It’s amazing how otherwise competent engineers will look down on technology that so many use all around the world when generally their contribution to society is a few buggy Python classes in some internal codebase.

For a counterexample:

Some pretty big businesses have been built on the back of PHP. That doesn't make the language any less ridiculous.

Why?

Because there are objective measures by which a programming language can be judged and assesed to be better or worse than others of its peers, and those measures, like a powerful (not necessarily static) type system and consistency of the language's core design and libraries, put PHP at the bottom of a hierarchy of languages.

This need not imply condesenction to the language users or designers, not as individuals at any rate.

Yes. And you might quibble about the exact criteria. But by almost any metric, old-style PHP was an awful language.

(Facebook's re-invented Hack isn't nearly as bad. It's about the best language they could have made starting from PHP.)

There was an article about PHP that summarized some of its issues back in the day: https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/

I think that it was excellently written and actually mentioned concrete issues, rather than vague personal dislikes. That is good, because you can revisit those in 10 years or so and see how many of those have been fixed in the actual language.

Someone actually tried to address a few of those: http://maettig.com/2020-09-16-revisiting-a-fractal-of-bad-de...

Thanks for the second link! It's good to see someone (sympathetic to PHP) address the issues reasonably objectively.

That's part of why I carefully wrote 'old-style PHP'.

Are they competent, or have they only written a few buggy classes? Your strawman needs work :)

That said, I'd agree that mockery is rarely ever appropriate, and is often undertaken by those without the credentials to do so.

It's also possible that someone is expressing hard won knowledge/battle scars in an unskilful way. And it takes investigation to know the difference.

When I hear that sort of mockery, especially from so-called "thought leaders" and other loud voices, in conference talks, in long-winded YouTube videos (rants), etc., it's such a big red flag to me. Even though I might agree with the individual in a general sense, it makes me wonder what they're missing or getting wrong or biased against in the areas where I don't have the (supposed) expertise that they do.