[addlepate]

While I sympathize with the situation MailChimp is in, I am getting tired of this anti-elitist attitude of PHPers. Of course, part of the reason why I feel that way is because I think PHP actually is crappy, but putting that aside doesn't change much.

There's this notion that programming languages are all really the same, and devs are just a bunch of prima donnas chasing the newest thing. It couldn't possibly be that we have used PHP before and have good reasons for not wanting to use it anymore. No, instead we must be a bunch of groupthinking prigs, scoffing at PHP because we're afraid to let our peers see us using such a shameful thing. You can tell they think that by the title of the post.

I guess what I'm wondering is, at what point will they consider using PHP to be too costly? If:

- they already have a limited talent pool due to location and the business they're in,

- PHP only serves to reduce that pool even further,

- presumably software development is important to the future of their business,

- and they're not changing markets or locations anytime soon,

when will it get too expensive to continue using it?

What rankles is the digging in of heels, the attitude of "oh, if only devs could see how clean and great our PHP code is!" They see a tons of developers not interested in using the tool they use, and decide that all those people are simply mistaken, and just need to be convinced otherwise. The problem couldn't be on the other side of the table, no sir.