Alternately there are 5 comments showing boilerplate for the most common use case, and none of them are quite what I'm looking for.
Compare to Python, 9 times out of 10, the boilerplate 4-line example (in the primary documentation) is exactly what I'm looking for.
I think PHP might actually have a good language lurking inside of it, but someone would need to rewrite most of the standard functions and classes by going through the comments on their documentation and asking "Why doesn't this function solve the problem this bit of boilerplate solves?"
Can I ask you what your language of choice was before FB and would you have taken a php job somewhere that wasn't FB?
And, might I add, PHP is so easy to understand and read.. You don't even have to know PHP to read the majority of code written in it ;-) Compare that to, say, haskell or scheme, where it's a whole new paradigm.
This is a crucial blunder from all no-tech people I know who are trying to hire great programmers. Seek Great Programmers, not Great "insert a language" Programmer! A good programmer will be good in any languages; a bad one will be bad in all languages.
I am not a super-dev, but I can write code in an unfamiliar language in a day or two (non-idiomatic, of course). Better people than I can do better, I am sure.
I am sure you will be able to find great engineers if you open up your playing field.
Of course a quick glance at a program in an unfamiliar non-procedural language defeats me.
I am amused by the perception that a pro software engineer is assumed to only be proficient in the programming language they used in their last job. If an engineer is applying for your job, talk to them and make sure they are a good personality fit for your team. They are probably going to take more time understanding your dev tools and procedures than boning up on PHP.
I guess seeing all the PHP-bashing that happens in the world (especially on HN) made me a little gunshy about approaching high-level devs to work on our project.
Fortunately thanks to some very well-made points and stories shared on this thread, I am now optimistic that I should be able to convince devs used to "better" languages that working on a PHP project could still be cool and a good learning experience.
This thread has been really great for me. Thanks, HN!
Anecdotally, I took a job as Rails developer some years back. I had zero experience with it before starting (Having worked mainly with PHP before), but because the environments are so similar (http is the same, gnu/linux is the same, mysql is the same, architecture and oop is the same etc. etc.), I was creating value after about three weeks and I would say that I was fully up to speed after something like 3 months. Consider that it can easily take the same time to get the business, the problem domain and your new colleagues to know, I'd say that the cost for my employer was close to nothing.
Now, I'm not saying that anybody can do this - I consider myself a fairly good developer and beside PHP, I have tinkered with a broad spectrum of languages, which surely helped my transition. And the point isn't that Ruby is such an easy language that it can be learned in 3 weeks either (In fact, I think it is a rather complex language). What I take from my experience is that a good (and diverse) developer, with a motivation can jump from related technologies with relative ease.
I do agree with your sentiment that it might be easier to sell a jump from php than to, but that is a different problem. If your project is interesting in it self, I'm sure you can find good developers who don't fret too much over what particular language they write in.
If somebody's got the attitude that 'Java sucks, I only want to code Ruby', that person's not a pro in my book.
