He meant that not in the context of Language Research, which is super-awesome and every developer should be super grateful to researches in this space, but in applied programming, where people piss on whatever language they aren't used to using/think sucks for some arbitrary reason.
But the lines between research and industry or "applied programming" aren't that clear cut (look at how much Rich Hickey's been able to mine the veins of research and bring awesome ideas to a practical and well-designed language like Clojure). I think some healthy debate, which includes pointing out languages that have severe flaws, is important and I wouldn't want to discourage it from happening, especially not on HN. I certainly don't think it needs to be dismissed as "meaningless penis measuring contests". That debate should definitely be carried out politely, of course. I'm not defending incoherent language flame wars.
I'll bite. PHP's automatic type conversion is a severe flaw.
The intent was to make it easier for beginners to pick up the language without worrying about technical details like types, but it violates the "fail fast" principle. It might make it easier for beginners to write code that works some of the time, but at a cost of making it harder to write code that doesn't break in surprising ways later. It's not just that automatic coercion exists, but that the behavior is biased toward returning values that don't produce errors. Treating the string "three" as equal to the number 0 is very unlikely to be the desired behavior. Even if not emitting an error is desired, a contagious NaN value would make a lot more sense.
There are certainly ways for an experienced user to mitigate the problem, but beginners don't know them, using them effectively requires discipline and a great deal of production code doesn't use them. The latter problem is cultural, but the language being tolerant of sloppy code naturally attracts people who write sloppy code to the language.
No, I absolutely was not defending language like "piddly shit". I was attacking language like "meaningless penis measuring contest". I think neither has a place on HN.
I have nothing to say about PHP (because I've never used it) I was reacting to a specific comment in jbm's post, which generalized languages and debates around them. Sorry for derailing the thread from the topic of PHP, and I probably shouldn't have made a little dig with "severe flaw".
