The problem is programming is still hard, even in 2012. PHP makes it look easy enough on the surface, but people skip learning all the other stuff you have to know to be a competent programmer. They're often completely unaware that they need to learn anything else, or completely uninterested in doing so—they think they're experts already because they can string some lines of PHP together to make a Web site that mostly seems to work, as long as no one's trying to break it.
Then they go on to teach others—other who, just starting out themselves, have no idea they're learning from someone who knows barely any more than they do. Or, they go on and get jobs doing this, and their very amateur code end up out in the wild.
I hate this effect because I'm definitely a fan of anyone who wants to being able to experiment with programming. I got my own start screwing around with code on my family's computers, probably like a lot of us here. Thankfully, I started so young that it was more than a decade before I got a job writing code. I even learned a thing or two in that time!
Of course, I also started with BASIC, then jumped to assembly for two different CPUs before moving onto C and a handful of other languages. Enough curiosity and dedication can get you through less newbie-friendly languages.
Maybe requiring that curiosity and dedication as a barrier to entry is a good thing. I think both are absolutely required, even in 2012, to become even a competent programmer.
Not everyone who programs wants to be a competent programmer, or even a programmer at all. Some people just want to build a contact form for their website, or work out how to pull a list from a database and display it in the sidebar of the their blog.
PHP lets them do that without having to learn anything more complex. Why spend days or weeks learning something when you can work out how to do what you need to do in hours?
If we're going to have amateurs doing things like this, we should at least give them the tools to do it safely without having to know too much, since they're not going to learn more than they have to in order to make something that looks good enough. PHP still requires you to know to avoid HTML/script injection and SQL injection vulnerabilities just to write a safe guestbook.
Then they go on to teach others—other who, just starting out themselves, have no idea they're learning from someone who knows barely any more than they do. Or, they go on and get jobs doing this, and their very amateur code end up out in the wild.
I hate this effect because I'm definitely a fan of anyone who wants to being able to experiment with programming. I got my own start screwing around with code on my family's computers, probably like a lot of us here. Thankfully, I started so young that it was more than a decade before I got a job writing code. I even learned a thing or two in that time!
Of course, I also started with BASIC, then jumped to assembly for two different CPUs before moving onto C and a handful of other languages. Enough curiosity and dedication can get you through less newbie-friendly languages.
Maybe requiring that curiosity and dedication as a barrier to entry is a good thing. I think both are absolutely required, even in 2012, to become even a competent programmer.