I consider the HN community, on the whole, to be very much concerned with their professional development. Whether it's taking classes, working on side projects, or reading the latest blogs, everyone seems genuinely interested in learning. Based solely on vote counts alone on the frontpage for the last few days, there appears to be a very large portion of the HN community that both readily follows PHP and/or actively uses it. What I find most interesting, however, is the comments section. There's a large camp of developers on HN that are very outspoken regarding their abhorrence of PHP. The language has been ridiculed for well over a decade, so this is to be expected. What's most intriguing is what you don't see in the comments: the huge number of proponents of PHP. So where does this discrepancy between vote counts and comments stem from? I would venture to guess the vote counts themselves stem from silent proponents. They likely don't provide counter arguments because it's simply not necessary. Nothing is gained. Everyone here has a unified goal of working on cool problems, building amazing applications, and hoping to strike paydirt for all of our hard work. Maybe it's time we all think about why it is we complain about language X vs. language Y and just get back to trying to make our lives and those around us better, through code.