objective-C, R, Perl, Ruby, Go, Javascript, Coffeescript, Bash, SQL, Lua and Java. And these are just the languages we actually use.
All of us speak PHP.
But none of us would ever write anything in PHP.
Why?
Simply put: PHP is seriously broken.
Really, go read this. Now.
It’s so bad, people make fun of it on a regular basis. I know many other languages have their wat moments. But PHP is not just strange at times (like javascript). It is just dangerous.
It is a statement of blatant ignorance to use it.
But why are still so many people using it, sadly even in the startup world? Honestly, all the answers I have to this question are downright sad or scary and would make the people in charge of hiring those morons look really bad.
So for those trusting developers with their money:
Do not hire PHP “developers”. Chances are, they are complete imbeciles building something broken with a broken language.
And for you PHP “developers” now feeling angry with me:
Learn Ruby or Phyton, heck – even Perl. Use frameworks. Write a project in one of those. Come back and tell me I am wrong.