The HN crowd might not be the target audience - this is targeted at non-technical people - but next time a friend of a friend tells you "so I have this website idea..." you can send them here.
As someone who 'speaks' Ruby, Python and PHP I don't think you can just say good coders use Python and Ruby and the 'journeymen' coders will use PHP. There's really little difference between all of these. Ruby and Python are simple languages for anyone to learn, just as PHP is. The biggest challenge I see isn't language, but thinking in terms of data structures and having an intuition about the right way to solve a problem. The language, or tech stack (most of the time) is irrelevant.
Yes, you're right. There's some terrible Ruby and Python coders, and some of the best programmers in the world use PHP.
However, this post was aimed at non-technical people. If you don't know much about tech, and try to hire PHP programmers, the quality of talent will be very variable. If you stick with Ruby and Python, your chance of finding someone decent is much higher.
Likewise, in almost any market, the price of an hour of Ruby/Python coding is going to be greater than an hour of PHP coding.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 18.8 ms ] threadHowever, this post was aimed at non-technical people. If you don't know much about tech, and try to hire PHP programmers, the quality of talent will be very variable. If you stick with Ruby and Python, your chance of finding someone decent is much higher.
Likewise, in almost any market, the price of an hour of Ruby/Python coding is going to be greater than an hour of PHP coding.