<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>laumars</author><text>I loved PHP at first too, but the more I started to do serious work in it, the more I grew to hate it. There&amp;#x27;s so many better languages out there these days, but PHP seems to live off the hype it gained when it was basically a choice between CGI&amp;#x2F;Perl, Classic ASP and PHP.&lt;p&gt;PHP ended up annoying me so much that I switched back to Perl (using mod_perl for performance critical stuff). However my latest project is being written in Golang (I know it&amp;#x27;s all just personal preference, but everything that I hated about PHP, Go seems to get right)&lt;p&gt;I know many HN members will already be familiar with the following blog post, but it highlights up many of my frustrations: &lt;a href=&quot;http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;me.veekun.com&amp;#x2F;blog&amp;#x2F;2012&amp;#x2F;04&amp;#x2F;09&amp;#x2F;php-a-fractal-of-bad-de...&lt;/a&gt;</text><parent_chain><item><author>jmspring</author><text>There are problems with php? It&amp;#x27;s not the prettiest language, but people have been building insanely successful businesses on top of it for years. Think Facebook.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s coyote ugly, but it works. At least most PHP devs don&amp;#x27;t have the attitude associated with other popular web frameworks. They focus on getting things done.&lt;p&gt;As a disclaimer, PHP is not my go to language, but I&amp;#x27;ve done some ugly scaling experiments with it. I&amp;#x27;m just tired of the PHP isn&amp;#x27;t cool, let&amp;#x27;s mock it with no actual valid arguments that is common.</text></item><item><author>ninjac0der</author><text>I get the nature of your comment, but you have to acknowledge that this does nothing to address any of the actual issues that many devs have with PHP.  It&amp;#x27;s not just a problem of perception.</text></item><item><author>DigitalSea</author><text>This is definitely a welcome change. Doesn&amp;#x27;t really stray too far from the previous design really, it feels cleaner and a lot more modern. I think PHP&amp;#x27;s lack of nicely designed site doesn&amp;#x27;t do them any favours in the language wars though considering PHP is viewed as an old and inferior language to others.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>The new php.net</title><url>http://www.php.net/?setbeta=1&amp;beta=1</url></story>
<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>dspillett</author><text>&lt;i&gt;&amp;gt; There are problems with php? &lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;I left PHP around the time that v5 was recently released and v4 was still common, as did a lot of people (moving over to Python and later Ruby+Rails). I think a lot of people put PHP &lt;i&gt;now&lt;/i&gt; down using their experiences of PHP4 (awful &amp;quot;object&amp;quot; features, irritatingly inconsistent standard library, ...) and PHP4&amp;#x2F;5 transition problems (which IRC were not really massive, but many libraries didn&amp;#x27;t deal with the compatibility breaks quickly so there were for a while issues knowing which libs and example code outside the &amp;quot;standard&amp;quot; library were compatible with 4,.x, 5.x, or both) before migrating away.&lt;p&gt;I assume a lot of the above has change considerably in the intervening years, but I think a lot of people assume instead that it is just as bad as it was when they migrated elsewhere.&lt;p&gt;That and there is a &lt;i&gt;lot&lt;/i&gt; of bad code written in PHP largely due to its perception of being a beginners language (any environment that is easy for a beginner to dive into tends to make writing bad code as easy as it makes writing good code).&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;&amp;gt; It&amp;#x27;s not the prettiest language, &lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;That I take as understatement, though I&amp;#x27;m still supporting some ancient &amp;quot;classic&amp;quot; ASP code (fingers crossed that legacy will finally be stomped out by the end of this year...) so I can conclusively state there is worse in use out there!&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;&amp;gt; but people have been building insanely successful businesses on top of it for years. Think Facebook.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Remember though that Facebook don&amp;#x27;t use stock PHP: &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HipHop_for_PHP&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;HipHop_for_PHP&lt;/a&gt;</text><parent_chain><item><author>jmspring</author><text>There are problems with php? It&amp;#x27;s not the prettiest language, but people have been building insanely successful businesses on top of it for years. Think Facebook.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s coyote ugly, but it works. At least most PHP devs don&amp;#x27;t have the attitude associated with other popular web frameworks. They focus on getting things done.&lt;p&gt;As a disclaimer, PHP is not my go to language, but I&amp;#x27;ve done some ugly scaling experiments with it. I&amp;#x27;m just tired of the PHP isn&amp;#x27;t cool, let&amp;#x27;s mock it with no actual valid arguments that is common.</text></item><item><author>ninjac0der</author><text>I get the nature of your comment, but you have to acknowledge that this does nothing to address any of the actual issues that many devs have with PHP.  It&amp;#x27;s not just a problem of perception.</text></item><item><author>DigitalSea</author><text>This is definitely a welcome change. Doesn&amp;#x27;t really stray too far from the previous design really, it feels cleaner and a lot more modern. I think PHP&amp;#x27;s lack of nicely designed site doesn&amp;#x27;t do them any favours in the language wars though considering PHP is viewed as an old and inferior language to others.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>The new php.net</title><url>http://www.php.net/?setbeta=1&amp;beta=1</url></story>