An attitude I’ve seen a lot among software developers is that basically there aren’t “good languages” and “bad languages.” That all languages are equal and all criticisms of particular languages and all opinions that some particular language is “bad” are invalid.
I couldn’t disagree more.
The syntax, tooling, standard library, third-party libraries, documentation quality, language maintainers’ policies, etc are of course factors that can be considered when evaluating how “good” a language is. But definitely one of the biggest factors that should be considered is how assholeish the community around a particular language is.
A decade or two ago, Ruby developers had a reputation for being smug and assholeish. I can’t say I knew a statistically significant number of Ruby developers, but the ones I did know definitely embodied that stereotype. I’ve heard recently that the Rust community has similar issues.
The Rust language has some interesting features that have made me want to look deeper, but what I’ve heard about the community around Rust has so far kept me away.
I write Java for a paycheck, but for my side projects, Go is my (no pun intended) go-to language. I’ve heard nothing but good things about its community. I think I’ll stick with it for a while.
In my experience the actual rust community that you’ll be seeing if you work with the language is actually incredibly nice and open minded. It’s got a lot of autistic people and other minorities who are more emotionally mature than a lot of adults. Rust people can be smug sometimes talking to “outsiders” but once you’re in the community the problem disappears
But definitely one of the biggest factors that should be considered is how assholeish the community around a particular language is.
I think all of the factors you’ve mentioned are extremely valid, but this is the one factor that I think should absolutely not count into whether something’s a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ language. If I’m choosing which technologies to use for my next project, the question of whether it has a rude vocal minority in its community is AS FAR DOWN on my list as possible. Right next to whether its name is hip or whether their homepage is engaging.
A toxic community won’t help you in good faith when you’re running into issues, and this makes it harder to develop using a language with a toxic community.
idk, how do I contact “the community” when I have an issue in the first place? All I know of is StackOverflow, and they’re honestly toxic enough to make me never ask questions there in the first place.
That kid is an asshole because cppreference is doing the lord’s work.
Also, I know that language choice is one of the most important decisions when starting a new project but, personally, I work on a highly performance sensitive project that’s written in PHP. If you think you need Rust to be performant or type safe then you don’t really know what you’re doing yet. It makes it easier and increases theoretical limits - that is all.
It’s a choice left up to developer but you can have static and runtime type checking enabled for as many functions as you desire. Theoretically you can have collection subtype checking but I’d say that PHP is still quite frail here as proper collection typing lacks any template-style typing but needs dedicated collection types.
Is this a new project that was intentionally started in PHP or something legacy? Any interesting benchmarks? Like minimal wire to wire network processing time and where the bottleneck is?
Our project was something that has evolved from a full web app into a PHP backend fronted by a reactish SPAish thing. Our spool up time to cache our website is 13 ms from a cold start (after provisioning and stuff) so we’re pretty good at horizontal scaling. Once cached our overhead is 7ms for framework things. Our page load times across the board calvary wildly with 25ms being our target time but with some very large reports stretching into the seconds range - on those slow pages all those previous numbers are essentially irrelevant and performance is dictated solely by how much we’re investing into query caching and tuning.
Personally I’m actually a big fan of PHP, it’s incredibly powerful and good with lists (and all good programming is list programming ;P). The typing is strong when enforced and weak when you choose. The lambda and reflection frameworks are robust and it has a number of interesting phpisms like magic functions and variable variables.
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An attitude I’ve seen a lot among software developers is that basically there aren’t “good languages” and “bad languages.” That all languages are equal and all criticisms of particular languages and all opinions that some particular language is “bad” are invalid.
I couldn’t disagree more.
The syntax, tooling, standard library, third-party libraries, documentation quality, language maintainers’ policies, etc are of course factors that can be considered when evaluating how “good” a language is. But definitely one of the biggest factors that should be considered is how assholeish the community around a particular language is.
A decade or two ago, Ruby developers had a reputation for being smug and assholeish. I can’t say I knew a statistically significant number of Ruby developers, but the ones I did know definitely embodied that stereotype. I’ve heard recently that the Rust community has similar issues.
The Rust language has some interesting features that have made me want to look deeper, but what I’ve heard about the community around Rust has so far kept me away.
I write Java for a paycheck, but for my side projects, Go is my (no pun intended) go-to language. I’ve heard nothing but good things about its community. I think I’ll stick with it for a while.
In my experience the actual rust community that you’ll be seeing if you work with the language is actually incredibly nice and open minded. It’s got a lot of autistic people and other minorities who are more emotionally mature than a lot of adults. Rust people can be smug sometimes talking to “outsiders” but once you’re in the community the problem disappears
I think all of the factors you’ve mentioned are extremely valid, but this is the one factor that I think should absolutely not count into whether something’s a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ language. If I’m choosing which technologies to use for my next project, the question of whether it has a rude vocal minority in its community is AS FAR DOWN on my list as possible. Right next to whether its name is hip or whether their homepage is engaging.
A toxic community won’t help you in good faith when you’re running into issues, and this makes it harder to develop using a language with a toxic community.
idk, how do I contact “the community” when I have an issue in the first place? All I know of is StackOverflow, and they’re honestly toxic enough to make me never ask questions there in the first place.
As someone who learned a lot from C++ and that now loves Rust, this annoys me.
That kid is an asshole because cppreference is doing the lord’s work.
Also, I know that language choice is one of the most important decisions when starting a new project but, personally, I work on a highly performance sensitive project that’s written in PHP. If you think you need Rust to be performant or type safe then you don’t really know what you’re doing yet. It makes it easier and increases theoretical limits - that is all.
Is PHP strongly typed?
It’s a choice left up to developer but you can have static and runtime type checking enabled for as many functions as you desire. Theoretically you can have collection subtype checking but I’d say that PHP is still quite frail here as proper collection typing lacks any template-style typing but needs dedicated collection types.
I want to tell the computer what it should do, not what the computer things I can do. That’s why I use scratch
I saw md5 checksum implemented in scratch.
There is also a whole OS written in scratch. A very basic one but still
And a RISC-V emulator that runs Linux.
I would like to hear more
I am happy to answer any and all questions.
Is this a new project that was intentionally started in PHP or something legacy? Any interesting benchmarks? Like minimal wire to wire network processing time and where the bottleneck is?
Our project was something that has evolved from a full web app into a PHP backend fronted by a reactish SPAish thing. Our spool up time to cache our website is 13 ms from a cold start (after provisioning and stuff) so we’re pretty good at horizontal scaling. Once cached our overhead is 7ms for framework things. Our page load times across the board calvary wildly with 25ms being our target time but with some very large reports stretching into the seconds range - on those slow pages all those previous numbers are essentially irrelevant and performance is dictated solely by how much we’re investing into query caching and tuning.
Personally I’m actually a big fan of PHP, it’s incredibly powerful and good with lists (and all good programming is list programming ;P). The typing is strong when enforced and weak when you choose. The lambda and reflection frameworks are robust and it has a number of interesting phpisms like magic functions and variable variables.