Yet the fact of the matter is that's how the cards fell - we had the well-designed, well-implemented languages and frameworks that failed utterly to find any foothold with amateurs and beginners, and only found refuge with the Java EE-enabled engineers.
And then we had PHP.
I'm inclined to side with the parent poster - yes, PHP has a lot of problems when you attempt to make it overly complex, but on the other hand it has introduced many people to programming who would otherwise never have even attempted (or even be able to), and driven ubiquitous web scripting forward single-handedly. Heck, even today, think about someone trying to run a blog - anyone reasonably experienced with a computer can buy hosting and install WordPress with almost no work... try that with anything written in Python?
PHP has a very low barrier to entry, and IMHO a lot of the hate directed at it is frankly jealousy. We are jealous, as professionals, that it is deadly simple to replicate some of our hard work, and that the people doing it are amateurs. This is the same reason people heap hate on VB.
I'm inclined to compare PHP to MySpace - yes, MySpace pages aren't pretty, in fact a lot are downright atrocious. You can make some specious claims about how MySpace-inspired "web design" has made the internet a worse place, somehow, but it would be a pretty thin argument. At the end of the day, both PHP and MySpace opened up a world of possibility to a lot of users who didn't have it before; picking at it really is just being pretentious and elitist.
Yet the fact of the matter is that's how the cards fell - we had the well-designed, well-implemented languages and frameworks that failed utterly to find any foothold with amateurs and beginners, and only found refuge with the Java EE-enabled engineers.
When did we have all that? In 1995, when PHP was started, I remember having Perl, shell scripts, and C server-side CGIs.
I don't recall significantly better viable alternatives becoming available until quite some time later.
And then we had PHP.
I'm inclined to side with the parent poster - yes, PHP has a lot of problems when you attempt to make it overly complex, but on the other hand it has introduced many people to programming who would otherwise never have even attempted (or even be able to), and driven ubiquitous web scripting forward single-handedly. Heck, even today, think about someone trying to run a blog - anyone reasonably experienced with a computer can buy hosting and install WordPress with almost no work... try that with anything written in Python?
PHP has a very low barrier to entry, and IMHO a lot of the hate directed at it is frankly jealousy. We are jealous, as professionals, that it is deadly simple to replicate some of our hard work, and that the people doing it are amateurs. This is the same reason people heap hate on VB.
I'm inclined to compare PHP to MySpace - yes, MySpace pages aren't pretty, in fact a lot are downright atrocious. You can make some specious claims about how MySpace-inspired "web design" has made the internet a worse place, somehow, but it would be a pretty thin argument. At the end of the day, both PHP and MySpace opened up a world of possibility to a lot of users who didn't have it before; picking at it really is just being pretentious and elitist.