I'd argue it's completely unfounded. PHP is the easiest language in the world for someone who is reasonable at other scripting languages, because there aren't very many new or weird paradigms that it forces on you. I last touched PHP in high school but haven't had any problems readjusting to it here at Facebook. In fact, I'd wager that very few of the people in Facebook's bootcamp program right now came with any of the experience you're looking for.
PHP is very easy to read, very easy to pick up. However, it is full of bizarre edge cases. It seems like every function definition is followed by at least 3 comments saying "Just so you know, you will try to do this - > PHP actually does this."
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?"
Thanks for your thoughts! I can see your point. I think mainly I was trying to get away without having to do training, but clearly that isn't working out so well.
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?
When you say "having to do training".. A great programmer don't need "you" to do the training. Just give him/her a couple of days to read your codebase and learn the language. Anyway, even if it was the best PHP programmer, you'd still have to walk through your architecture and important design decision. So, at this high level, it's not important at all whether the guy/girl understand the inner details of PHP.
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.
If I had to choose I'd probably say C or Python, but language wasn't a very strong influence on my job choice (other than knowing that I wanted to avoid Java). That Fog Creek has done well with Wasabi [1] says to me that language is not the most important thing for most candidates.
I think you are correct that any good programmer could learn PHP (or any language, really) to be productive in a reasonably amount of time. All the startups I've been involved with hire talent over language experience. However, I think the hirer was correct in noting that a PHP job would not be the most attractive job in this period of high demand for engineers.
I've struggled with it and given up almost entirely because it's so hard to memorize. Surmountable with full time use, I suspect. Very inconsistent function names led me to either living from a reference book or constant Googling even when I thought I knew the name of the function I needed.
