I also thought this argument was obvious, even though people clearly didn't think so, but I'm glad you did such a good job explaining the point.<p>> when did learning become bad?<p>This is when you hit on what I think people mean when they use the "just get stuff done" argument. What they mean is they can get stuff done <i>now</i>, without having to learn anything along the way or think too hard.<p>Sometimes that's defensible, deadlines and real life and all. Most of the time it's defensiveness because they know they are getting less stuff done and that stuff is lower quality because they didn't take the time to learn better tools and stuck with the training wheels.<p>> hip guys in class who write cool code in Ruby or Python<p>How out of touch do you have to be to think that people are using Ruby or Python because they are hip unknown languages? I have literally gotten this same statement thrown at me (to be fair, he had two young kids so he really was out of touch and had good reason to be).
Author's anger is misdirected here. The core thesis of the TechCrunch article -- <i>shipping some working PHP code is approximately a million times better than designing something mindblowing in Haskell that never actually ships</i> -- is true. If your team can get a Python project out the door faster than one written in PHP, go with Python. And vice versa. Users don't care what language it's written in, so why should you?
> most of PHP’s trade immediacy for the slightest hint of reliability.<p>This article is a list of best (or at least the author's favorite) practices for Python.<p>I'm so tired of reading a person banging on PHP and then hyping up best practices for another language. As if nobody can be productive with PHP or would choose it for a new project. Or that PHP doesn't have better practices than what the authors have experienced.<p>If you like Python, that's great. So do I. Just get over it, these threads are so lame.
> I use Python because it balances getting stuff done with having that stuff not fall over as soon as I turn my back.<p>Uhh... Heard of automated testing?<p>It makes absolutely no difference what language you write your code in, whether it's PHP, Python or Brainfuck - reliability is dictated by your testing strategy, not the language. In the PHP applications I write, the only things that break are the things I didn't test.