Re: [PHP-EVANGELISM] Bad rep?

On Tue, 6 May 2003 08:31:23 -0700 (Pacific Standard Time),
[email protected] (Rasmus Lerdorf) wrote:

>Present yourself as a programmer and not as a "PHP Programmer".  When I
>hire people I look for a solid background in a variety of languages.  Even
>if I need a PHP person, I am unlikely to hire someone who comes to me with
>only PHP experience.  I want to see C, C++, Perl, Python and Java on the
>resume.
>

I agree on programming skills rating higher than specific knowledge of
PHP. I teach programmers to be productive with PHP in 6 hours.
Teaching programming to a non programmer takes 5 days of my time and a
few months of practice by them.

A lot of local PHP positions advertised by job agencies say something
like:
Must have 5 years experience as a Unix system administrator, security
expert, network guru, and own a phillips head screwdriver. Must be
proficient in HTML, shell scripts, Photoshop, Fireworks, water skiing,
Oracle, SOAP, Rational Rose, XML, (insert every three letter acronym
here), Javascript, PHP.

Perl programmers tend to learn more bad habits than good so teaching
them programming includes a few extra weeks unprogramming their
habits.

Graduates trained in Java seem to learn very little about programming
because they waste a year learning how to cope with Java.

Java does let information technology people continue the witch doctor
mythology used to maintain high salaries in mainframe and Oracle
sites. If no one else can understand your code then you cannot be
replaced.

>PHP, by its very nature, is a really easy language to pick up.  That is
>what has made it so popular.  People can start using it and within and day
>or two they feel that they are proficient in PHP.  This is great because
>it opens up web development to a lot of people who might not otherwise
>have been able to program a web application.  But at the same time, this
>person may not be the most attractive candidate when it comes to someone
>hiring a web developer.

Making the language easy to learn means dentists can write programs
for dentists and the next generation of Danni Ashe's can use PHP
instead of Coldfusion.

>In the past people have suggested that we make PHP harder to use so that
>only "real" programmers can use it.  This is one of the most bogus and
>elitist arguments ever and it always sets me off into a fit of ranting.
>PHP is a glue language that can be used at many different levels.  To some
>it is a toy language because that is how they use it.  And in some ways it
>is very much a toy language.  One of the best toy languages ever as a
>matter of fact.  To others it is an intermediate level language that
>bridges the gap between the front-end and the back-end in a 3-tier
>architecture.  And to another group it is a powerful OO language used to
>write large object oriented applications in.
>
>To me personally, PHP is a powerful templating system because that is what
>I originally wrote and that is how I have always used it and that is how I
>am deploying it at Yahoo these days.  Trying to change peoples' perception
>of something is a very difficult thing to do.  If we were a company we
>would be looking at hiring a creative advertising company who would put
>together feel-good tv and radio ads and perhaps some cute billboards that
>would have catchy slogans and pretty hackers waterskiing or something like
>that.  But we are not a company.  We are a very diverse collection of web
>developers who even amongst ourselves have a hard time agreeing on what
>PHP is and who the target audience of the language really should be.  We
>know absolutely jack-shit about marketing and we suck at waterskiing!

Using PHP at Yahoo is great marketing.

>
>-Rasmus