I understand your pain - the real reason for that is that PHP was the first “hobbyist” programming language so a lot of self trained folks built websites that ended up slowly morphing into successful businesses.

One of the things I’m actually most proud of from the PHP community is that around 5.2 the maintainers looked around and saw sites like Quora and StackOverflow were littered with the worst fucking PHP advice endorsing functions like mysql_query and ill-advised features like magic_quotes so the community invested a lot of resources in purging answers that preached anti-patterns and replace them with non-terrible answers.

I work in PHP and it’s perfectly serviceable now, we’ve got strict typing, namespaces, lambdas, all the nice shit you’d expect in a modern language.

PHP and C are both fine languages, they have their strengths and their weaknesses. They’re tools and if you feel the need to shit on them then you clearly need more practice using a diversity of languages.

I work professionally with actually useful ML stuff (we parse a lot of weird ass files and it’s extremely powerful in that context) - we’ve looked at integrating gpt3 and it scored much worse on accuracy than the model we trained in-house. We’re also investigating adding front-end AI bullshit to placate the CEO. Even at the good shops, you’ll probably get buried in this bullshit - but there are good opportunities out there!

Fucking awesome writing style there - and a lot of salient points. The only weakness is that it’s preaching to the choir - the use of jargon and technical references probably makes it inaccessible to anyone who doesn’t agree with its conclusion.

That said, it’s wonderfully cathartic.

So… I’m old. All my time working in C++ was pre-C++11

Good Afternoon Sir, have you heard about our lord and savior pthreads?

My mind also immediately went to Elon Musk.

Yea, pointer arithmetic is cute but at this point the compiler can do it better - just type everything correctly and use []… and, whenever possible, pass by reference!

You can absolutely read my code. The ability (similar to functional languages) to override operators like crazy can create extremely expressive code - making everything an operator is another noob trap… but using the feature sparingly is extremely powerful.

This graph cuts off early. Once you learn that pointers are a trap for noobs that you should avoid outside really specific circumstances the line crosses zero and goes back into normal land.

I understand there’s some jest in this expression but I strongly object. I work tuning queries and doing that awful database shit yall dread and I find a lot of fulfillment in supporting devs and providing a better user experience.

I can guarantee you I’d be stuck in the deepest depths of depression if I tried a career in sales. Job satisfaction is high enough a priority for me that I’m currently wrestling with my dumbass PE overlords to stop trying to bankrupt our company even as they underpay me by an embarrassing amount.

h8 u

(/jk, of course)

Yea, but, alternatively, sales could just stop being entitled pricks. I’ve worked with sales people that were excellent - they had a technical mind and were able to grasp what our product could and couldn’t do and, if they were uncertain… they would fucking ask me. And I’ve worked with sales people that won’t tell me they made a sale until two months later when the deadline is a week away.

Lemme fix that for you.

position: absolute;

Where does “Suddenly realizing why they call it DLL hell” fall on the scale?

$facts

Heh… but Javascript is so permissive you can just start writing psuedocode and it’ll probably be valid!

We’re all trying our best to ignore the Americans and you bring up m/d/y… why!

What if the logic is more readable in one function?

I use whitespace to make my code more legible, python forces more whitespace consistency but it comes at the cost of limiting the legibility.

Oh, definitely, they can look bizarre and confusing before you understand them.