Everybody who has been programming for a while hopefully has found their favorite programming language(s), framework(s) and tools. From my Category Cloud, you can easily find out where I feel most fluent and comfortable, and the “comfort zones” are constantly evolving and/or changing. (I should really add ASP.Net MVC and JavaScript to that list 
)
Going hand in hand is the tendency of avoiding other languages, etc., due to lack of knowledge, experience, or because they are considered technically inferior. Recently, I came across a couple of pages bashing PHP, such as on Coding Horror (again!) referring to this blog which analyses the shortcomings of that language.
I guess, while this criticism will have no impact on Real PHP Programmers ™, it should certainly influence people evaluating other languages to avoid it, since the technical reasons NOT to start a PHP project seem overwhelming. (this here deals with “loose comparison“, as documented on PHP.net, and compared to Perl)
So is PHP special? Let’s ask Google:
| language + “bashing” | hist |
| PHP bashing | 8.500.000 |
| 3.200.000 | |
| Powershell bashing | 3.000.000 * |
| VisualBasic bashing | 2.300.000 |
| Delphi bashing | 1.600.000 |
| C# bashing | 1.300.000 |
| JavaScript bashing | 1.200.000 |
| VBA bashing | 600.000 |
| Java bashing | 600.000 |
| VB bashing | 500.000 |
Powershell reports 3 million hits, but from the first look that’s mostly due to comparisons of Powershell with Bash and other shells.
Let’s have a look at databases
| database + “bashing” | hist |
| MySQL bashing | 3.000.000 |
| Oracle bashing | 500.000 |
| SQL Server bashing | 300.000 |
MySQL, SQLite, and Postgres are difficult to compare, again because of references to Bash shell programming.
Superficially judging from the numbers, I think we have a winner, though.
