violated pen & paper, left the interview

I hate people who hate

what a load of tosh

What happened to George Orwell, Animal Farm, 1984 and all that hype about eastern bloc, freedom and that crap. Confused. Maybe, George Orwell was an Indian after all.

I am not trying to offend you, but I really don't understand when someone says "yes and no". I hear it more and more these days. Is this becoming a cliche? It can be "yes" or "no", not both together. "yes and no" is "no" for me.

Don't know about other languages, but in german this phrase is pretty common when there is no clear yes or no answer. Like "yes to some extend but not completely"

PHP will get you paid always. It's like "a Lannister always pays his debts"

You're talking about technical debt, obviously.

Writing PHP since 2001. It gets job done & pays bills. No complaints at all. A big thank you to all whoever made it available and improved.

Seems like every couple if months there is a post justifying a future for php.yet,it seems to do just fine.

It isn't the sexiest language, but a lot of people are making a decent living working with it.

The same can be said for Visual Basic and lots of other unsexy languages. Heck, someone out there is still doing COBOL and that's the unsexiest of beasts (that I can think of, ATM).

The trick is this: get familiar with a language now and just hang on tooth and nail. Someone, somewhere will still be using that language when you're close to retirement. And you can either charge them a bundle converting off of it, or an even bigger bundle supporting it.

And if it's the government, well, as long as you don't get too careless with the yachts, vacation homes and shady neighbors in banana republics, you can probably get away with it until you die. Especially if you own a politician or two.

There is even some overlap between COBOL programmers and the Github generation: https://github.com/search?utf8=✓&q=language%3Acobol finds 75 repos containing COBOL right now.

In addition to the oft-cited deployment story, I think another reason for PHP's success is that it's the only major language specifically created as a DSL for rendering web pages. Once you're accustomed to having its baked-in toolset for web-related tasks, having to constantly hunt for the right third-party library in a general-purpose language like Ruby or Python becomes a major drag coefficient, even if those languages are objectively better in all other respects.

What features are built in to PHP that aren't built in to Ruby and Python?

This is actual curiosity, I just can't think of anything that PHP has that Ruby and Python don't. Even more so when it comes to Go. But you didn't mention Go.

It's not a little 20 line of code toy project. It's an engaging and accessible writeup of some basic parts of TCP that happens to include some easy-to-understand code.

It's pointless to people who understand how TCP works in depth, but the majority of programmers don't.

It's an engaging and accessible writeup, true. Unfortunately, there are also several glaringly incorrect/misleading points in the article. The fact that it's getting upvoted is just..... strange.

I don't think it's presented as a "big deal." I read it as a fun little experiment.

It confuses me that instead of finding these projects uninteresting (as you claim) you took the time and effort to write a reply in a thread just to belittle and dismiss the article.

I for one found it interesting/fun.