I ran across a blog post entitled "Why the Light Has Gone Out on LAMP" earlier today, and felt compelled to respond.

First, a rant: somehow, this article got posted on Slashdot. I've never heard of the guy who posted it, and some quick googling shows that he's a pythoner. He's simply fueling the language wars, and the slashdot post opened up a huge debate that need not have occurred. I think it was irresponsible of the Slashdot editors to post it.

In the post, the author makes an analogy of using PHP + MySQL as the equivalent of using BASIC, and then uses a quote that claims BASIC "has become the leading cause of brain-damage in proto-hackers."

I'm sorry, but using a language doesn't cause brain damage. And there are many levels to programming. And using Python, Ruby, C, C++, Java, etc., does not automatically make you a better programmer than those using one of "those other languages". You can write crap code in any language. You can also write great code in just about any language.

Programming takes practice; programming well takes a lot of practice. You get better at it by learning more about programming practices, and applying them to your language. Part of programming is also learning when a particular language is suited to a task, and when it isn't. Python works for the web, but it's not particularly suited to it; similarly, you can write web servers in PHP, but that doesn't mean you should.

Stop the language wars already! Stop writing incendiary pieces about a language you don't use regularly or never gained particular proficiency in, and code already!