This is a follow-up from yesterday’s post. Yesterday’s post was about the awkwardness I experience when I talk about my job with non-computer-types. Things aren’t really that great when I talk to fellow programmers either. It usually goes like this:
So you work in PHP then? Isn’t that just absolutely awful?
It’s no more awful than anything else, why?
Oh, it’s just because I prefer to work in more modern stacks like rails or node. I’m getting into angular, you ever heard of that?
Yep, I’ve heard of angular. But why do you hate PHP? What have you got against it?
It’s spaghetti code, man. And completely non-performant. Are you like living in the 2000′s or something?
This is a dramatization, of course. But that’s really what people’s reactions are when I talk about how I’m building something in PHP. I got similar reactions a few years ago when I worked in Java, too.
I’m really tired of people that turn their noses up at certain technologies either 1) because of the stereotypes they’ve heard (and often perpetuated) about them, or 2) the fact that it’s not the latest and greatest lovechild technology of the hot silicon valley startups.
But here’s the truth: the decision on what technology you use for a project should have nothing to do with stereotypes or even whether it’s the latest and greatest. You should use the right tool for the right job, that’s it.
No technology is perfect. PHP is no exception to this. But it’s quite possibly the most widely supported programming language on the planet. And it’s stable. And finding developer talent for it is extremely easy. Those three facts that I just gave you are pretty compelling when you’re a company that is building a product that may need to run on a wide variety of systems and be supported by a large number of people.
I really like the latest and the greatest, don’t get me wrong. I really want to start learning about this new MeteorJS craze. But I’m not going to hop all of our mission critical stuff onto that bandwagon before we know it’s the right choice. And I’m not going to have my mind clouded by the fact that everyone’s going gaga over it.
But maybe I’m biased just like everyone else, just on the other end of the spectrum.