Reddit, the new Slashdot
Reddit, a year ago, was useful reading and comments tended to be halfway insightful. Reddit today is cluttered with links to Impeach-Bush propaganda (which is a movement I support, but reading half baked analysis on why they should be impeached gets old very quickly), LOL-cat pics and not-really-amusing satire. Then there are comments like this one on PHP’s use as a programming language make me wonder about the many forms of idiots that make up the technical community on Reddit:
[PHP is] fine dealing with it for current applications for but future applications should not ever use it except for templating. That’s all I’m trying to say. All new web apps should be built with mature and secure implementations of proper programming languages.
Ah yes, something “mature” and “secure” and “proper”. I was expecting “enterprise” too somewhere in there, but apparently meeting the buzzword criteria is not required on Reddit. God forbid if anybody was using PHP for anything remotely connected to building real world applications.
Of course, there are undoubtably problems with the PHP platform, but I am routinely surprised the number of technical people who miss the trees for the forests and end up making sweeping generalized statements that don’t serve to increase the quality of the debate as a whole.
There have been many such examples. Recently, I spoke to a pretty smart engineer who insisted that C was horrible and nobody should ever use it for building real world applications. He, of course, had never written code in his life, and I wondered why he would make such a statement without any experience writing C.
Another example was attending the MIND meetup showed that there are huge number of Microsoft platform users who think Free Software code (such as python) can never be as useful, efficient and stable as Microsoft software …. and an hour later, we were flabbergasted to notice that a demo of their own ware showed python running in the background. Clearly, it was a case of FUD to deceive and distort.
It is important that we in the Free Software community think and argue constructively; FUD for any reason can be a waste of time and energy, and we have substantially more important things to achieve at hand now rather then to engage in FUD.