While you shouldn't have been downvoted, you also shouldn't complain about it. "Resist complaining about being downmodded. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading. " ~ https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
That said, while both you and ircmaxell (who is a commenter on the article's page and very involved in the PHP community) can be a bit terse when making assertions it doesn't make you wrong. I can't possibly see this being labeled 5.x and the 6.x major version number is inseparably bound to the 5-year-old vaporware.
If we don't complain about it, nothing will change and the nonsense will continue.
Hacker News used to be a great place for open discussion. Now, anything even slightly against the silicon valley hive-mind is downvoted.
Any time PHP comes up, there are tons of garbage comments stating how terrible of a language it is. This is not constructive in any way and adds nothing to the discussion. No downvotes in sight. Why? Because the downvoting is only used as a tool to silence opposing viewpoints. It has almost nothing to do with keeping out the trolls.
I guess I shouldn't be surprised. It's almost a perfect mirror of our society today. Just look at all of the people getting fired and having their careers ruined for merely having opposing viewpoints to the special interest groups in the US.
> If we don't complain about it, nothing will change and the nonsense will continue.
It corrected itself, and the post is fine now. Complaining about down votes, however, should be discouraged.
> Hacker News used to be a great place for open discussion. Now, anything even slightly against the silicon valley hive-mind is downvoted.
I've been bearing that since I joined.
> Because the downvoting is only used as a tool to silence opposing viewpoints.
That's not true.
Coming into a thread still going on, you're just getting a snapshot. Yes, there will be up votes and down votes, but I find that generally things get corrected in the end.
However, contributing to the problem by complaining about down votes doesn't help matters. It makes them worse.
What's interesting is that the comment getting down voted now: "I get down-voted for stating a fact, welcome to hacker news.", is false in every way.
Programming languages are tools, not religions. Calling PHP terrible is not an "opposing viewpoint", it's stating facts. It's not garbage either: if these comments manage to help people steer clear of PHP in favour of stronger tools, they have served their good purpose.
