Yes, how dare he talk about the problems with PHP in the comments on a site dedicated to talking about how to avoid problems with PHP. Seriously, WTF? Are people actually offended that discussion of PHP's defects take place in a conversation about PHP best practices?
I think it is because we (as a community) should be past the piling-on stage and on to the constructive discussion stage. Snark doesn't add to the discussion.
I don't intend to jump into the ring, but as an observer, I don't think we're at that point yet. Here's the progression of the current anti-PHP flare up:
Jeff Atwood says PHP sucks
|- Says we should make other languages fill in on what PHP does best
|- Post goes on HN
|- PHP apologists say "No! PHP is fine, I've made a career out of it!"
|- 'Atwoodians' continue to reject PHP, ruby/python need to be more accessible
|- PHP apologists make reasonable arguments for why PHP isn't as bad as everyone says, while admitting its probably worse than python/ruby
There remains a conspicuous lack of response from the 'Atwoodian' camp regarding what could be done to add PHP's quick-start strengths to other languages so that PHP developers can develop similarly to how they currently do, just with a less wonky and problematic base language.
By no means, as an outsider, do I perceive the PHP apologists as having redeemed PHP to the point that the discussion should be about 'how to fix PHP' rather than 'how to discourage its propagation' as was originally put fourth in a fairly reasonable way by Atwood.
I realize why saying 'PHP apologists' is problematic, but I'm mostly seeing responses that are in themselves critical of PHP, while espousing its widespread use, quick-start capabilities, and developer intertia--and not espousing why the fundamentals of the language are better of the equals of ruby/python.
While I can't speak for others in the "Atwoodian camp," I for one think Atwood's article was that response, to a large degree: it pretty much said that his next big project is trying to bring those strengths to a platform built on another language.
Having said that, it seems to me that there's certainly a fair amount of work being done to make deploying apps in other languages pretty simple. With mod_passenger, for instance, setting up a Rails app under Apache isn't notably more difficult than setting up any other Apache virtual host. Deploying Python web applications isn't quite as simple yet (at least in my experience), but it's nothing that should be beyond the ken of someone who's figured out how to write a Python web application in the first place. And that, in turn, isn't really beyond the ken of anyone who's learned how to write reasonably good PHP MVC code.
