Snobbery is exactly what this is. You can honestly create a list of complaints for any language (even the hipsters' beloved Ruby) that's just as long and passionate but it's become cool to hate PHP.

People have a lot of excuses for their snobbery but it really does all come down to snobbery. The post says that the "you can write bad code in any language" retort isn't valid and labels it as a discussion ender but I'd submit that his unwillingness to deal with that argument serves just that purpose. It's a perfectly valid point to say you can write crap in any language.

PHP really does nothing to discourage you from writing bad code. It gives lazy and inexperienced coders the false sense of security that comes with the magic quotes setting, it encourages you to mix logic and presentation and generally has lots of shortcuts that let you avoid tedious things like writing maintainable code and taking responsibility for security but there's beauty in the language too. No one has to fall victim to those things and anyone can avoid them just as easily as they could in any other language. I love the fact that PHP doesn't force any one way of doing things on you like other languages do. If you're a newbie it holds your hand while letting you screw up. If you know good application design it let's you write your scripts any way you want and trusts that you know what you're doing. I can't say that about Ruby though I too have warm fuzzy feelings for that language.

There's a lot of bigotry against not just PHP but beginner programmers. For some reason hackers have this strange mentality where many just need to be the smartest person in the room and take cheap shots at uncool technologies while masturbating over their shiny new toys that are oh so superior. They also have this weird love/hate relationship with beginners. They love to impart their knowledge and school them (while often times trying to get them to do thing their way which is not always the right way despite what they say). But then they hate the newbies when they go off and use PHP to build something cool and interesting. I can sometimes just hear them silently thinking "I spend $100k and 15 years learning to be an elite programmer and you picked up 'PHP for Dummies' and whipped up a clone of my app in a day? Well fuck you, I'm going to find everything wrong with it and knock you down a peg or two".

Seems like a fad to me. Eventually our beloved Ruby and Python will be replaced with SuperCoolScript (SCS V1.0) and we'll all be right back here hating or defending those languages. I know we don't like to admit it but it's becoming more and more apparent that deep down a lot of PHP hating is due to snobbery caused by jealousy and a need to be the smartest person in the room.

Remember when it was cool to hate JavaScript? It still is but now that's starting to change. Now we have nodejs and V8 and Geddy and JavaScript is the new Ruby. Let's all play nice, let the noobs have their fun, and just keep our heads down and focus on being better by doing better instead of being better by tearing others down.

By the way, I'm a totally unapologetic PHP guy. I fucking love PHP. I know about the problems it has but I don't mind being uncool.